Tetrascroll: Goldilocks and the Three Bears, A Cosmic Fairy Tale

R. Buckminster Fuller

Jun 1982 · Estate of R. Buckminster Fuller

About this ebook

A series of twenty-one original triangular lithographs (with narrative captions) which may be displayed in a helical scroll of linked tetrahedra. They were executed during the years 1975 and 1976 under the guiding light of Tatyana Grosman (to whom Fuller had been introduced by Edwin Schlossberg) at her ULAE print workshop in West Islip, Long Island. In something of a publishing innovation this trade book was brought out concurrently with a limited edition of the signed original lithographs. Michael Denneny was the editorial impresario at St. Martin's and Ronald Feldman Fine Arts handled the exhibition of the lithographs. 

Fuller composed the Tetrascroll between the publication of Synergetics in 1975 and Synergetics 2 in 1979. He had been frustrated by the rigid structure of the synergetics books which, despite certain advantages, he felt robbed the work of spontaneity and narrative force. To compensate for this Fuller worked feverishly on the Tetrascroll as a free-form obbligato to the synergetics books. He explained to me at the time, "The empirical, the scientific way to present the argument of synergetics is the way I am doing it in Goldilocks.  

Description by Ed Applewhite, courtesy of The Estate of Buckminster Fuller

About the author

Buckminster Fuller (1895 - 1983) was an architect, engineer, geometrician, cartographer, philosopher, futurist, inventor of the famous geodesic dome, and one of the most brilliant thinkers of his time. Fuller was renowned for his comprehensive perspective on the world's problems. For more than five decades, he developed pioneering solutions reflecting his commitment to the potential of innovative design to create technology that does "more with less" and thereby improve human lives. The author of nearly 30 books, he spent much of his life traveling the world lecturing and discussing his ideas with thousands of audiences. In 1983, shortly before his death, he received the U.S. Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation's highest civilian honor, with a citation acknowledging that his "contributions as a geometrician, educator, and architect-designer are benchmarks of accomplishment in their fields." After Fuller's death, a team of chemists won the Nobel Prize for discovering a new carbon molecule with a structure similar to that of a geodesic dome, they named the molecule "buckminsterfullerene"—now commonly referred to in the scientific community as the buckyball.