Buckminster Fuller Born 131 Years Ago on July 12

Article excerpt

Buckminster Fuller, born July 12, 1894, spent his life turning structural geometry into a philosophy. He is best remembered for the geodesic dome, a design he used most visibly in the Montreal Biosphere, but that building was only the most photographed expression of a much larger project: Fuller believed that doing more with less could solve the world's resource problems before they became catastrophes. Over his lifetime he published 30 books, coined words that have since drifted into common usage, and accumulated honors across architecture, engineering, and design. He called himself a "comprehensivist" at a time when specialization was the reigning professional ideal, which either made him a crank or a visionary depending on who you asked. History has mostly settled on visionary. Fuller's geodesic dome principle, distributing structural stress evenly across a sphere-like lattice, remains one of the most efficient load-bearing forms ever designed and shows up today in everything from sports arenas to molecular biology, where the carbon structure C60 was named Buckminsterfullerene in his honor. He died in 1983, but the dome he built for the 1967 World Exposition in Montreal still stands on an island in the St. Lawrence River.