Bucky’s Very Large Dome

A catalog of his inventions doesn't do justice, though, to the free-ranging ideas that scratched around inside Fuller's own dome. He reinvented the world map to correct the Mercator version that distorts the land masses toward each pole; he dreamed up fantastical structures that floated in the sky, which he called "Cloud Nine"; he proposed a clear dome over Manhattan; a tetrahedron suburb in San Francisco Bay, and he patented a scheme for an underwater city. But his overarching project was his own life and mind—which, like Leonardo da Vinci and Thomas Edison before him, he recorded in staggeringly fine detail. His "Chronofile"—scrapbooks of letters, ideas, sketches, projects, clippings—had grown, by his death, to 270 linear feet. (The archives of everything he saved—and he was a packrat extraordinaire—are at Stanford University, still being explored by scholars.) He published many books, including "I Am a Verb," and had a vast circle of friends, such as Isamu Noguchi, Alexander Calder, John Cage, John Huston and John Denver. And he reveled in his celebrity and demand as a speaker, which kept him on the road, all over the world, until days before his death at 87.

What to make of the enormity and complexity of the Buckminster Fuller enterprise isn't easy. The Whitney show dips a toe into very deep and swirly waters. Fuller's work, the catalog points out, was often exhibited in art galleries in the 1960s, and he inspired artists then and now. (One is the Danish-Icelandic conceptual artist Olafur Eliasson, whose projects, using mathematics, expand on natural wonders.) In 1967, when a 20-story geodesic dome was chosen to be the U.S. Pavilion at the Montreal Expo, Jasper Johns proposed a painting for the interior based on Fuller's Dymaxion map. (Johns reworked the painting extensively a few years later, and after it sold for a considerable price, Fuller said he was miffed not to have shared in the proceeds.) Most architects, however, didn't rush to claim Fuller as one of their own ("You can't put a door in a dome," sniffed Philip Johnson). But he appears to have affected the work of Louis Kahn—think of those tetrahedral shapes in the concrete ceiling of the Yale Art Gallery—and was a mentor to Norman Foster. Today Fuller seems to be touted once again by younger architects, maybe because he championed the kind of interdisciplinary collaboration and experimentation that's emerging from contemporary studios, thanks to the computer.

In fact, if it's hard to plot straight lines of Fuller's influence, it's easier to see his long shadow across our exploding and diverse world of digital information and virtual reality. Fuller, like his contemporary Marshall McLuhan, was a futurist who believed technology held the key to social transformation—that people could be united in vast networks of information. In his fascinating study, "From Counterculture to Cyberculture," Fred Turner argues that the West Coast '60s scene—particularly Brand's Whole Earth project—helped feed the digital revolution, an unlikely merger of back-to-nature hippies and the cyberpioneers.

Fuller was full of contradictions himself. Despite his global outlook and ideas, points out K. Michael Hays, the co-curator with Dana Miller of the Whitney show, he remained quintessentially American, an Emersonian with a powerful belief in the individual. He could be almost perversely rational. He insisted children be taught that there's no such thing as a sunrise or a sunset because it's Spaceship Earth that turns, not the sun. Or he could just be perverse. He told Calvin Tomkins in a 1966 New Yorker article that eons before, he'd been a Maori sailor adrift in the Pacific without the tools of celestial navigation.

Yet what captures our collective imagination most about Fuller may be just how vast his imagination could be. The limitlessness of his thinking can sometimes strike you as kind of arrogant or even nutty, but it's inspiring nonetheless. And his central message, if you can boil it all down, still hits home. "We are on a spaceship, a beautiful one," he wrote. "It took billions of years to develop. We're not going to get another. Now, how do we make this spaceship work?" Earth to Bucky: we're still trying to figure that out.

© 2008