I’ve used an illustration-portrait of Buckminster Fuller on the cover of the Investigative Study handbook, so I thought that I should tell you why. Fuller is the American architect and ‘design-scientist’ who designed the Geodesic Dome – the most efficient and economical way of enclosing maximum amount of space for minimum amount of materials in any rigid architectural form.
This is the dome he designed to house the US pavilion at Expo67 in Montreal, 1967.
Bucky Fuller was a kind of hero to my generation of art, architecture and design students – mainly because one of his main aims was that designers should do MORE with LESS – a very good approach in an era when we are rapidly using-up all the world’s natural resources. He also believed that everyone on Earth should enjoy the BARE MAXIMUM living standards. He believed that we should design ourselves better ways of dealing with all the problems that we face. We said that we are all CREW of SPACESHIP EARTH, travelling through the universe at hundreds of thousands of kilometres per hour. And that is was incumbent on us to LOOK AFTER our spaceship – its the only one we’ve got. For these and a number of other reasons (he was a great speaker, and wrote some brilliant books – and he wrote poems and was a sailor too) I really admired his work. He died in 1983, and this year at the Whitney Museum in New York, they are holding a major retrospective of his work http://www.whitney.org/www/buckminster_fuller/about.jsp
I saw this show in August, and it will do much to renew interest in a man whose life and work are extremely relevant to our current issues and problems. Check him out.
