University of Southern California
SUMMER @ TROJAN
VOL. LXII, NO. 9
LOS ANGELES. CALIFORNIA
FRIDAY, JULY 17,1970
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Buckminster Fuller to speak at the Festival of the Arts
By LINDA BIBER
R. Buckminster Fuller, the revolutionary architect-inventor-writer-thinker who knocked the walls out from under traditional building concepts with his geodesic domes and who ignored the walls artificially drawn around countries to develop his global village concept, is coming to USC.
Jack Marquette, the head of next years’ Festival of the Arts Committee, said he had received a final confirmation from Fuller’s office, saying he would appear on campus Feb. 23, as part of the week-long festival.
The visionary architect has been coming up with ideas for more than 30 years on how to pump up 20th century living standards to the scope of 20th century technology, but many of the ideas have lain dormant for a while, waiting for public awareness to come of age.
Years ago, for example, Fuller took the standard compression-type stacked-unit architecture and broke it out into bubbles—tetrahedron webs held together by tension and suspension, intricate geodesic surfaces,
domes assembled in an afternoon.
He showed the post World War II world how surfaces of a dwelling could be used for maximum energy and constructed a few protoype Dymaxion houses—low-cost, streamlined and self-autonomous—while the countryside was being paved with costly tract housing and split-level monstrosities.
Fuller finally received a great deal of attention for his geodesics when he designed a huge “sky-break bubble” as the United States’ pavilion at Expo ’67 in Montreal.
Fuller is currently going around the world promoting a concept called World Game, which he has been formulating for many years. World Game involves taking a survey of the world’s resources and seeing how they can be pooled together most efficiently in order to provide a high standard of living for all the world’s peoples.
The game can only be accomplished by forgetting about national borderlines and differences in politics, lifestyles,
and material wealth of the different nations.
World Game runs on synergy —the idea that the behavior of a whole system is different from the behavior of the component systems working separately.
Fuller uses synergy as the basis of his geodesic and dymaxion designs, he views it as the basis of the workings of the universe and he sees it as the only proper basis for man’s survival and harmonious attachment with the environment.
In his book, “Utopia or Oblivion: The Prospects for Humanity” Fuller tells why the present mentality of dealing with world subsistance problems doesn’t work.
“What could be done and up to now has been done in a big way . . . has not been determined by the technologists, but by their economic masters who see only the immediate profits—in, for instance, the exploiiability of the fossil fuels . . . which can bring the highest profits . . .
World organization needed to solve environmental problems, editor says
Top: Buckminster Fuller plays with tension suspension structure. Middle: Geodesic dome over New York City conceived to control environment. Bottom: Sky-Break Bubble, designed by Fuller, was awesome structure at Montreal World Fair.
In his failure to deal adequately with the problems of world strife, the population crisis, environmental pollution and urban conditions relating to his new habits of life, man may already have exhausted his margin of error for survival.
Such was the premise of a talk delivered by Norman Cousins, editor of Saturday Review, when he addressed more than 50 Southern California school superintendents last Friday.
“We find ourselves with problems which are not simply local, regional or even national,” Cousins said. “The problems have becomt international and yet there are no agencies to deal with them at that level— certainly not the United Nations as it is presently constituted.
“Russia’s decision to reverse the flow of two rivers now entering the Polar Ice Cap could raise the temperature beyond acceptable limits on the other side of the world,” Cousins noted.
“At the rate we’re going, pollution could make ‘dead’ lakes out of the Atlantic and the Pacific oceans in 30 to 40 years. A recent study, showing that New York could become uninhabitable in seven or eight years, resulted in a reduction by 50 percent of some of the most dangerous pollutants.
“The fact is that we are running out of oxygen. But who is to make the necessary determinations about this? Who is to act in behalf of human interests?”
The problems of the world today go back to the Industrial Revolution which gave us one world — without making it whole, the noted editor, author and observer said.
“One American, for instance, consumes 75 times as much
electricity as is used by an individual in Asia, Africa and Latin America,” Cousins said. “The problem has become world-wide because everyone is trying to emulate the United States in such things as production and power.
“The U.S. has stockpiled—by four or possibly as much as 10 times—the destructive power we once thought we needed to survive in world conflict. There are now 30,000 pounds of destructive force for every man, woman and child in the U.S.— but not 30,000 pounds of reserve food, or medicines or books.
“Yet nothing we create as destructive force makes us secure because Russia has comparable destructive power. Probably no one summed up our plight better than Pope John XXIII when he said ‘the
next war will not be man vs. man, but man vs. God’.”
The United Nations has not proved any real solution to man’s problems, Cousins said because that body “merely reflects differences and does nothing about them.”
“We cannot afford to stumble for another 25 years,” he added. “We are at the point of a last stand on behalf of man which can come only with an interest in the quality of life and a new world philosophy tied to human interest.
“Man is capable of doing anything he wants to do—go to the moon or solve the population and pollution crisis.
“But everything must begin with education. We must learn how to develop a means by which sensible limits are imposed on national differences in the interest of all mankind.”
Communication workshop writes stories tor Trojan
The second USCommunications Workshop, an intensive introductory training session in journalism for students in neighborhood junior high schools, ends today.
The stories on pages one and two of today’s Summer Trojan were written by the students in the workshop.
Throughout the two-week course, the students have been working on group projects, hearing from distinguished men and women in all aspects of communication and working with television equipment.
Some of the class’s projects included making a video tape, presenting skits, conducting surveys and making posters—all designed to give the students a wide-range of exposure to the methods and meanings of communications.
The course is taught by Vicki Hyman, a DSC journalism graduate who is currently an English and journalism instructor at Foshey Junior High.
She is assisted by Bernard Comas, a free-lance writer, and Clint Wilson, also a USC graduate who has advised the Black Call, a paper at Los Angeles City College.