"Selfishness is unnecessary and hence-forth unrationalizable ... War is obsolete."
The standard account makes Fuller (1895-1983) a designer whose century was not equipped to receive him. It is a comfortable, but dubious story. He was an ILE, with all the benefits and flaws of the type being very brightly presented, and what stopped his Dymaxion house project was not the century. The inventor himself was the kind of man who could reach prototype, but had major difficulties crossing into production.
Fuller showed distinct traits of an inventive Ne-lead ever since childhood, just like another ILE, Ada Lovelace, did. He made various "inventions" from things he found in woods, and took issue with his school's style of geometry teaching, wanting a more "synergetic" approach where each one of an object's qualities has its place in the whole (when shown a drawing of a cube in class, his questions about its size, weight, and temperature were dismissed by teachers, leading him to believe traditional math ignored real physical things). As a book describes it, "when Bucky Fuller looked around, he saw, not trees and roads and butterflies, but a miraculous web of interacting patterns." His dislike of school geometrical abstraction was not due to an inability to comprehend it (people who can't do it don't become eccentric theoreticians), but due to wanting to go beyond it.
Fuller was definitely an "irrational" character, even more irrational than your typical ILE. He managed to get expelled from Harvard twice: first for spending money with a vaudeville troupe, and the second time, after re-admission, for his "irresponsibility and lack of interest." Again, he clearly had the intelligence, but lacked responsibility. In early 1920s, he and his father-in-law started a company for producing housing building materials, but it ultimately failed, and his first daughter died young of polio complications. In deep depression, and contemplating drowning himself in Lake Michigan for family ensurance, Fuller experienced an epiphany. As he recalled it, a voice, speaking directly to him, had declared:
'From now on you need never await temporal attestation to your thought. You think the truth. You do not have the right to eliminate yourself. You do not belong to you. You belong to the Universe. Your significance will remain forever obscure to you, but you may assume that you are fulfilling your role if you apply yourself to converting your experiences to the highest advantage of others.'
Hearing voices while not being externally influenced by drugs or physical traumas is rare in general, but definitely happens more with intuitives than sensors, and the two intuitives for whom this happens the least are the logical-rationals LIE and LII. Besides being intuitive, the content of the vision shows Fuller's "global" ascending and "special snowflake" questimic character.
In New York, Fuller decorated cafe interiors in exchange for meals, while giving informal lectures and starting to work on his new house building project, which another employee, Waldo Warred, called the Dymaxion house, assembling it out of the words "dynamics", "maximum" and "tension" (or "ion" as scientific suffix, I've seen both versions online), which Fuller, himself quite a wordsmith (Ne is associated with this trait for a reason), liked so much he applied it to a house, a car, a bathroom, a map, a sleep schedule and eventually his own archive. The house was meant to be efficient, intended to be suitable for any site or environment — Te considerations certainly were not alien to him — yet the first conscious effort to build an autonomous building in the 20th century was still not practical enough. Fuller rejected attempts to simplify his design, believing that it destroys the whole idea. Only one Dymaxion house was ever built by investor William Graham, who used it as his family home.
At Black Mountain College in North Carolina, Fuller, according to Wikipedia, "had been shy and withdrawn, but he was persuaded to participate in a theatrical performance of Erik Satie's Le piège de Méduse produced by John Cage... under the tutelage of Arthur Penn, then a student at Black Mountain, Fuller broke through his inhibitions to become confident as a performer and speaker" — a relatively good description of activator Fe as a function that wants to be taught by others. Granted, I don't necessarily share the views about the supposed importance of the activator functions other schools share, but in this case, it fits. At the same college he worked on the principle of the geodesic dome, which turned out to be his greatest contribution to the world. This time, he didn't actually invent it — its creator was the German Walther Bauersfeld — but Fuller recognized its importance and made major improvements. Wikipedia notes, "Although Bauersfeld's dome could support a full skin of concrete it was not until 1949 that Fuller erected a geodesic dome building that could sustain its own weight with no practical limits." Another of his inventions, the Dymaxion car, described by him to his second daughter as a "zoomobile" that could hop off the road at will, fly about, then, as deftly as a bird, settle back into a place in traffic, fared worse, with one prototype getting into a crash that killed its driver (although it's still debated whether the car's design contributed to the crash).
In his philosophy, he was an optimist who believed that there was enough relevant information that was gathered together, along with the huge amounts of major recyclable resources that had been mined from the earth, to reach a point where competition for needs was not required anymore. Certainly a very Alpha-NT, "peripheral" and even "positivist" view. Shortly before his death, he described himself as "a living case history of a thoroughly documented, half-century, search-and-research project designed to discover what, if anything, an unknown, moneyless individual, with a dependent wife and newborn child, might be able to do effectively on behalf of all humanity."
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