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Buckminster Fuller: Your Own Private Sky

by John McGee

Dymaxion House, patented by Buckminster Fuller in 1946 (Photo courtesy Buckminster Fuller Institute)

At the age of 32, R. Buckminster Fuller—one of the great visionaries of the 20th century—stood on the edge of Lake Michigan, contemplating suicide. He had been kicked out of Harvard twice, lost all of his money and couldn’t support his wife and baby daughter. His life was a failure. 

Despondents take note: Instead of surrendering to the abyss, Fuller took his bleak situation as a challenge. How could this poor unknown change the world for the better? He became his own guinea pig in experiments to “make the world work for one hundred percent of humanity, in the shortest possible time, through spontaneous cooperation, without ecological offense or the disadvantage of anyone.” 

This show, organized by the Museum fur Gestaltung in Zurich, is a good introduction to the life and radical designs of Fuller, from his Dymaxion car to his tensegrity structures to his geodesic domes. Copious original drawings, plans, and models (with lengthy titles in English and German) put visitors in Fuller’s studio if not his head. Photos and newsreels reveal how he was perceived by friends and colleagues (like sculptor Isamu Noguchi) and how he not only tried to build a better house and car, but streamline our world and the way we think about it. 

Some of the earliest sketches in this show, for an apartment building ca. 1930, are a solution to a problem nobody knew existed and an indictment of thousands of years of residential architecture, from the Greeks to the Bauhaus. Why live in dark, rectilinear, earthbound dwellings when the freedom, light and fresh air of the open sky are overhead? Fuller’s later Wichita and Dymaxion houses followed this theme, re-tooling the highrise apartment concept for individual pre-fab housing in the round. 

Though these models failed to attract sufficient support for mass production, a subsequent project—the geodesic dome—was one of Fuller’s greatest successes. Embodying two of his key catchphrases—“don’t fight forces—use them” and “doing the most with the least”— these freestanding structures could be built easily and quickly, transported by air, and maximized interior space relative to structure. The US military used them as helicopter hangars and radar installations. Hippies used them as housing. The most famous one was the US Pavilion at the 1967 Montreal Expo. 

Fuller approached problems with a rigorous scientific objectivity, re-orienting the way of thinking about things by stripping them down to basics. Though his ideas were sometimes too bare-bones—we have him to thank for the unit bath (there’s a 1936 prototype here)—Fuller’s ambitious goal was no less than a total transformation of the world from a dysfunctional, unbalanced, inefficient system to one where abundant wealth and good living were equally shared by all citizens of the planet. 

Fuller’s faith in humanity can seem fanciful. His revolutionary Dymaxion World Map posits the continents as one island in one great sea, “This Spaceship Earth” where all inhabitants are joined together in solving problems and redistributing resources. Bumper sticker wisdom like “think global, act local” (a Fuller coinage) reflects a well-intentioned desire to change the world, but relies on an overreaching altruism counter to a human nature that seems to be inherently selfish. And, fortunately or not, he offered no practical fix for that.

This exhibition was held Feb-May 2002 at Watari-Um Museum of Contemporary Art in Aoyama, Tokyo, Japan.

©2007 John McGee

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