R. Buckminster Fuller: In a small world, his dome is still big
From today's print edition
By Stevenson Swanson
Chicago Tribune correspondent
NEW YORK — Broke and despondent over his prospects, the young New Englander who had moved to Chicago stared out at Lake Michigan and thought about suicide. But instead, he decided to dedicate his life to helping humanity.
That, at least, is one version of the crucial moment in 1927 when a 32-year-old R. Buckminster Fuller found his calling in life. Some scholars now think Fuller, who is enjoying a resurgence of interest 25 years after his death, dressed up the story to make it more dramatic.
Fuller, the visionary dreamer and designer who died in 1983 at age 87, is the subject of a new exhibit at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, as well as a hefty exhibition catalog and a forthcoming book about his life and works. A newly established $100,000 prize for proposals "to solve humanity's most pressing problems" bears his name.
And in Illinois, Fuller fans are working to preserve two of his distinctive geodesic domes in Downstate Carbondale and Edwardsville.
However Fuller found his life's work, he became a self-described "comprehensive anticipatory design scientist" whose mixture of the practical and theoretical can be summed up by the fact that he not only invented the geodesic dome but also coined the phrase " Spaceship Earth."
With the increasingly global nature of commerce, culture and environmental problems such as climate change, Fuller's ideas about applying technology to help the greatest number of people and doing more with less seem especially timely.
"His ideas were incredibly prescient and have become increasingly relevant today," said Dana Miller, co-curator of the Whitney Museum exhibit, "Buckminster Fuller: Starting with the Universe," which will come to Chicago's Museum of Contemporary Art next year. "He understood that we're living in a closed system, and so you have to make the best use of the resources available and in a way that benefits the largest segment of humanity."
Born and raised in Milton, Mass., Fuller came from an old Massachusetts family whose ancestors included a delegate to the convention that wrote the U.S. Constitution, and 19th Century Transcendentalist writer and editor Margaret Fuller.
But Bucky, as friends called him, managed to get thrown out of Harvard University twice for his antics. After moving to Chicago to work for a relative, he became depressed following the death of his 4-year-old daughter and began drinking heavily. By 1927, he had a second daughter but no job.
Fuller's own account of his crisis involved a walk by Lake Michigan, during which his thoughts of suicide were interrupted by a voice in his head that said he did not have the right to take his own life because, "You do not belong to you."
Rather, the voice continued, Bucky belonged to the universe. He resolved to become the subject of his own experiment, "to find what a single individual can contribute to changing the world and benefiting all humanity."
"I'm sure he had a moment of profound inward probing," said Miller, who questions the literal truth of the account. "There was an important transition point in 1927, and the suicide story served a function."
A brand name
One of the highlights of the Whitney exhibit is Fuller's Dymaxion car, a three-wheeled, teardrop-shaped vehicle that could carry 11 passengers at speeds up to 120 m.p.h. Only three prototypes were built because financing collapsed after a fatal accident with one of the cars in 1934.
"Dymaxion" was Fuller's all-purpose brand name — there were also Dymaxion houses and maps — but the term was the creation of Marshall Field's marketing department, which wanted a catchy name for a display of Fuller's design for a modern house in the late 1920s. The word is a conflation of "dynamic," "maximum" and either "ion" or "tension," words featured heavily in Fuller's dialogues.
An itinerant lecturer for most of his life, Fuller became a professor at Southern Illinois University in 1959, despite the fact that he had no college degree. But by then, he was famous as the inventor of the geodesic dome, which combined the properties of a sphere and a tetrahedron, or a triangular pyramid, which he believed was the most stable structural form in nature.
A home, a legacy
Although his most famous dome design was for the U.S. pavilion at the Montreal World's Fair in 1967, the form was adaptable, including as a home for its inventor.
Fuller also adapted his design into a 40-foot dome on SIU's Edwardsville campus for use as a multifaith religious center.
Earth's continents and oceans are etched on the dome, which SIU philosophy professor Greg Fields describes as "an amazing, uplifting space with outstanding acoustics."
The non-profit Friends of the Religious Center has applied for listing as a state historic landmark, with the ultimate goal of achieving national landmark status.
That Illinois has two domes associated with Fuller is remarkable for a designer who did not leave a large body of completed work behind. But that does not lessen his legacy, according to devotees.
"For me, it's not a sign of failure that he didn't create a lot of buildings," said Miller, the Whitney curator. "I'm just as interested in the ideas and the philosophy that he left behind."