FULLER, R(ICHARD) BUCKMINSTER, (JR.) 1895-1983

ENGINEER, AUTHOR, AND INVENTOR OF THE GEODESIC DOME

Man of Many Talents

"Bucky" Fuller was an inventor, engineer, architect, mathematician, cartographer, philosopher, scientist, environmentalist, poet, author, and educator who, because of his wide range of interests and abilities, has been compared with Leonardo da Vinci. He is most famous for his creation of geodesic domes—structures of honeycombed triangles encompassing maximum space and strength with minimal materials. Since their invention in 1947 geodesic domes have been used in thousands of structures throughout the world.

Early Handicaps

Fuller had impaired vision as a child, and he was fitted for his first eyeglasses at the age of four. "I was filled with wonder at the beauty of the world and I have never lost my delight in it," Fuller told one of his biographers. In kindergarten he built his first tetrahedronal octet truss (three squares combined into eight triangles) out of toothpicks and dried peas. Many years later this construct became a key element of his geodesic domes.

Post-Harvard

Fuller was expelled twice from Harvard—once for "irresponsible conduct" after a spree in New York City, a second time for "lack of sustained interest in the process within the university." The second expulsion ended his formal education. He worked at a variety of jobs for more than a dozen years before he began patenting the first of his two thousand inventions. Believing that all human needs could be met through technology and planning, Fuller worked for several years on the mathematics of the science of geodesies. He constructed his first sizable geodesic dome in 1948 with the help of students at Black Mountain College in North Carolina. In 1953 Fuller designed a ninety-three-foot cover for the Dearborn plant rotunda of the Ford Motor Company. Thereafter his geodesic domes began to gain general acceptance. He created the famous American domed pavilion for the Montreal World's Fair in 1967. He designed plastic and fiberglass geodesic enclosures used for military radar installations and a two-hundred-foot golden dome in Moscow that became the site of Soviet premier Nikita S. Khrushchev's much publicized "kitchen debate" with American vice-president Richard Nixon. Khrushchev later remarked: "I would like to have Mr. J. Buckingham [sic] Fuller come to Russia and teach our engineers."

Uniquely American Contribution

By the early 1960s Fuller's geodesic dome was generally recognized as a uniquely American contribution to architecture. During the late 1960s Fuller became a hero of the counterculture with his books and his World Game—a computerized interplay of world resources and world strategies. But he will always be known for the geodesic dome. According to Time magazine in 1964: [the dome is] "a kind of benchmark of the universe, what seventeenth-century mystic Jakob Boehme might call 'a signature of God.'"