Fifty three years ago, when I first designed that Dymaxion house, I became deeply aware of the fact that humanity headed for a great deal of trouble. The year I was born, the automobile was invented in America. When I was five years of age, that was 1900, there were five thousand cars being manufactured. In my class at Harvard, the class of 1917, there were seven hundred members and only two of them had automobiles. Automobiles were something very new. But it was perfectly clear to me, after World War I, when we accelerated all kinds of production using all kinds of energy, there would come a time when we certainly would run out of fossil fuels. Fossil fuels that had taken millions of years for humanity to store away as a safety deposit, savings account, energy. And quite clearly then, you don't wait until you're in trouble. So I began to see many problems that are inherent in what seemed to me to be clearly a whole new era of humanity that was starting on our planet. In 1927, I undertook to make an experiment to see what, if anything, a little unknown, penniless human being with a dependent wife and a newborn child might be able to do effectively on behalf of all humanity that were inherently impossible for great nations and great private enterprises to effect. The function of a human is that it has a mind. The corporation, the legal entity, does not have a mind. And the free thinking of the individual mind, I felt, was the very essence of the human being itself. So I saw that here is one quarter of the Earth's surface being divided by over a hundred nations, and those nations inherently looking out for themselves. I saw that great corporations were venture enterprise, and they had to make a profit within a reasonably short amount of time or they would fail. So they were inherently short-sighted. They could not look at the kind of problems that I saw should be looked at, as for instance, the fact that someday we would run out of fossil fuels. So I said, there's nothing to stop me as a little individual from thinking about our whole planet Earth.

I am quite convinced of the incredible integrity of design of universe. It's the designing of various creatures, you and I did not design human beings. We didn't design those creatures. We didn't design the universe. We've designed very, very little so far. We have learned some very important principles from it, but when you get to the competence of design manifest by universe, as in designing human beings, there's something talking about structures.