December 2008
This spring, the Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA), Chicago, presents Buckminster Fuller: Starting with the Universe, the first major American exhibition in decades devoted to the visionary mind and work of Buckminster Fuller, and the most inclusive show to date of Fuller’s work. On view from 14 March – 21 June 2009, the show is organized by the Whitney Museum of American Art with the cooperation of the Fuller family.
R. Buckminster Fuller (1895-1983) was one of the great American creative thinkers of the 20th century. Philosopher, forecaster, designer, poet, inventor, and advocate of alternative energy, Fuller is probably best known as the originator of the geodesic dome, but his theories and innovations engaged fields ranging from mathematics, engineering, and environmental science to literature, architecture, and visual art.
Fuller was one of the great multi-disciplinary thinkers and made no distinction between these spheres as discrete areas of investigation. He devoted much of his life to closing the gap between the sciences and the humanities; a schism he felt prevented a comprehensive view of the world. He believed in the significant interconnectedness of all things and concluded that certain basic structures and systems underlie everything in our world.
Today, his prophetic concepts are a touchstone for discussions of issues including environmental conservation, the manufacture and distribution of housing, and global organization of information. Fuller’s concepts are ripe for reexamination by artists, architects, designers, scientists, and poets among others.
As Whitney curators Michael Hays and Dana Miller write in their catalogue introduction, “Fuller sought to produce comprehensive anticipatory design solutions that would benefit the largest segment of humanity while consuming the fewest resources…Starting as he did from the universe and ending up with visual spatial models with which to ponder universal philosophical problems in the here and now, it is not surprising that Fuller has had a tremendous impact on the visual arts and architecture.
His sensibilities and modes of working were deeply aesthetic and many of his closest friends and supporters were artists." Fuller’s concepts are ripe for re-examination by artists, architects, designers, scientists, and poets among others.
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