ANYONE willing to go along with the proposition that a house is an Energetic Environment Valve, and that man is, among other things, "a self-balancing 28-jointed adapter-base biped" will find himself right at home with Richard Buckminster Fuller. Bucky Fuller is a super-technologist whose mission in life is to help the human race do more & more with less & less until, at the ultimate, it can do everything with nothing. Variously classified as a scientist, engineer, philosopher and architect, but innocent of formal education beyond a matter of months at Harvard College, which callously bounced him in the teens of the century, Bucky Fuller is today a teacher whose mind bestrides the most colossal problems of life and living, and whose proposals can be called provocative, if not provoking. Bucky Fuller's idolaters compare him to Leonardo da Vinci, and even his detractors do not view him as an ordinary man. "Don't underestimate Bucky," warned one of them recently. "He might be a fake, but he's certainly a Force."

Although, as with Leonardo, there is no limit to Bucky's interests, and no domain he cannot think himself into or out of, many of his most energetic ideas center in how best to shelter the human race. A house is an energetic environment valve because man, the 28-jointed, etc., biped, creates or modifies his environment by the energy he brings to it; it is the house's function to sluice the biped's energy into its appropriate social, sexual, digestive or somnolent modes. In the Fuller terminology, an automobile is a migratory glassed-in front porch; an airplane is a powerized, high-speed room. "Bucky thinks the individual should be able to exist by just plugging himself into the landscape," a friend said recently.

Bucky Fuller's name was once best known for its association with the Dymaxion House, the first version of which was a life valve designed to hang from a central mast containing an elevator. But today this once revolutionary idea is old stuff, and superseded by the Fuller Geodesic Dome. The dome is as big as one likes, made up of small spherical triangles pinned together. In appropriate sizes, it can be made to shelter anything from newlyweds to a railway terminal with less weight and hence less cost, and, Bucky hopes, be more resistant to hurricanes or atomic-bomb blasts than conventional design's. "It would be a good moon structure too," said a Fuller enthusiast.

Last summer the Museum of Modern Art plugged a model of a Geodesic Dome into its landscape of Manhattan's West 53rd Street and drew as many as 2,000 spectators on a Sunday. This spring, the Ford Motor Co. will unveil a go-footer, made of such gossamer materials as aluminum spars, Orion fabric and Fiberglas, to enclose a large court in its Rotunda in Dearborn, Mich., as part of its soth anniversary celebration. This will bring this Fuller idea closer to practical use and success than most; it has hitherto been the fate of most of Bucky's dreams to blow up when the attempt was made to connect them to the surging voltages of everyday life. This has never troubled Bucky. No matter what happens on earthly levels, his mind goes its own soaring way. Currently it is full of another concept of shelter for the human family in the form of'a great whirling blade overhead, which swishes into outer space all cold and fog and wind and rain, together with the moth and rust that corrupt, leaving the shipping clerk and his riveter wife snug and secure with their three children inside the wall-less vacuum of his dreams. If any fool objects that the neighbors can see in, there are always curtains, or something.

It is as a teacher and inspirer of youth that Bucky scores most heavily today. This year, as occasionally before, he is putting in two months at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the archbishopric of practical science in America, whither he came dragging a earful of models, tools, domes and other geometries from the University of Michigan. He calls himself a visiting professor of energetic geometry, and lectures to graduate students in architecture at M.I.T., as almost everywhere, with success. Since most teachers in America operate on narrow gauge and have strictly limited switching faculties in the world of cognition, Bucky is an inspiring Messiah to the type of youth that wants to be told the relationship between a triangle and quantum mechanics, and cannot find anyone else willing or able to make the connection.

FEW people have ever been able to catch Bucky reading a book; his ideas in consequence are almost bound to be his own, and fresh minted. His great virtue as an inspirer of young men lies in the extraordinary egocentric faith he has in his own intuitions; as a scientist, Bucky often has not much more quality than Lewis Carroll's Bellman, in The Hunting of the Snark, whose assertion was that what he said three times was true, but he can relate anything in the world to anything else, and spin such long-chain molecules of thought that professors to whom a house is a house would rather maintain a purse-lipped reserve than openly contradict.

Now 57, and thinner than he used to be, Bucky Fuller today presents a kindly and tranquil aspect to the world. His build is stubby; from a thick neck there rises a handsomely shaped skull:his hair is well-implanted, white and crew-cropped; his light eyes swim hugely behind the thick trifocals a man must wear who is too farsighted to cope unaided with the close at hand. As he warms to a subject, an initial shyness disappears; his ideas pop up faster & faster, as interminably as bubbles from a test tube held in a hot blue flame. Two hours may pass, but the answer to a simple question is not complete; Bucky is still stewing, happily and softly, in his own rich juices, his quiet, cultivated New England voice scarcely varying from paragraph to momentous paragraph. Any interruption jars him; he copes with it politely, lays it aside, and resumes from where he thinks he ought to be. After three hours, the visitor may rise to leave. "May I borrow two more minutes," says Bucky, "to complete the thought?"

THE energetic environment valve in which the Fullers flux-ate when Bucky is at home is definitely non-Dymaxion and infra-geodesic: a two-room Queens apartment with bath and kitchenette such as might have served a young couple beginning married life modestly in 1912. The living room is furnished in a combination of advanced geometric shapes and Chinese prints; there are some books, a head of Bucky sculptured in chromium, and a photograph of his beautiful daughter, Allegra. Mrs. Fuller, as befits the wife of a man concerned almost exclusively with the future, is apt to murmur "How nice, darling," in answer to almost any revelation from her husband. Once when he was deep in numerology, he conducted a marital quarrel entirely in digits. "He was terribly mad at me that night," Anne Fuller recalled, "but all he would say was '27-4-32.' " Genealogy connects Buckminster Fuller to Transcendental Concord, Mass.; he is the grandnephew of Margaret Fuller, friend of Ralph Waldo Emerson.

Bucky invented a series of Dymaxion bathrooms which were excellently designed, but demanded a great deal of their occupants. "Damn it," said an eminent architectural friend of Bucky's, "Bucky thinks people ought to get weighed while sitting on the toilet seat, brushing their teeth with a cake of soap and taking a shower from a fog-gun." An evil light came into the eminent architectural eye. "But I ainta gonta," he said. "I just ainta gonta."

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