Revisiting Buckminster Fuller’s ‘Far-Out’ Schemes

Boris Artzybasheff (1899-1965), R. Buckminster Fuller, 1963 National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution; gift of Time magazine
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Boris Artzybasheff (1899-1965), R. Buckminster Fuller, 1963 National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution; gift of Time magazine

When Buckminster Fuller died 25 years ago as a resident of Pacific Palisades, he was already a mythical figure in American cultural life, world-renowned for his eccentric designs and concepts. Fuller was born in Milton, Massachusetts on July 12, 1895 and his rigorous thinking and experimental projects, combined with nearly a pop-star status, made him one of the most beguiling figures of the 20th century.
Fuller thought of himself as a “comprehensive anticipatory design scientist,” which he defined as “an engineer, inventor, mathematician, architect, cartographer, philosopher, poet, cosmogonist, comprehensive designer and choreographer.” He conceived of hundreds of different projects, lectured around the world and wrote dozens of books. His real contribution, though, revolves around his vision for the future of humanity and how we must think strategically about how to manage the earth’s natural resources.
Now, with the advent of global warming and looming energy shortages, Fuller’s once far-out schemes seem like the very type of innovative thinking the world needs. In celebration of his life’s work, a retrospective exhibition, “Buckminster Fuller: Starting with the Universe,” is currently on view at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York.
Dana Miller, co-curator of the show and co-editor of the accompanying catalog, recently told the Palisadian-Post that it was the concept of totality that informs the heart of the exhibition, as well as the first four images a viewer sees when entering the show.
“The first four drawings, from 1927, are images of the earth,” Miller said. “I thought it was important to start there, to illustrate how Fuller was thinking expansively, on a grand scale. He was thinking about the whole earth and the entire of humanity.”
Fuller tackled the problem wearing all his hats, coining the term 4D, which stands for the fourth dimension, or time, in 1928. Attached to his early experiments with mass-produced housing, the concept of 4D encompasses issues of efficiency and organization. Fuller, always the wordsmith, embraced new language for his many innovations, such as “dymaxion,” which combines “dynamic,” “maximum,” and “ion,” which he trademarked and used to describe many projects.
Perhaps Fuller’s most visible project was the development of the geodesic dome, which he saw as a way to quickly provide strong, lightweight shelter for millions of people. He and his wife Anne lived in one while Fuller was teaching at Southern Illinois University, from 1959 to 1972, before moving to Philadelphia, where he maintained his office for the rest of his life. With Anne’s decline in health, the couple moved to Pacific Palisades in 1980 and rented a house on Via de la Paz to be closer to their daughter Allegra, who had moved here with her documentary filmmaker husband, Bob, in 1962. Buckminster died on July 1, 1983, having suffered a heart attack while visiting Anne in the hospital. She died 36 hours later.
The Whitney exhibition attempts to present, in the words of Miller, “a visual display of Fuller’s ideas, through drawings or models.” She had approached Fuller’s work “from a painting and sculpture perspective” and initially thought the exhibition would showcase how artists have responded to Fuller. As she began to talk to artists of her generation, who had never heard Fuller speak, she realized that they were hungry to know about Fuller and his work. She talked with her co-curator, K. Michael Hays, an architecture critic, and learned that Fuller “was back into vogue” in the architecture community.
The next step was a trip to Stanford University, where the Fuller Archives are housed, to assure that there would be enough new and interesting material to exhibit. Miller and Hays found a trove of drawings, notebooks and models at Stanford. They were on the path to organizing a Fuller retrospective.
In addition to the Stanford material, the curators scoured collections from Carbondale, Illinois to Paris to gather more work. Although they commissioned several new models, they did everything they could to find original ones. Miller recounts her search to find a model of Fuller’s Brookyln Dodgers dome at Princeton, where Fuller was teaching at the time.
“I drove the people in Princeton crazy,” she said. “I was convinced there had to be a model somewhere, but there wasn’t.” Fuller proposed many projects, from a dome over part of Manhattan to an apartment tower floating in San Francisco Bay, that, like the Brooklyn Dodgers dome, were never built.
Fuller’s largest project to be realized was the U.S. Pavilion at Expo ‘67 in Montreal, a giant 200-ft. dome constructed with steel piping and nearly 2,000 clear, molded acrylic panels. Fittingly, the pavilion housed work by many leading American artists of the period, including Jasper Johns, who painted a map based on one of Fuller’s earth diagrams. The pavilion’s skin, destroyed by fire in 1976, was later restored and reopened in 1995 as the Biosphere, a water and environment museum.
Allegra Snyder, Fuller’s 81-year-old, is the first to point out that her father wasn’t an architect. Architecture was part of his tool-kit, but it was always the big picture that mattered. Snyder recently told the Post that it was that “the groundwork, the earth from which his ideas grew that was most successful.” Looking back, she now appreciates his strength as a teacher and communicator, and she thinks it’s “time for us to be very courageous and realize how courageous he was. He risked his whole life, dedicated himself to solving problems, thinking from the various to the biggest perspective.”
Late in life Fuller wrote a book called “Utopia or Oblivion.” Snyder said that “he felt we were in a marginal place and that we had to make a real effort to correct things and make things work for everybody orwe would end up in a real frightening place.” Snyder doesn’t think her father would feel too different about today, although he might think we are a bit closer to oblivion.
While working on the exhibition, Miller herself experienced a shift in priorities, beginning to appreciate modesty in the art world and “starting to think of material costs of what we do as curators.” As for the models and drawings in the exhibition, may they be an inspiration to many young Fullers, eager to think across the borders between art and science in order to imagine a better future.
“Buckminster Fuller: Starting with the Universe” is on view at the Whitney Museum of American Art through September 21. The exhibition will be on view at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, from March 14 to June 21, 2009. The catalog ($50) is published by the Whitney Museum in association with Yale University Press.