Universe's pragmatic optimist

Make no mistake about it, Bucky Fuller was an optimist. His optimism stemmed from the fact that he knew that the options exist for supporting all of humanity at a higher standard of living than ever before achieved without compromising the Earth's ecological integrity. He realized that the existence of options -- even those that are desirable -- does not guarantee their adoption.

Nature is extremely resourceful, and Spaceship Earth resource-full. The current crop of crises that humanity faces are the result of poor choices that have been made with regard to the distribution and use of our planetary wealth. Bucky sought to demonstrate how thoughtful, comprehensive anticipatory design could optimize the use of Earth's abundant yet finite resources to achieve a sustainable society.

Referring to Bucky as an idealist, feels inappropriate. I always thought of him as a pragmatic optimist. (GW)

Fixing Earth One Dome at a Time

By Nicolai Ouroussoff
New York Times
July 4, 2008

Cold war culture has been back in style for a while now, at least in architecture circles. The clarity of its Manichaean worldview, in which everyone seemed to know who the bad guys were, is a comforting refuge from our current ideological confusion. And the era’s brooding architectural monuments look pretty good compared with the Disney-inspired visual noise that has invaded so many American cities.

So “Buckminster Fuller: Starting With the Universe,” a timely new exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art, is likely to stir waves of nostalgia. For people of my generation, who spent much of their childhoods clambering over jungle gyms inspired by Fuller’s geodesic domes, his architecture embodies the values of an era when it was still possible to believe that society was gliding steadily toward a better future. If parents sometimes drank too much, got divorced and neglected their children, these were only potholes on the superhighway to utopia.

But Fuller, of course, was more than that. His deep conviction was that environmentally sensitive, technologically innovative design could save the world. One of this show’s strengths is that it allows us to recognize how that vision was shaped by cold war militarism as well as personal idealism. It offers a poignant contrast to the ethos of our era, when the technology of war borders on a science-fiction fantasy, yet we no longer seem able to put it to other, constructive uses.

A descendant of outspoken New England intellectuals and ministers, Fuller was a quintessential American mix of hard-bitten pragmatism and dewy-eyed optimism. His mind was first opened to the potential of America’s technological might during the First World War, when he served as a radio operator, and he never lost faith that wartime technology could be retooled to create a peacetime nirvana.

The Whitney show opens with a series of sweet little sketches from Fuller’s “4D Lightful Towers” of the late 1920s, his earliest vision for a housing prototype. A series of lightweight structures, with floors supported by slender masts, were staffed by airplane maintenance crews and could be transported around the world by zeppelins, an expression of global mobility easily embraced today.

Within a few years that vision had evolved into the Dymaxion House, one of his most mesmerizing creations. A six-sided shelter suspended from a central steel mast, it was in some ways less radical than that earlier design. Depicted here in a gorgeously moody painting by his wife, Anne Hewlett Fuller, it is a futuristic vision of suburbia: a one-story suburban dwelling floating above a trim yard, with a woman reclining on a lawn chair in the foreground. The rooms are arranged around the mast, which houses the entry staircase and all the house’s mechanical systems. (One failure of the show’s catalog is that it never fully explains Mrs. Fuller’s role in her husband’s work; despite her drawings and paintings she remains a largely invisible figure.)

Yet the Dymaxion House’s most radical feature was its nomadic quality. Its efficient assembly mirrored that of auto production, and like a car, it had no fixed relationship to its context. Its pieces could be transported by helicopter and lowered onto a construction site. According to Fuller the rest of the house could be put together or disassembled by two workers in a few days.

The project cemented Fuller’s status as an outsider among the great architects of his day. Designed in the same era that yielded such Modernist marvels as Pierre Chareau’s Maison de Verre, Le Corbusier’s Villa Savoye and Richard Neutra’s Lovell Health House, the Dymaxion House’s bizarre hexagonal form was not about creating a radical aesthetic for a new age. It was conceived as a purely technological solution to a fundamental human problem: the need for affordable shelter.

This faith in technology to solve the world’s problems remained a constant in Fuller’s career. Yet the show’s great subtext is the degree to which this vision would remain entangled in ideological battles: as early as 1932 he was rethinking the Dymaxion House to shelter laborers in pre-industrial Siberia in collaboration with architects who were seeking temporary work in the Soviet Union during the Depression.

Twenty or so years later, with the cold war in bloom, Fuller’s client list included the Ford Motor Company, the federal Department of Commerce and the Marine Corps. His dream of adopting military technology to produce low-cost civilian housing took on a more ominous cast. In a catalog image the steel frame of a geodesic dome is suspended by cables from the bottom of a military helicopter. A model reproduced for the show depicts a community of shiny stainless-steel Dymaxion houses strung along a cul-de-sac fronted by lush lawns. The scene suggests the eerie correlation between the endlessly repetitive suburban subdivisions of postwar America and military barracks.

The line between the utopian postwar vision and the anxieties that it masked was always blurred. And like Charles and Ray Eames, Fuller was often enlisted as a propagandist in the ideological battle between East and West. One of his earliest domes was displayed at the 1959 Moscow trade fair, where Richard M. Nixon and Nikita S. Khrushchev debated the technological superiority of capitalism versus communism. And if Fuller’s domes were soon fixtures in neighborhood playgrounds, the American military also saw their potential as transportable shelters in war zones. From here it was a short distance to the backyard bomb shelters testifying to a fear of nuclear annihilation, the flip side of the postwar suburban dream.

Fuller’s fullest expression of a belief in postwar progress was an enormous geodesic dome he designed for the United States Pavilion at the Expo ’67 world’s fair in Montreal. Measuring 250 feet in diameter, its translucent acrylic shell housed an exhibition that included overscale works by artists like James Rosenquist and Andy Warhol. About 50 million people visited the show in just six months, and the dome became an international symbol of America’s enchantment with the future, the architectural equivalent of the Apollo spacecraft.

Fuller’s vision went up in smoke a few years later, when the dome’s acrylic skin was destroyed in a fire, leaving only the steel latticework. By then he had ventured further into fantasy. One of the most striking images of the show depicts a two-mile-wide glass dome that he wanted built over Midtown Manhattan to create an energy-efficient, Edenlike environment. In another proposal a floating community would live in tetrahedral structures moored off the coasts of overpopulated cities. Because no one would have to pay for land, he argued, this dense offshore network of housing, shops, schools and parks would be affordable to the average worker.

No one bought into the idea, but the innocent optimism of these schemes remains striking today. Although the cold war is long over, the world seems more dangerous than ever. America’s once-proud infrastructure of roadways and bridges is crumbling, and we no longer seem able to muster confidence that our children will live in a better world. Architects expend most of their creative energy on luxury apartments. Or on colossuses in China. Fuller’s brand of idealism seems more distant than ever.

The exhibition runs through Sept. 21 at the Whitney Museum of American Art, 945 Madison Avenue, at 75th Street; (212) 570-3600, whitney.org.