Isamu Noguchi (1904–1988) R. Buckminster Fuller. Buckminster Fuller, 1929. Chrome-plated bronze , 13 x 8 x 10 in. (33 x 20.3 x 25.4 cm) Alexandra and Samuel May © 2007 The Isamu Noguchi Foundation and Garden Museum, New York/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York, photograph by F. S. Lincoln

NEW YORK.- This summer, the Whitney Museum of American Art is presenting Buckminster Fuller: Starting with the Universe, the first major American exhibition in decades devoted to the visionary mind and work of Buckminster Fuller, and the most inclusive show to date of Fuller’s work. On view from June 26 to September 21, 2008, the show is co-curated by Michael Hays, Adjunct Curator of Architecture, and Dana Miller, Associate Curator at the Whitney; the curators are working in association with the Department of Special Collections of the Stanford University Libraries and with the cooperation of the Fuller family. The exhibition travels to the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, in the summer of 2009.

R. Buckminster Fuller (1895-1983) was one of the great American creative thinkers of the 20th century. Philosopher, forecaster, designer, poet, inventor, and advocate of alternative energy, Fuller is probably best known as the originator of the geodesic dome, but his theories and innovations engaged fields ranging from mathematics, engineering, and environmental science to literature, architecture, and visual art. Fuller was one of the great transdisciplinary thinkers and made no distinction between these spheres as discrete areas of investigation. He devoted much of his life to closing the gap between the sciences and the humanities, a schism he felt prevented a comprehensive view of the world. He believed in the significant interconnectedness of all things and concluded that certain basic structures and systems underlie everything in our world. Today his prophetic concepts are a touchstone for discussions of issues including environmental conservation, the manufacture and distribution of housing, and global organization of information.

As curators Hays and Miller write in their catalogue introduction, “Fuller sought to produce comprehensive anticipatory design solutions that would benefit the largest segment of humanity while consuming the fewest resources…Starting as he did from the universe and ending up with visual-spatial models with which to ponder universal philosophical problems in the here and now, it is not surprising that Fuller has had a tremendous impact on the visual arts and architecture. His sensibilities and modes of working were deeply aesthetic and many of his closest friends and supporters were artists. Today, his lessons take on an even greater relevance. Fuller’s concepts are ripe for reexamination by artists, architects, designers, scientists, and poets…The exhibition and catalogue also are intended for an entire generation who know little or nothing about Fuller but share his curiosity about nature’s structures or his sense of urgency about economies, ecologies, and their interactions.”

This exhibition offers an opportunity to study the pioneering thinking of an intensely passionate, prolific, and idiosyncratic individual. It includes original examples of Fuller’s important works from both private and public collections, among them the sole extant Dymaxion car; models of the Wichita House; the Tetrascroll portfolio; several geodesic study models; as well as numerous sketches, notebooks, and other artifacts. Many of the artifacts and documents in the show are held in the R. Buckminster Fuller Archive at the Stanford University Libraries.

Richard Buckminster Fuller Jr. was born on July 12, 1895, in Milton, Massachusetts, to an old New England family. His great-aunt was the transcendentalist feminist writer Margaret Fuller, co-founder, with Ralph Waldo Emerson, of the magazine The Dial. Spending summers on Bear Island, off the coast of Maine, Fuller showed an early propensity for design and invention. At a young age, he experimented with designing a new apparatus for human propulsion of small boats. He attended Milton Academy, in Massachusetts, and entered Harvard in 1913, but was expelled, returned to the university the following year, and left again, without ever graduating.

Between periods at Harvard, he was sent to Canada by his family to work as a mechanic in a cousin’s textile mill, and later as a laborer in the meat-packing industry. He married Anne Hewlett in 1917. Fuller served in the U.S. Naval Reserves and the U.S. Navy in World War I as a shipboard radio operator, an editor for a Navy publication, and a crash-boat commander. After discharge, he again worked in meat-packing, where he acquired management experience. In the early 1920s he and his father-in-law developed the Stockade Building System for producing lightweight, weatherproof, and fireproof housing.

In 1922, Fuller lost his first child, Alexandra, shortly before her fourth birthday, to complications from polio and spinal meningitis. A few years later, he was ousted as president of the Stockade Midwest Corporation by new owners and took a job as a flooring salesman. In 1927, jobless and destitute, Fuller considered taking his own life, but later said that he decided at the last moment to embark instead on "an experiment, to find what a single individual can contribute to changing the world and benefiting all humanity."

During the 1930s and 40s, Fuller designed his Dymaxion cars and houses, joined Fortune magazine’s editorial staff as a technical consultant, participated in museum exhibitions, and developed friendships with a number of artists, including Isamu Noguchi. He collaborated with the copper company Phelps Dodge Corporation on prototypes of the Dymaxion Bathroom, an easily installed, lightweight, four-part unit Fuller envisioned incorporating into Dymaxion Houses. In 1939, his Dymaxion House model and Dymaxion Bathroom were included in Art in Our Time, an exhibition celebrating the opening of the new building of The Museum of Modern Art, New York.

Fuller’s exposure to artists increased considerably when he took a teaching position at Black Mountain College in North Carolina, where he taught for two summers, in 1948 and 1949, encountering Josef and Anni Albers, Ruth Asawa, John Cage, Merce Cunningham, Willem and Elaine de Kooning, Richard Lippold, and Kenneth Snelson. The first summer, Fuller played the lead in Erik Satie’s play The Ruse of Medusa, organized by Cage and directed by Arthur Penn; it featured Cunningham and Elaine de Kooning, and employed props and sets by Ruth Asawa and the de Koonings. It was there, at Black Mountain College, with the support of a group of professors and students, that Fuller began work on the project that would make him famous, the geodesic dome. In 1949, he erected the world’s first geodesic dome building that could sustain its own weight with no practical limits. The U.S. government recognized the importance of the discovery and employed him to make small domes for the army. Within a few years, there were thousands of domes around the world.

The growing recognition that Fuller enjoyed in the 1950s reached a crescendo in the mid-1960s. Throughout this period and for the rest of his life, he contributed a wide range of ideas, designs, and inventions to the world, particularly in the areas of practical, inexpensive shelter and transportation. Fuller wrote several books in short succession and was the subject of extensive press coverage, including a 1964 Time cover story and a profile by Calvin Tomkins in The New Yorker, in 1966. He taught and lectured at hundreds of universities, contributed writings to numerous publications and had his work exhibited at museums and galleries throughout the world. He was awarded 28 U.S. patents and many honorary doctorates and received the Medal of Freedom, as well as the Gold Medal award
from the American Institute of Architects, among numerous other awards. Fuller died on July 1, 1983, at the age of 87.

U.S. Pavilion Montreal Expo 67. Buckminster Fuller, 1967. Image courtesy the Estate of R. Buckminster Fuller