Research Paper
“Nature, Poetic Dialogue and Buckminster Fuller”
June 2016
In the ancient Greek sense, “krisis” had the meaning of “a decision” or “judgment,” which can call into question for us a certain comportment towards a modern ethics of the environment that, as Bruce Folz argues, distinguishes our ‘relation’ to nature as the primary subject of crisis, rather than nature itself.[1] Thomas Khun’s assertion that scientific revolutions occur as a series of crises can be broadly applied to human exchange politics, where technology has both direct and indirect implications. He argues that a paradigm shift occurs at the moment when an anomaly arises and is explained in part or whole by a new scientific model.[2] In the consideration of an environmental ethic, it is the very essence of technology as the instrumentality of scientific inquiry that is anomalous.
According to Martin Heidegger, the Western metaphysical tradition naturally culminates and is completed by technology.[3] A “challenging” of the earth has allowed energies and forces to be extracted from it, and metaphysics has instrumentally “enframed” a certain truth from nature as its mode of revealing being. The relationship of humans to their natural environment is questioned by the constant presence of nature reduced to a technological resource.[4] Buckminster Fuller was one of the early proponents of sustainability. He provided a framework that made a link between scientific decision-making and political discourse. The inventor, as one who is versed in modern science then becomes essential in the political realm, where technology optimistically provides for human development by undertaking “positive physical environmental reform” through the prerogative of the thinking individual.[5] A rigorous technical inquiry led Fuller to the development of modern and sustainable architectures, such as tensegrity structures and the Dymaxion House, which have low embodied energy and are lightweight. [6] These architectures were, however, conceived as a highly technological mediation within an ethical comportment towards nature and the environment. This natural comportment of material preservation and an economy of means is maintained by technological structures that acknowledge nature for its own sake. A modern ethics of the environment is therefore distinguished through technology’s relation to the environment that is other than a technological resource.
Heidegger views dwelling on the earth as a ‘relationship’ to nature. If nature were considered to be the “house of the world,” what would an architecture be that views the earth as homeland? Man’s essential involvement with nature would draw upon a care for the environment in the letting-be of entities. Nature, fulfilled for us in the poetic, is meaningfully disclosed through language as a ‘saying’ that speaks its ‘truth,’ the meaning of nature, therefore, is constituted through poetic discourse. Nature is revealed to us even as it falls continually back into the self-concealment of the earth.[7] Nature and its unknowability, which is much greater than the potential immortality of the common human world as conceived by Hannah Arendt, forms a reciprocal relationship with it through public discourse according to the Arendtian notion that the reality of the world is obtained by speaking about it. A poetic dialogue can establish a conversation with nature as a certain comportment and way for us to ‘dwell’ publicly in a necessary relation to nature that is non-oppositional. Nature then becomes important to publicness, as a political and ethical dimension of human life, through an essential involvement with one another, in which the role of earth in Heidegger’s temple assumes a public significance through its being revealed as the letting-be of earth’s self-concealment. In Fuller’s architecture, poetically revealing qualities of nature for their own sake through technology takes on a public ethical significance.
Heidegger characterizes the fourfold world structure as a household in which we dwell by conserving what shelters and surrounds us in order for it to remain open for us. Dwelling has an active temporality: as mortals, we inhabit the earth as a kind of staying or remaining.[8] Nature’s capacity for self-emergence, its essential manner of being, is simultaneous with its capacity for self-concealment. Self-emergence corresponds with Arendt’s political conception of natality. Public politics can thus be understood as a disclosure of the unique individual through self-emergence, which is predicated upon a self-concealing into the private realm. So doing, allows for the possibility of a non-oppositional role for nature within the quality of things in the public realm through poetics: a poetic dialogue with nature through technology becomes ‘political’ in an Arendtian sense, parallel with self-emergence of the human in the public realm from out of the household.[9] When seen through Heidegger, there is a ‘natural’ account of Arendt’s human politics.
How is it that the space of politics allows for a disclosure that then returns back to the ‘household’ as self-concealment within the fourfold as dwelling on the earth? A discourse with nature as a form of reciprocal semantic contact, or a ‘natural’ contract, provides the necessary space for conserving and preserving the landscape as a common ground through which a ‘mutual exchange’ is revealed.[10] Our essential involvement with the landscape through cultivating and building a discourse is implicit in our ‘dwelling’, which opens up to a continuity with Arendt’s politics.
For Arendt, the common world is the essential setting that has always stood as the pre-condition of the political. It is not identical, however, with the earth or with nature, but consists rather of “the human artifact, the fabrication of human hands, as well as to affairs which go on among those who inhabit the man made world together.”[11] Nature is the much broader context in which the common world takes its place. The fundamental contract with nature that is implicit in the fourfold and enacted in things provides an inclusive structure in which the natural and the sociopolitical come together. With respect to this wider context, the human artefact can be seen as poetic discourse with nature. We inhabit the earth - beneath the sky, in the presence of gods and in view of our own mortality – as part of phusis that self-emerges from the earth while continually returning back into concealment.[12] Nature sets the standard of beauty as a quality of divinity, to which politics ultimately aspires. Nature thus supports the development of humanity through a transcendence of our own mortality by participating with the divine through political action and discourse.[13] Politics, therefore, becomes a disclosure of the unique individual as self-emergence. Arendt’s common world, as the setting in which actions and interactions take place, can be seen as a table surrounded by individuals in dialogue. This setting is analogous to the Heideggerian clearing that allows for the temporal emergence of the “figure” or Gestalt, where the rift composes itself as the “createdness” of the work’s truth fixed in place, which speaks through us as a revealing of beings, and which we witness and participate with in dwelling within the fourfold in the world and on the earth. The architectural figure emerges from this ‘discourse-rift’ by a mutual self-assertion that allows earth to be earth and world to be world.[14]
Buckminster Fuller envisaged a collaboration of architects, inventors, artists and economists in a study studying how to relate nature and art through its poetic disclosure as a means to understand the new embodiment of a sustainable environmental ethic.[15] The “world community of scientific and industrial controls” was seen as a poetic synthesis of the plural arts, sciences, technologies and socio/political entities, [16] through which individuals emerge within a reciprocal discourse. The environmental movement in the nineteen sixties and seventies centering on the Whole Earth Catalogue proposed to integrate information about energy, resources and population through an awareness of ecology. A computer program in Fuller’s project for The World Game would bring people from around the world to ‘play’ and build a free environment without “any one individual interfering with another,” and “without any individual being physically or economically at the cost of another.”[17] In such an environment, individuals would assert themselves within an Arendtian framework as plural, equal, reconciling and persuasive. They would partake of an ethic or comportment towards a sustainable environment that, while actively instrumental, would also provide the occasion for qualities of human action and of nature to appear.
The notion of play is a stake through an inter-subjectivity that moves towards the other as a mutual preservation and appearance of entities through the play of players, where the human-as-divine comes into play with nature-as-divine. Hans-Georg Gadamer writes that the experience of the work of art is a mode of being in the work itself as the freedom of an individual engaged in play. The player in The World Game loses himself in play, while knowing what he is doing is only a game. Play is a self-presentation or revealing in Heidegger’s sense as a playing oneself out, and has all the nuances of Arentdtian political action that reveals identities in establishing the human for the sake of which player’s play.[18]
If there were a celebration of an environmental ethic, it would require a decision or krisis made in action through words and deeds amongst equals, with respect to our essential involvement with nature. Nature itself, must therefore be allowed to manifest its own Being through the natural dimension of a building. Materials, for instance, must behave as they naturally would, as freely appearing for their own sake, in spite of having been ‘revealed’ by technological making, just as the ancient Greek Temple forms a clearing in which the marble rests on the ground in order to allow the earth to be earth.[19]
Although Fuller was critical of the nature of contemporary politics, he proposed a world that employed a highly technological order that captured the essence of political action with a comportment towards nature. Fuller understood nature metaphysically; his understanding of nature allowed for and respected a plurality of discourses and solutions for an environmental ethic. Fuller’s Dymaxion House can be seen as a vision of a world household - a metaphorical, poetic and rhetorical response to the Machine Age - that addressed the functional issues of ecology by drawing a relation between humans and nature through the qualities of technological forms.[20]
The Dymaxion House of 1927 was one of the first homes Fuller designed that would challenge the limits of material tensile strength by extending the structural members from a central mast to beyond the non-bearing enclosure. The Witchita House of 1944, due to an increase in tensile strength, allowed for the tension members to be enclosed within the roof at a relatively flat pitch. Fuller writes that he did not accomplish this for aesthetic reasons, rather the industrial ‘revealing’ of the aluminum yields certain performance criteria in keeping with the inherent structural geometry. The angle of the vertical sling towards the horizontal increases the resistance to stress and thus makes for a more rigid frame. The compression ring was a significant distance from the mast because it allowed for greater shelter and was within the ‘natural’ limitations of the metallurgical performance with respect to tension. The house was able to enclose a large space through an economy of materials that are non-bearing in the way that tents are deployed. A long span structure is therefore developed that is both light-weight and has great degree of rigidity. The form follows from the ‘nature’ of the materials as revealed technologically that are extremely economical and have a low embodied energy, where the ‘inertia’ of the earth is allowed to be earth. The earth’s inertia and gravity are revealed through the other components and assemblies that anchor the house to the ground. The canopy is completed by the self-seclusion of the earth’s inertia, where the dwelling house is tied back to the earth as it is brought forth into the open. For stronger structural shapes, Fuller employed steel sheathing that was used for ship-building and for trains, which had high tensile strength. He took advantage of the sheet principle of increased rigidity, by curving steel is into a cylindrical-shaped section. [21] The strength, malleability and lightness of steel is allowed to behave within its own technologically revealed being, and is employed in a sustainable manner that is true to the overall nature of the dwelling house as a socio-political artefact. The lightness of the architecture emerges as a Heideggererian gesture or sketch. The dwelling house reveals a certain figure of ‘lightness’ on the landscape. Lightness is thus physical geometry manifested in its purest sense as “sectionless tensioning,” otherwise known as gravity. Man’s emancipation in the form of divine transcendence “depends upon his relative knowledge in purest principle” of the ‘universe’, properly understood as ‘tensional integrity’ within the open fourfold world structure.[22]
Italo Calvino wrote that “lightness” was to be the first of six categories of human thought that would emerge in the twentieth century theoretical condition.[23] Architecture reveals this lightness, which could not become a category of thought without having first been made.[24] Lightness is the ambiguous condition of human desire that brings forth a wonder of things, which transcends our own mortality for the divine. The goal of light structures is paradoxically “zero weight and infinite span,” the qualities of the absolute divine, while a light structure has weight which represents our striving for the divine.[25] Architectural poetics are revealed as a ‘human condition’ in Fuller’s work by virtue of a wonder in tension between the self-seclusion and heaviness of the earth on the one hand, and the ‘lightness’ of the heavens that give measure within the fourfold world structure on the other. The world remains open within the lightness of the canopy.
Ethics involves our concern for entities in the world. An environmental ethic requires a comportment towards technology that questions our bearing in relation to the being of entities. An architecture of sustainability is formed through the collaboration of equals by mutual self-assertion for the sake of a nature that can be revealed other than as resource. Architecture as part of the common world prepares the setting for action and speech. Arendt uses the table as a metaphor for the common world where political action can take place, so that action through making can occur by its direct involvement with nature that is formed for us by a reciprocal semantic contract. A rift opens within the world to create the architectural figure whose being is poetically disclosed through discourse within a ‘rift-table’. Heidegger regards dwelling poetically upon the earth involving a care and preservation of nature and the world where the figure is revealed as it is self-secluding. Architecture is a vehicle by which we can bring about a poetic dialogue with nature through technology.
Bibliography
Abram, David. “Reciprocity.” In Rethinking Nature: essays in environmental philosophy. (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2004).
Arendt, Hannah. The Human Condition. (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1958).
Beukers, Adriaan, and Ed Van Hinte. Lightness: The inevitable renaissance of minimum energy structures. (010 Publishers, 2005).
Foltz, Bruce Vernon. Heidegger, environmental ethics, and the metaphysics of nature: inhabiting the earth in a technological age. (Pennsylvania State Univ., University Park (USA), 1985).
Frascari, Marco. "A Light, Six-Sided, Paradoxical Fight", Nexus Network Journal, vol. 4, no. 2 (Spring 2002), http://www.nexusjournal.com/Frascari_v4n2.html
Fuller, Buckminster R., “Designing a New Industry.” In The Buckmister Fuller Reader, ed. James Meller (Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England: Penguin Books Ltd, 1970).
Fuller, Buckminster R., “Preview of Building.” In The Buckmister Fuller Reader, ed. James Meller (Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England: Penguin Books Ltd, 1970).
Fuller, Buckminster R., “Comprehensive Designing.” In Man and the Future, ed. James E. Gunn (London: The University Press of Kansas, 1968).
Fuller, Buckminster R., “Influences on My Work.” In Ideas and Integrities, A Spontaneous Autobiographical Disclosure, ed. Jaime Snyder.
Fuller, Buckminster R., “Prospects for Humanity.” In Man and the Future, ed. James E. Gunn (London: The University Press of Kansas, 1968).
Fuller, Buckminster R., Tertascroll: Goldilocks and the Three Bears. (New York: R, Buckminster Fuller and ULAE Inc., 1982).
Fuller, Buckminster R., “The World Game – How to Make the World Work.” In Utopia or Oblivion: The Prospects for Humanity (London: Allen Lane The Penguin Press, 1978).
Gadamer, Hans-Georg. Truth and Method (New York: Sheed & Ward Ltd and the Continuum Publishing Group, 1989).
Heidegger, Martin. “The Origin of the Work of Art.” In Basic Writings, Martin Heidegger, ed. David Farrell Krell (New York: Harper Perennial, 1993).
Kuhn, Thomas S. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1996).
Vilder, Anthony. Whatever Happened to Ecology? John McHale and the Bucky Fuller Revival. (G Braziller Inc, 1970).
[1] Bruce Vernon Foltz, Heidegger, Environmental Ethics, and the Metaphysics of Nature: Inhabiting the Earth in a Technological Age. (Pennsylvania State Univ., University Park (USA), 1985), 4.
[2] Thomas S. Khun, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1996), 67.
[3] Foltz, Heidegger, 4.
[4] Ibid., 8.
[5] Buckminster R. Fuller, “Prospects for Humanity.” In Man and the Future, ed. James E. Gunn (London: The University Press of Kansas, 1968), 134.
[6] Adriaan Beukers and Ed Van Hinte, Lightness: The inevitable Renaissance of Minimum Energy Structures. (Rotterdam: 010 Publishers, 2005), 33.
[7] Foltz, Heidegger, 166.
[8] Ibid., 167.
[9] Hannah Arendt. The Human Condition. (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1958), 8-9.
[10] David Abram, “Reciprocity,” in Rethinking Nature: Essays in Environmental Philosophy. (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2004), 83.
[11] Arendt, The Human Condition, 52.
[12] Foltz, Heidegger, 160.
[13] Arendt, The Human Condition, 19.
[14] Martin Heidegger, “The Origin of the Work of Art,” in Basic Writings, ed. David Farrell Krell (New York: Harper Perennial, 1993), 187-91.
[15] Anthony Vidler, “Whatever Happened to Ecology? John McHale and the Bucky Fuller Revival” Architectural Design 80, no 6 (November/December 2010), 26.
[16] Buckminster R. Fuller, “Comprehensive Designing,” in Man and the Future, ed. James E. Gunn (London: The University Press of Kansas, 1968), 230.
[17] Buckminster R. Fuller, “The World Game – How to Make the World Work,” in Utopia or Oblivion: The Prospects for Humanity (London: Allen Lane The Penguin Press, 1978), 182-186.
[18] Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method (New York: Sheed & Ward Ltd and the Continuum Publishing Group, 1989), 102-3.
[19] Heidegger, “The Origin of the Work of Art,” 171-2.
[20] Vidler, Whatever Happened to Ecology?. 31-33.
[21] Buckminster R. Fuller, “Designing a New Industry.” In The Buckminster Fuller Reader, ed. James Meller (Hammondsworth, Middlesex, England: Penguin Books Ltd, 1970), 205-7.
[22] Buckminster R. Fuller, “Preview of Building.” In The Buckminster Fuller Reader, ed. James Meller (Hammondsworth, Middlesex, England: Penguin Books Ltd, 1970), 297-98.
[23] Marco Frascari. "A Light, Six-Sided, Paradoxical Fight", Nexus Network Journal, vol. 4, no. 2 (Spring 2002), 1, http://www.nexusjournal.com/Frascari_v4n2.html
[24] Ibid., 1.
[25] Ibid., 1.
