For instance, Fuller believed that entrusting housing to architects would simply encourage superficial stylistic changes to dormers and window frames rather than inspiring a reconceptualization of shelter for the entire planet. His farsighted approach was to consider everything from the distribution of continents to the tensile strength of alloys. As in kindergarten, he would make no assumptions, leaving himself open to all options, searching for the underlying patterns connecting seemingly discrete problems. Providing a good home for all meant making better use of the entire planet through greater mobility. For that reason, Fuller’s architecture was never geographically fixed, having more in common with the ships he sailed in World War I than the skyscrapers raised by the Bauhaus. (Even the term "geodesic" is navigational in origin.) As a child of the Einsteinian universe, where all is in flux and everything is interrelated, he liked to say that "form is a verb."
 
Buckminster Fuller’s first big idea was the Dymaxion house. ("Dymaxion" combined three of his favorite terms—dynamic, maximum and tension—becoming sort of a universal handle for everything he conceived, an intellectual trademark.) The house was conveniently designed to be delivered anywhere in the world by dirigible: A central mast would be dropped from the sky, and then circular housing units would be suspended on cables. Homes could rotate with the sun, and be moved to another mast elsewhere by simple airlift, since all the utilities would be contained inside the central mast. A model was shown at Marshall Fields department store and written up as a "weekend home" in the Architectural Record, but few people were prepared to live with Fuller’s ultra-efficient "fog gun" bathing unit, let alone his "packaging toilet."
 
For all their apparent differences, the geodesic dome evolved from the Dymaxion house. Light enough to be transported by helicopter, simple enough to be assembled in a single day by untrained hands, and durable enough to withstand climates from the Arctic to the Sahara, it balanced mobility and stability, at a staggeringly low cost. That seemingly miraculous combination was made possible, as in the case of the Dymaxion house, by the astounding tensile strength of modern materials, much greater than the compressive strength of bricks or concrete upon which conventional architecture rested. Fuller’s tetrahedrons let him exploit this strength, leading him to believe that he’d found "nature’s own structural coordinate system," as he phrased it, or a "benchmark of the universe," as Time wrote. In other words, Fuller’s comprehensive anticipatory design science strove to correlate the broadest patterns, with the idea of bringing humanity and cosmos into alignment.

Fuller’s utopia, which at various times entailed enclosing Manhattan under a climate-controlled dome and moving people up into the clouds, remains essentially an imaginary place. And it’s within that purely speculative realm that his Dymaxion world operates as art, unique in the 20th century for its comprehensiveness: a dream of universal purpose in a world increasingly degraded by divisive irony.
 
"I am convinced of the utter integrity of total experience," Fuller once wrote, encapsulating his own accomplishment and seemingly foreshadowing the immersive environments of artists such as Olafur Eliasson. Yet, for all the intensity of Eliasson’s installations—for example, his whimsical bridges that tunnel in colorful light through polarized glass—the experience is no more comprehensive than the exhibition space, nor does it anticipate much more than the next art review. Fuller saw artists as the most liberated people in society; because they didn’t belong to "slave professions" such as science or engineering, they could act wholly on their own initiative. What the visionary failed to predict was the conformity demanded by globally networked curators, and the commodification encouraged by an overactive marketplace, let alone the apotheosis of self-perpetuating MFA programs. The confluence of these influences has transformed art, like science, into a closed discipline.

"Artists have the integrity of childhood," he claimed, believing children to be born geniuses. Fuller had it backward. Children have the integrity of true artists—and R. Buckminster Fuller, from kindergarten to age 87, remained a perfect child.
 
Jonathon Keats is the art critic for San Francisco Magazine and a conceptual artist.