ArtBistro

News >> Browse Articles >> Design

News >> Browse Articles >> Fine Art

News >> Browse Articles >> Interior Design

Buckminster Fuller: Starting with the Universe

Featured Author:

John Haber

John is an arts writer and textbook editor living in New York City. A native New Yorker, he studied physics at Princeton and started writing about art in 1994. His own website now has articles on more than 700 artists and critics, from the early Renaissance to contemporary art. His interests include art and science, art and politics, old and new media, and the future of art. haberarts.com

More articles from this author:

• Action/Abstraction: Pollock, de Kooning, & American Art
• Jed Perl's Hallelujah
• Graphic or Novel? ©MURAKAMI and Others

In 1985, chemists finally detected fullerenes, carbon molecules shaped like soccer balls. R. Buckminster Fuller would have taken more credit, but he had died two years before.

Fullerenes come in many forms, but even the simplest, dubbed buckminsterfullerene, contains sixty carbon atoms. They embody Fuller’s ideal structure, the union of the tetrahedron and the sphere, and it gives them the stability that he valued and predicted. They do undergo chemical reactions, but they have as yet no obvious application. They occur naturally but sparingly in soot, and to this day no one knows for certain their toxicity. The discovers won a Nobel prize in 1996. Fuller, or course, did not. Buckminster Fuller’s U.S. Pavilion, Montreal Expo 67 (Estate of the artist, 1967)

Buckyballs have come to stand for his vision, but they might also stand for ups and downs of a fertile but and troubled career. The Whitney calls its retrospective “Starting with the Universe,” and like Fuller himself it challenges one to separate fact from fiction. He could play scientist, designer, architect, engineer, sociologist, environmentalist, or blusterer. Born in 1895, he could be far ahead of his time or off in his own world. On film, he appears as a cross between a college professor and a snake-oil salesman. The combination may make him—a descendant of Margaret Fuller, the American transcendentalist who coupled feminism with a belief in divine energy—a prototype for Modernism in America.

“Best of Friends,” an exhibition not long ago at the Noguchi Garden Museum already surveyed Fuller’s life and ideas, and I try not to repeat the same story. I invite you to consider this as the second part of a two-part overview.

Fuller brush man

At the Whitney one can hardly keep straight what came to exist, what lives on in the imagination, and what merely fell by the wayside. Fuller’s structures might save humankind or force it into a mold. They could blend art and science or muddle the two. could span unprecedented distances—and, in the architect’s mind, Einstein’s four dimensions of spacetime—but the roof could leak.

By 1927, he envisioned 4D Lightful Towers with a complex, tapering geometry, and he promoted them for decades. (Promotion for Fuller always starts with a brand name—4D as spacetime, light as lightweight engineering structures, and lightful as filled with light, but also dee-lightful.) No one took him up on them. Renamed the Dymaxion Houses, they morphed by the 1940s into smaller, bell-shaped dwellings on pedestals. He meant them as units for garden communities that never came to pass. He imagined them floating high above, indistinguishable from clouds.

He imagined them floating in the East River just off the United Nations, to remind the global community of the needs of spaceship Earth. He imagined his own map of the planet as a further reminder. He considered it an improvement on the Mercator projection, because it displayed the globe in two dimensions without breaking up the outline of the continents.

His housing promised laundry machines that accept clothes one at a time. They were to come out “washed, dried, and completely sterilized in three minutes.” The formulas sounds as if it applies to the inhabitants, too. Yet the houses also have a human side, symbolized by their organic shape, like, huge jellyfish. By recycling existing grain sheds and airplane materials, they look ahead to environmentally friendly architecture today, such as the “container home kits” from the firm Lot-Ek.

Separate, free-standing Dymaxion bathrooms found no takers either, but then New York is still finding a place for public toilets. They have a spooky resemblance to self-contained Living Units today by Andrea Zittel and her “A-Z Administrative Services.” Strangest of all, people are commissioning her work as homes. Fuller would have told her to adopt an efficient geometry.