The End of Creativity

Mathematically speaking, the more talking increases the probability of saying something worthwhile; at least for those who constantly think out loud or have an ultimate goal that requires broader thinking. To Buckminster Fuller, Universe was something worthwhile, found in mathematic standardizations and started imitating those certainties in inventions. Such was the efficient and universal Dymaxion house, conceived by the talkative Fuller as his solution to an energy- and space-efficient Spaceship Earth. “Dymaxion houses, even when stacked into tall apartment buildings would be so light and sturdy that they could be transported all over the globe. A zeppelin would first drop a bomb in the open landscape to blast a hole then plug the tower” (Yesterday’s Tomorrows: Past Visions of the American Future, 69). These plans were not popular, but have come true in electronic games today. The video game Spore visualizes the planting of city stations on any foreign planets from a flying object (spaceship) into the surface with a large impact that unfolds and creates its own atmosphere: the creative game process realizes a once radical idea in a digital place where the radical is possible.

His unified aesthetic to the construction of neighborhoods and transportation vehicles is not as creative as Spore’s interface. Dymaxion houses are all the same, but construction was limited by the affordability and low technology available to inventors. With the neighborhoods, does fuller anticipate the waning of creativity with the emergence of a future age where all houses are universal? He mentioned in the movie that in the future, ample living space would be available for any population size and that places must be utilized efficiently for that to happen. At our current rate of industrialization, there looks to be no space or place for individual creativity to be a part of the human/space experience. I believe that Fuller’s future looks bleak, and our connection with the environment is disconnected along with the freedom to explore place.

Creativity is defined by ways of thinking, something that may be strengthened but not lost. However, our future selves have to become more knowledgeable with the self and our place in Universe to be expressive. Will there be an artistic limit to “do what is needed” and nothing else? When he dropped a stone in the water, Fuller theorized of “pattern integrity,” suggesting that form follows function, “…nature uses waves, never strait lines” (R. Buckminster Fuller On Education, 151). As the Dymaxion house moves onto mountainous terrain, how well they adapt may rely on new creative insights about pattern integrity (blueprints) of a new Dymaxion for a hillside. There is hope for work at being creative and finding an ever-perpetuating “better” design for living. In Steven Harrington’s exhibit “Our Mountain” written about his artistic purpose was, “Part of a more contemporary, outward-looking strain of west coast design work, one that seeks to re-mobilize the productive energies of the late 1960s and early 1970s, that period of geo-political exigency in which the idealism of the counterculture blended with the promise of the cybernetic revolution and the cosmic, visionary potential of new modes of habitation” (Arkitip, No. 0052, Introduction by Mark Owens).

"One world is enough for all of us. It may seem a million miles away, but it gets a little closer every day." --lyrical excerpt from “One World,” The Police

IHRTLUHC, Ian Wallace