This review is an excerpt of Michael Pellechia's monthly BookPage business and finance book round-up.

Bucky Works

Buckminster Fuller's Ideas for Today

By J. Baldwin
John Wiley & Sons, $29.95

ISBN 0471129534

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Exploring Bucky's fertile imagination

Review by Michael Pellecchia

Spaceship Earth. The Dymaxion Car. The geodesic dome. The legacy of Buckminster Fuller is the life experiment he carried out with himself as "Guinea Pig B." The experiment was "designed to discover what-if anything-a healthy young male of average size, experience, and capability with an economically dependent wife and newborn child, starting without capital or any kind of wealth, cash savings, account monies, credit, or university degree, could effectively do that could not be done by great nations or great private enterprise to lastingly improve the physical protection and support of all human lives, at the same time removing undesirable restraints and improving individual initiatives of any and all humans aboard our planet Earth."

Whew. We know he did something to that effect, and his many accomplishments are chronicled in BuckyWorks: Buckminster Fuller's Ideas for Today by J. Baldwin. Fuller was born in 1895, and his youth was a period of vast innovation and social change. As he documented these things, right down to his own traffic tickets and dry cleaning bills, he detected patterns that helped him foresee the future. In his "Chronofile," an iconoclastic but detailed record of technological happenings, he became aware of the various gestation periods of technology. He was interested more in completely new ideas than incremental improvements.

One of these was the all-aluminum Dymaxion House, which could be mass produced like a car and would cost about the same money per pound in 1927. Presciently, there was even a room in the house designed expressly for a home-based business. Alas, the mass-produced house and its revolutionary designed components could not take hold amid the Byzantine welter of housing codes and entrenched construction methods of modern-day America.

One of his successful early breakthroughs was adapting the conical grain bin, a fixture of the midwestern landscape, into Dymaxion Deployment Units (DDU), prefab Butler buildings which came to be used as portable housing for remotely stationed radar crews during World War II. By 1946 he had the first true Dymaxion House, a civilian version of the DDU built as postwar housing in cooperation with Beechcraft, the airplane company based in Wichita. This dwelling was destined to become known as the Wichita House, and represented the ultimate aircraft technology of the time applied to residential housing. It is currently being restored (under supervision of the author of this book) and is scheduled to be open to the public in 1998, at the Henry Ford Museum & Greenfield Village Museum in Dearborn, Michigan.

In manufacturing the Dymaxion Car, Fuller proved to Walter Chrysler that individuals working in small teams can work more efficiently than large companies. In a discussion with colleagues about teleportation in 1966, he essentially predicted the existence of digital transport as we know it today.

And as expected, the book contains an introduction to the geodesic dome, which Fuller did not actually invent, but discovered and developed this form of enclosure.

It's well worth grasping the spirit of Bucky's (everyone but his wife called him that) life adventure/experiment. You will come away with an expanded view of your own potential.

Michael Pellecchia writes about business and finance books for this publication. He can be reached at michael_pellecchia@bookpage.com.