Yet another article about Fuller that categorically dismisses his ideas and historical importance based on a few shallow misunderstandings that likely came from reading other shallow summaries rather than actually reading his work.

Here are a few of the factual inaccuracies that this article uses to build a wholly incorrect view of Fuller:

> attempts at industrializing housing production have failed again and again

Manufactured homes are nowadays about 10% of new homes in the USA, hardly an abject failure.

> Fuller chauffeured Eleanor Roosevelt and Amelia Earhart to the White House—the car never made it to a production line. But its chubby front somehow portends the VW bus

This is a deep misunderstanding of the important influence of the Dymaxion car on vehicle design. The reason it looks similar to the VW Bus is because the bus copied the 'forward control' concept, which radically increased the interior space and passenger count for a small efficient vehicle. To dismiss it as a funny coincidence is really ignorant.

> Fuller also came up with the concept of “tensegrity”

As Fuller himself admits, he did not come up with this concept, one of his students did, he only came up with the word itself. Fuller's contribution was showing examples of how concepts like this could help build a better future for humanity, e.g. by reducing the resources needed to construct buildings.

> Fuller did not really understand that “design” means something altogether different at different scales

This is a really absurd assertion, since it's one of the key focuses of his work- the geometric and mathematical implications of scaling designs. "Synergetics: Explorations in the Geometry of Thinking" talks about this concept he supposedly fails to understand in extreme depth.

> Fuller did not accept evolution and saw the world as the creation of an intelligent god

This is also untrue, he talks often about evolution as a fact in his writings, but does have some deep spiritual beliefs that inspired his self confidence and efforts. As far as I can tell, they have no connection with established religion, or any opposition to scientific concepts like evolution.

> It is no wonder, therefore, that Fuller had little of use to say about cities and metropolitan areas

Again, the author here clearly has read none of Fuller's work, and has no familiarity with which concepts he has a lot or little to say about. In this own article he talks about his concept of building a dome over Manhattan, which directly contradicts this assertion. In short- Fuller saw the haphazard unplanned design of cities to be massively inefficient, especially the massive surface area requiring huge amounts of heating and cooling. He came up with tons of ideas to increase the efficiency and livability of large cities and metropolitan areas.

> Fuller’s built forms—Dymaxion houses or geodesic domes—all have circular footprints and are at their best when positioned in the middle of an open field. Dense cities, on the other hand, are never made from circular footprints.

This is easily the silliest assertion of the article- again an example of claiming Fuller never considered issues that he actually wrote entire books about. Really a huge amount of Fuller's work was on the mathematics of efficiently packing spheres into large systems, with direct discussions of the implications of this for constructing cities more efficiently and thoughtfully. This problem is a key focus of the book "Synergetics: Explorations in the Geometry of Thinking"... complete with pages and pages of diagrams of different ways of packing spheres and circles, and detailed discussions about the implications for urban design!