Richard Buckminster Fuller never considered himself an architect. He considered himself a “comprehensive anticipatory design scientist” — someone who seeks universal principles applicable at any scale, from the spoon to the planet. It is not a modest definition. It is also, in the history of architecture, a unique position: Fuller does not design buildings in the traditional sense — he designs systems. The geodesic dome is not a building: it is a structural principle applicable at any scale and in any material. The Dymaxion Car is not a car: it is a principle of efficiency. The Dymaxion map is not a map: it is a way of seeing the planet as a continuum with no centre or peripheries.
The geodesic dome (patented in 1954, with an important precedent in the dome of the Zeiss planetarium in Jena, designed by Walther Bauersfeld in the early 1920s) is his most influential invention. The principle: divide a sphere into triangles — specifically, project the faces of an icosahedron (the Platonic solid with 20 triangular faces) onto the spherical surface and subdivide them into smaller triangles. The result is a network of triangles, a figure that cannot be deformed without lengthening or shortening one of its sides: loads are thus spread across the whole surface, and each strut works almost purely in compression or tension. It is one of the lightest structures ever conceived relative to the volume it encloses, and it needs no internal columns, beams or walls.
Houses made like aeroplanes
Before the domes, Fuller worked on houses. In 1927–1929 he designed the Dymaxion House, a hexagonal dwelling suspended around a single central mast containing the services, intended to be factory-made and delivered like a car. The name, coined by an advertising man, combined the words dynamic, maximum and tension, and Fuller would use it for decades. At the end of the Second World War he tried again in a more concrete way: the Wichita House (1945–1946), developed with the aircraft industry, which needed to convert its factories, was a circular aluminium house, light, transportable in a metal cylinder, with a natural ventilation system in the roof. Only prototypes were built; one is now kept at the Henry Ford Museum near Detroit. The commercial failure taught Fuller that the building industry does not transform itself like the aircraft industry, but the idea of the house as an industrial product would recur throughout 20th-century architecture.
Fuller's first dome, built in the summer of 1948 at Black Mountain College in North Carolina with his students, collapsed as soon as it was assembled: the aluminium slats were too thin. Among those students was the young artist Kenneth Snelson, who in the same months built small sculptures in which rigid rods seemed suspended in mid-air, held in place only by taut cables. Fuller immediately grasped their significance and coined the term tensegrity, from tension and integrity, for the principle. Authorship of the idea would long be the subject of a friendly but stubborn dispute between the two. It is an episode that says a great deal about Fuller's method: experiment, fail, observe, generalise.
The applications
During his lifetime more than 300,000 geodesic domes were built worldwide (Buckminster Fuller Institute estimate) — most of them small (temporary dwellings, military radar stations, planetariums) but some of remarkable size. The most famous: the American Pavilion at the 1967 Montreal Expo — a dome 76 metres in diameter covered in acrylic panels, looking like a giant soap bubble set down on Île Sainte-Hélène, in the middle of the St. Lawrence River. Today it is the Montreal Biosphère — a museum dedicated to the environment, appropriately, since Fuller devoted his life to the idea of “doing more with less”.
Fuller's most ambitious — and craziest — project is the proposal to cover Midtown Manhattan with a geodesic dome 3 km in diameter (1960). The dome, Fuller said, would make it possible to regulate the area's climate, reduce heating and cooling costs, and pay for itself in ten years. The cost of the snow removed from Manhattan's pavements every year — he argued — was already of the same magnitude as the cost of the dome. It is not a joke: it is an economic calculation. Fuller is always serious when he proposes his utopias.
The first major applications were not architectural in the strict sense. In 1953 Fuller covered the courtyard of the Ford Rotunda in Dearborn with an extremely light aluminium dome, which the existing structure could not have supported with a conventional roof. In the 1950s the US military adopted geodesic domes as radomes, shells protecting radar antennas along the Arctic defence line: they could be flown in by helicopter, assembled in a few hours and withstood very high winds. In 1958 the Union Tank Car Company built in Baton Rouge a steel dome about 117 metres across for the maintenance of railway wagons, at the time the largest clear-span roof in the world. It was in these industrial and military uses that the geodesic dome showed its real advantage: covering large spaces quickly with very little material.
The Montreal dome also has a history worth knowing. In 1976 a fire, which started during welding work, destroyed the skin of acrylic panels within minutes, leaving the steel lattice intact. The structure stood empty for almost twenty years until in 1995 it was turned into a museum of water and the environment, today the Biosphère. The episode shows a concrete limit of these constructions: the structure can be almost indestructible, but the cladding, made of many thin panels, is the weak point, both for fire and for water.
In the 1960s the geodesic dome also became a symbol of the counterculture. At Drop City, Colorado, in 1965 a group of artists built a small community of domes from salvaged materials, including car roofs cut into panels. In the early 1970s Lloyd Kahn's Domebook taught thousands of people to build their own geodesic homes. Years later, in 1989, Kahn himself published a rethink, Refried Domes, frankly listing the problems encountered: water leaking through the many joints between panels, the difficulty of furnishing spaces without vertical walls, the waste of material in cutting triangular panels from rectangular sheets, the difficulty of fitting windows and doors into a curved surface. It is one of the most honest self-criticisms in the history of self-built architecture, and it explains why domes succeeded as roofs over large spaces and much less as homes.
The other inventions listed in the fact box also have concrete histories. The 1933 Dymaxion Car had three wheels, the rear one steering, and a streamlined teardrop body that could carry many people; three prototypes were built. During the Chicago World's Fair that year one of them was involved in an accident in which the driver died: the collision had been caused by another car, but the bad publicity drove the investors away. The Dymaxion map, published in 1943 by Life magazine, projects the Earth's surface onto the faces of a polyhedron that can then be unfolded and laid flat. Compared with the Mercator projection, which hugely enlarges the regions near the poles, it greatly reduces distortions of shape and size, and shows the continents as a single almost continuous island in one ocean. It is the graphic translation of his idea of a planet without centre or peripheries. Fuller saw it as a practical tool, not a curiosity: a map that privileges no country makes it easier to reason about resources, transport and populations as parts of a single system, and that was exactly the way of thinking he wanted to teach architects. Fuller saw it as a practical tool, not a curiosity: a map that privileges no country makes it easier to reason about resources, transport and populations as parts of a single system, and that was exactly the way of thinking he wanted to teach architects.
Spaceship Earth
Fuller's most important concept is not the geodesic dome — it is “Spaceship Earth”. The planet Earth is a spaceship — with finite resources, a life-support system, and a crew (humanity) that has not been given an instruction manual. If the spaceship breaks down, there is no way to call for rescue. The responsibility for keeping the system running lies with the crew. It is a simple idea, and radical for its time: the book <em>Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth</em> came out in 1969. It anticipates political ecology, sustainability, the idea of planetary boundaries. Fuller is not an architect — he is a philosopher of planetary design who uses geometry as a universal language.
Fuller's legacy in architecture is enormous but indirect. Nobody builds like Fuller — his geodesic domes are too difficult to integrate with traditional domestic functions (there are no right angles, furniture does not sit against curved walls, dome roofs leak at the joints between panels). But the principle of “doing more with less” — the logic of dematerialising structures — is at the heart of all the structural progress of twentieth-century architecture.
A name for a molecule, a method for architects
Fuller's legacy has also reached places no one expected. In 1985 the chemists Harold Kroto, Robert Curl and Richard Smalley discovered a molecule made of sixty carbon atoms arranged like the vertices of a football, that is, following the same geometry of pentagons and hexagons as Fuller's domes, and named it buckminsterfullerene. The discovery earned them the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1996. In the world of architecture, the most direct link is with Norman Foster, who in the last fifteen years of Fuller's life worked with him on several projects and has always acknowledged his influence. The question Fuller used to put to architects, "how much does your building weigh?", has become central today for reasons he had sensed: a building's weight is also a measure of the materials, energy and emissions needed to build it.
Anyone wanting to see a geodesic dome in real life has several options. Montreal's Biosphère is the most famous; Epcot in Florida has a large geodesic sphere named, not by chance, Spaceship Earth; many planetariums and botanical conservatories, such as the Climatron at the Missouri Botanical Garden, built in 1960, still use the principle. In Europe the Eden Project in Cornwall, though designed by Nicholas Grimshaw with a different system of hexagonal domes, owes a great deal to the same idea of covering a large landscape with the minimum of material. In each of these places it is worth looking at the nodes, the points where the struts meet: that is where you understand how much precision a structure that looks so simple actually requires.