Spaceship Earth

U.S. Pavilion at the 1967 International

and Universal Exposition, Montreal

Buckminster Fuller: Starting With the Universe
Whitney Museum
June 26 - Sept. 21

One of Buckminster Fuller's first geodesic domes was made of strips from venetian blind. Assembled at Black Mountain College in the summer of 1948 in the company John Cage, Merce Cunningham and Willem de Kooning, it was a flop. They called the Supine Dome. It wasn’t neither Fuller’s first setback, nor his last.

"Buckminster Fuller: Starting with the Universe" at the Whitney presents fifty years of his idiosyncratic designs and ideas for everything from housing to transportation, cartography and globalism. At the same time, it’s a portrait of a single-minded individual who persevered numerous bumps in the road to become an avatar of holistic thinking and hope for humanity.

The visitor is presented with an enticing array of objects – drawings, models, photographs, films and, yes, even sections of that infamous venetian blind. But the lasting impression is the mythic story of the man himself.

Despite five generations of Harvard graduates in his family, Bucky Fuller was kicked out – twice. He lost his first-born daughter to meningitis and pneumonia. Then he was fired from his job in his father-in-law's building supply company. After contemplating suicide in 1927, he had a revelation that his life was not his own, but belonged to the universe. Thereafter, he set out to reinvent housing, and in turn, the world.

In his early sketches from the late 20s, we see he took a global view. The whole planet is the stage for his 4D Tower, a lightweight prefab stackable units arranged around a centralized tower. Each would have an airport at its base, connecting it to similar towers around the world. Construction made use of a zeppelin that would drop a bomb, making a crater for the tower's foundation. Interlaced with these ideas are mystical formulations about the time and the meaning of various colors, giving the whiff of science fiction or outsider art.

These early visions evolved into a practical single-family dwelling, the hexagonal 4D House, soon known as the Dymaxion House. A conflation of dynamic, maximum and ion, the new name was conceived by Chicago’s Marshall Field’s department store where Fuller’s design was briefly exhibited. The aluminum house was to have all the conveniences. In a 1929 promotional film, Fuller discusses how "air breathers" in the structure’s central mast will create such a comfortable interior climate that bed clothes and blankets are unnecessary.

Fuller had a unique way of proposing very sensible ideas that were simultaneously very outlandish.

Next up was the Dymaxion Vehicle. With the help of his drinking buddy Isamo Noguchi and a yacht designer named Starling Burgess, Fuller designed the streamlined 11-passenger three-wheeled vehicle. It was originally intended to float and fly, but the first prototype did well on the road — despite having no rear window (you were supposed to use a periscope). But it crashed on its way to the 1933 Chicago Century of Progress Expo, killing the driver, and essentially killing the project. The one remaining car — actually only a non-working shell — is on display in the Whitney's first floor gallery.

Noguchi fans will be happy to see his sleek chrome-plated bust of Fuller on display. Fuller was taken with silver, designing an all silver studio for Noguchi (two decades ahead of Warhol's Silver Factory). He also did a silver redo of Romany Tavern, where Fuller and Noguchi met, and a favorite drinking spot of everyone from E.E. Cummings to Marcel Duchamp (his design wasn't well received) . It’s also possible to see Fuller's telegram to Noguchi explaining Einstein's theory of relativity; Noguchi was in Mexico working on a mural, and shacking up with Frida Kahlo.

The failed Dymaxion Vehicle was followed by the failed Dymaxion Bathroom of 1936, a prefab piece made in partnership with a copper company. Somewhat more successful was his 1941 Dymaxion Deployment Unit, or DDU, which transformed metal grain bins into basic homes and would be used by the military during World War II. Then, correctly anticipating a post-war housing shortage, he collaborated with the Beech Aircraft in Wichita, Kansas to develop the Dymaxion Dwelling Machine, also known as the Wichita House. Despite looking like a giant aluminum hamburger or UFO, tens of thousands of orders came in before Fuller got cold feet and pulled the plug in 1946.

While commercial success remained elusive, he managed to get the attention of the art world. In 1939, the newly opened Museum of Modern Art exhibited the Dymaxion Bathroom along with a model of the Dymaxion. Two years later, two connected DDUs were erected in MoMA's garden, followed by a show at the Cleveland Museum.

Around this time, Fuller began to search for a new geometry, having decided that Euclid’s right angles were unnatural because the planet was round. His solution was the tetrahedron, a three-dimensional figure with four equilateral triangles. He first used this geometry to create a new projection of the world map. The Dymaxion Air-Ocean World Map, as it was called, was published as a pull-out page in a 1943 edition of Life magazine. While it dispensed with compass-point orientation, the map’s advantages were minimal distortion and, in one version, the appearance of single, linked continent, or as Fuller put it, "a one-world island in a one-world ocean."

These experiments, including the ventian blind flop at Black Mountain College, led him to the geodesic dome, which he first successfully erected in 1950. His breakthrough happened two years later, when he was commissioned by Ford to design a dome in Detroit. In 1961, Harvard gave him, oddly enough, an honorary poetry chair at Harvard. In 1964, he was profiled in Time Magazine cover story. In 1965, he was invited to design a dome for the 1967 Montreal Expo, which drew 13 million visitors.

Fuller's star was ascendant and he was invited to lecture around the world. His dome was exhibited everywhere from Casablanca to Kabul. He authored seven books in the 60s alone, including "Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth" (1963). In the late 60s, Fuller was embraced as a countercultural icon. The exhibition makes it possible to watch footage of a 40-minute lecture to a hippie gathering at Golden Gate Park. Tens of thousands of geodesic domes were erected, with more than a few leaky examples surviving today.

During this period, Fuller continued his explorations into geometry, eventually publishing a mamoth and basically unreadable text on his theories called Synergistics. He also pursued ideas related to re-conceptualizing the globe and its resources. In 1956, he developed Minni Earth, a big floating globe with interior lights that would represent the world’s resources. His intention was to moor it in the East River in sight of the United Nations. He also published reports on the global outlook, including the World Energy Map in the 50s, and the World Game Report, in the 60s.

Fuller also returned to bigger, more ambitious designs that, along with his 4D Tower of the 20s, might today be regarded as 60-style visionary architecture in the vein of Archigram or Superstudio. One was a proposal for a dome over a 50-block section of Manhattan (for climate control purposes); another, a 200-story, one million inhabitant pyramid-shaped mega-apartment; and best of all, spherical floating cities that were supposed to float because the air inside was warmer than the air outside.

A visitor might wonder why Bucky? Why now? Is it 60s nostalgia, a reprise to last year’s "Summer of Love" show? Or perhaps, it's that in this age of Peak Oil and Global Warming, we yearn for someone with unflinching optimism, even if it's a lovable dreamer like Bucky and his leaky domes. Or maybe it's because his aesthetic still matters, influencing contemporary artists like Olafur Eliasson, Sarah Sze and Andrea Zittel.