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.