Bonnie DeVarco

65 web pages, hyperlinked to more than 250 sites | Copyright 1997 Bonnie Goldstein DeVarco. All rights reserved

This monumental undetaking was completed just when the World Wide Web was beginning to take off. In this online tour de force, Bonnie Goldstein DeVarco masterfully "places Buckminster Fuller, one of the great innovators of this century, into a unique lineage of great thinkers, artists, scientists and inventors." Her thesis "connects some of [Fuller's] ideas to leading edge technologies such as nanotechnology, biotechnology and computer information systems."

This paper was made possible by a research grant from the Buckminster Fuller Institute.

Invisible Architecture — The NanoWorld of Buckminster Fuller

Excerpt from: A Note to the Reader

"The artist Vincent Van Gogh once remarked on how he was transfixed by "the vertigo of the infinite." As I sit in front of my computer screen linked up to the vast world of cyberspace through my modem and phone line, I am beginning to get a glimpse of what he meant. In a matter of a few short years, the World Wide Web, an ephemeral repository and my favorite archive, has become an inexhaustible contemporary resource library. The web has quickly become a medium whose content is as varied as it is infinite, expanding geometrically by the day in every direction around the planet. It is a growing databank of current and ancient information changing moment by moment, assembling its global presence by millions of people in millions of different ways.

In the following hypermedia document containing links to more than 250 other pages around the web, I sketch out an interdisciplinary thesis that places Buckminster Fuller, one of the great innovators of this century, into a unique lineage of great thinkers, artists, scientists and inventors. This thesis also connects some of his ideas to leading edge technologies such as nanotechnology, biotechnology and computer information systems. The key to reading this piece is for the reader to explore the myriad links within it -- links to people and organizations all over the world, in numerous fields of inquiry, covering a a broad cross section of disciplines. I have tried to make it easy for the reader to explore these links by choosing the most relevant pages or images I could find on the web and placing them straight in the text of this document (which runs about 65 pages in total).

The reader may not agree with various aspects of the thesis itself. However, I hope the mere juxtaposition of so many different ideas with links directly to their sources, histories and/or originators will help the reader to jump around in history and poke around into subject matter that she would not have looked at otherwise. This may also assist in helping the reader explore some of the patterns that connect the arts and sciences together in a fresher, more visually stimulating way. Fuller's geometry, known to most only by his most famous artifact -- the geodesic dome -- seems to make good sense in each of these contexts, demonstrating that he was indeed, as he was often referred to, "the Leonardo da Vinci of the 20th Century."

» Click here to visit the Invisble Architecture website