Critic's Notebook: Cosmic Conceptualist

May 2008

As a kindergartner, R. Buckminster Fuller was so farsighted that he invented a new kind of architecture. His teacher had given the class peas and toothpicks to build toy houses. With his uncorrected eyesight, Fuller wasn’t quite sure what a dwelling should look like. He didn’t ask. Using his fingers to feel out a stable structure, he discovered the tendency of cubes to collapse, and found the ideal architectural form in the tetrahedron.
 
Nearly six decades later, in 1958, the world’s largest clear-span structure—23 times bigger than the cupola over St. Peter’s Basilica—loomed over the Union Tank Car Company in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Derived from the tetrahedron (though incorporating neither peas nor toothpicks), it was a steel-skinned geodesic dome designed and built by R. Buckminster Fuller.
 
The geodesic dome, for which Fuller (1895–1983) was awarded U.S. Patent No. 2,682,235, made him famous enough that his own head was caricatured as one on the January 10, 1964, cover of Time. By then he’d raised domes in Bangkok and Tokyo, Casablanca and Warsaw, Kabul and Moscow. In the Soviet capital they were admired by Nikita Khrushchev, who wished that Fuller would teach his engineers a thing or two. Yet, for all the intrinsic strength and beauty of his domes, the secret of geodesics wasn’t the only lesson learned by Fuller in kindergarten, nor was it the most important. What he’d discovered was that all problems could be addressed by probing the basic order of nature, extracting relevant patterns from the cosmos. Or, as Fuller himself put it, "I started out with the universe."
 
"Starting With the Universe" is the title of a major Buckminster Fuller retrospective opening at the Whitney Museum of American Art on June 26. The first exhaustive survey of Fuller’s 87-year-long life, the Whitney exhibition and its accompanying catalogue pose Fuller not only as an engineer and architect but also as an artist whose work has directly influenced everyone from Isamu Noguchi to Olafur Eliasson. "Since his death the number of those who call him an artist has dramatically increased," writes co-curator Dana Miller, adding her own voice to the chorus.

While Fuller declined to call himself an artist, believing that the term could only be bestowed by others, his polymathic activities led people even in his own day to add that accolade to countless others—including philosopher, scientist, poet and prophet—and to consider art one of his many simultaneous careers. He was an instructor at Black Mountain College at the invitation of Josef Albers, and his geometric structures were exhibited in museums and galleries beside sculpture by Tony Smith. Though Smith denied any aesthetic relationship to Fuller, Fuller acknowledged a connection between his geodesic structures and sculpture. "I never work with aesthetic considerations in mind," he explained to Calvin Tomkins in a New Yorker profile. "But I have a test: If something isn’t beautiful when I get finished with it, it’s no good." Believing the underlying patterns of nature to be beautiful, he knew that his discoveries had to be, as well.
 
In other words, Fuller was never a stranger to art. However, the Whitney retrospective encourages us to consider more than these glancing resonances, to view Fuller’s work as a whole, from his three-wheeled cars of the ’30s to his plans for floating tetrahedral cities in the ’60s. With the exception of the domes (actually independently invented by Walter Bauersfeld, three decades before Fuller received his 1954 patent, as a specialized structure to enclose the Zeiss Planetarium in Jena, Germany) few of Fuller’s ideas ever entered the mainstream as technology. His practical legacy is negligible. As time passes, his role as an artist comes to subsume all the others—and his overriding artistic vision looks stronger and stronger.

Fuller did have a preferred title for his myriad activities, which also included writing a shelf of books and lecturing to packed auditoriums for six hours at a stretch. He called himself a "comprehensive anticipatory design scientist," by which he meant many things, elucidated at great length in those books and lectures, but which ultimately entailed seeking universal solutions to universal problems. For Fuller—who taught himself pretty much everything he knew after twice being expelled from Harvard, and who possessed more knowledge than a conclave of Harvard professors—traditional distinctions between different fields didn’t exist, or at least couldn’t be allowed to persist if humanity was to endure.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.