Jonathon Keats

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There were other auto manufacturers that were confabulating as much as [Buckminster Fuller] was, making claims about how cars resembled this or that aspect of nature.
- Jonathon Keats
Collection: Car
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On the other hand, the way in which that car fit into this whole very roundabout way of attempting to solve the problem of what - the problem that [Buckminster Fuller] perceived as being the cause of his daughter's death and meningitis. I mean how you get from your daughter dying from meningitis to making a car with three wheels and saying that it's like a bird and a fish. That really is amazing.
- Jonathon Keats
Collection: Daughter
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Once you start backing into all of that, then you see this incredibly intricate, totally wrong-headed way to do things, but nevertheless has a lot of merit to it for the fact that [Buckminster Fuller] is recognizing much larger patterns, seeking much larger patterns and seeking much larger ways of trying to solve for the problem of unhygienic conditions in slums. They really were unhygienic. Whether his family was living in the slum is debatable but they were unhygienic. That needed to be addressed. He was attempting to address it.
- Jonathon Keats
Collection: Trying
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I became really absorbed but again I was at that point - and I still remain today - an outsider who has no interest in becoming an insider, let alone in what that insider perspective on [Buckminster Fuller] has come to be and come to represent.
- Jonathon Keats
Collection: Perspective
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I would say that what the value of talking about and thinking about a dome over Manhattan is that [Buckminster] Fuller has identified a scale of action I think is actually really compelling.
- Jonathon Keats
Collection: Thinking
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At this point in history, the desperate need for building a sustainable society and for managing energy usage makes for a really - of vast importance that we need to place on where we live and how we live in those places.
- Jonathon Keats
Collection: Energy
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You have the insanity that is geo-engineering which is a case in which you say the planet is heating up. Let's spray some aerosol and cool it down.
- Jonathon Keats
Collection: Engineering
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I think that what we need to do is we need to think about what scale makes sense for dealing with our need to live within a habitable zone and to do so without using air conditioning and heating in the way that is so incredibly expensive to the environment.
- Jonathon Keats
Collection: Thinking
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The city is better because the city has an economy of needs and once you're talking about a city, maybe you can start talking about how you manage the climate of that city as a whole. Not by putting a dome over it but by more passive means that can potentially be put together in creative ways.
- Jonathon Keats
Collection: Mean
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Architects in urban planning are talking about this but they're not talking about it yet I don't think at that level that [Buckminster] Fuller is talking about when he talked about putting a dome over Manhattan, which is to say an attempt at integrating all of these different technologies in a way that makes for a city that, without having an actual dome, thermodynamically manages the heat flow for that urban environment and therefore makes it so that it is a highly efficient machine for a living or a dwelling machine as he would have preferred in terms of thermodynamically optimizing it.
- Jonathon Keats
Collection: Technology
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Since I live part of the year in Italy, I live in a society in which I'm the optimistic American relative to the people who I'm around there. And that has actually brought to my attention the fact that I do have some sort of optimism and has made me think about it enough that I can attempt an answer.
- Jonathon Keats
Collection: Optimistic
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First of all, [Buckminster Fuller's] identification of the problems that are all that much more pertinent, all that much more pressing in the world today than in his own lifetime from sustainability in terms of the environment to income inequality.
- Jonathon Keats
Collection: Today