Like many people, I've long had a vague, amorphous idea of who Buckminster Fuller was. He was the guy who designed futuristic landscapes in that modish, Jetsonian sensibility. He lived in the mid-twentieth century, and his buildings resembled flying saucers; his cities looked like vast interplanetary hubs. He was an ambassador to a future more stylish than the present.
Buckminster Fuller
The reason many people think of Fuller as the godfather of utopian, starry-eyed optimism is that he wanted them to, as a new exhibit at the Whitney Museum of Art suggests. As a scientist worried about our civilization's rapid consumption of resources, Fuller knew that for his conservation-minded designs to catch on, he'd have to convince huge numbers of people to radically change their lifestyles.
promotion
Fuller believed the way to achieve this goal was to make conservation stylish — not in the trendy sense, but literally stylish: make environmentally friendly buildings, homes and cars look awesome, and people would embrace them. He arrived at this idea as early as 1920, a good fifty years before the modern environmental movement took hold.
This belief produced two outcomes. One is that Fuller is often thought of as more stylish than substantial. His most famous portrait, a Time magazine cover, portrays him as a trippy pop-culture icon, not a preeminent scientist. The Walt Disney corporation's decision to build a theme park around his most famous design didn't help sober his image up, either.
Fuller envisioned airborne spheres that would hover above the earth and hold several thousand "passengers." (Buckminster Fuller and Shoji Sadao Project for Floating Cloud Structures (Cloud Nine), ca. 1960 Black-and-white photograph mounted on board 15 7/8 x 19 3/4 in. (40.3 x 50.2 cm) Department of Special Collections, Stanford University Libraries Image courtesy the Estate of R. Buckminster Fuller.)
But Fuller's belief in stylishness produced something enduringly valuable: a trove of incredible schematics, prototypes and drawings, most of which never became a part of our culture, but all of which still inspire and awe. Fuller's greatest contribution to the environmental movement wasn't his structures themselves, which weren't built on a wide scale, but his inspirational designs, many of which are on display at the Whitney.
You have to believe he knew some of these designs would never actually get built — enclosing midtown Manhattan in a protective bubble, for instance. But he knew they'd grab attention for his cause. He called himself not a scientist, but a "comprehensive anticipatory design scientist." He coined the phrase "Spaceship Earth" to try to make people see our planet as a groovy interstellar vehicle that needed care and maintenance, just like a trendy car. His language and drawings were meant to connect with people's desire for fashion. For Fuller, being hip was a means to an end.
