Buckminster Fuller: The Big Thinker

By Richard Lacayo

When I hauled my teenage self up to the 1967 World's Fair in Montreal, what I wanted most to see was the giant geodesic dome--actually more like a huge, transparent sphere--that Buckminster Fuller, the famous advance man for the future, had designed to serve as the U.S. pavilion. Once you got inside, there wasn't much to look at, but that didn't matter. The dome itself was the thing, a smashing image of the U.S. claim on tomorrow.

Now, 41 years on, when that claim is a bubble looking ready to burst, Fuller's reputation has deflated a bit too. Geodesic domes are no longer the rage they were in the '60s, when not only did hippies love them but even the Defense Department owned a string of them to house its early-warning radar network along the Arctic Circle. Bucky, as he was known to everybody, was an authentic American visionary, the kind who could seem at first glance--and not just at first glance--like a bit of a crackpot, something between a panoramic intellect and one of those "outsider" artists who manically fill in every free space of their drawings. There were too many ideas in his teeming brain, most of them system-wide and cosmic in scale. He was unconfined by the real-world considerations that keep you and me from envisioning massive spherical communities that would float from place to place in the sky.

Then again, what are visionaries for if not to launch thought balloons? And 25 years after his death at age 87, there are unmistakable traces of Fuller's thinking in everything from prefab housing to sustainable green architecture. That's more than enough of a legacy to fill "Buckminster Fuller: Starting with the Universe," a show of drawings, models, videos and pipe dreams that runs through Sept. 21 at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City and then reprises next summer in Chicago.

Fuller was the descendant of a distinguished and nonconformist New England family. (His great aunt was the early feminist Margaret Fuller.) He never finished college--he was expelled from Harvard twice--and by the 1920s, he was a failed businessman and, perhaps, a would-be suicide. (On the basis of his journals, some scholars doubt it.) That was when he claims a voice came to him saying he had no right to take his own life, because he had important work to do. "You do not belong to you," said the voice. "You belong to Universe." That's Universe--no the. Universe prefers to drop the the.

In his life thereafter, one of Fuller's abiding preoccupations was how to mass-produce housing the way Ford made cars. He came up with the fully portable Dymaxion House, a metal dwelling suspended by cables from a central mast that held all the plumbing and wiring. He also produced a three-wheel Dymaxion Vehicle--the Whitney has borrowed the last surviving one--and even a Dymaxion Bathroom, which could be manufactured and shipped as a single modular unit. None of those worked out as manufacturing ideas in his lifetime, but they left behind proposals, plausible ones, for the future to work out for itself. What Bucky's career reminds us is that sometimes even bubbles can put down roots.

Steady Art Beat Richard Lacayo blogs daily about art and architecture at time.com/lookingaround