Topics
55 articles
Bear Island, Maine
Bear Island in Penobscot Bay, Maine, the Fuller family's summer island since 1904, where childhood experiences with…
Biomimetic Cooling
How biological ventilation and thermal regulation strategies — termite mounds, silver ant hair geometry, butterfly wing…
Black Mountain College
Black Mountain College near Asheville, North Carolina (1933-1957), the experimental school where Fuller's 1948 dome…
Buckminster Fuller and Robert Pickus
A 1970 essay-review by Gene Keyes pairing Fuller's 'Utopia or Oblivion' with peace organizer Robert Pickus's 'To End…
Buckminsterfullerene
Buckminsterfullerene (C60) is a cage-like carbon molecule shaped like a truncated icosahedron, named after Fuller…
Buckyballs Squeeze a Noble Gas Into One Dimension
A 2024 experiment used buckminsterfullerene cages inside carbon nanotubes to confine krypton atoms into a single-file,…
Center for Spirituality and Sustainability (Fuller Dome)
A 1971 geodesic dome designed by Fuller and Shoji Sadao at SIU Edwardsville, the only built example of his Geoscope…
Cloud Nine
Cloud Nine was Fuller's proposal for mile-wide geodesic spheres that would float in the atmosphere by heating enclosed…
Criticisms of R. Buckminster Fuller
The contested side of Fuller's legacy: invention-priority disputes (geodesic dome, tensegrity), engineering and…
Drop City
Drop City, the artists' commune near Trinidad, Colorado (1965-1973), recognized as the first residential use of…
Dymaxion (Word Origin)
How the word 'Dymaxion' was coined in 1929 by advertising consultant Waldo Warren at Marshall Field's department store,…
Dymaxion Bathroom
Fuller's stamped-metal prefabricated bathroom unit — two interlocking copper bubbles integrating bathtub, shower,…
Dymaxion Car
The Dymaxion car was Fuller's three-wheeled, aerodynamic experimental vehicle of 1933, built to study the…
Dymaxion Car Accident (1933)
The October 1933 crash on Lake Shore Drive that killed driver Francis Turner and effectively ended the Dymaxion Car…
Dymaxion Chronofile
Fuller's 66-year attempt to document every aspect of his life, resulting in one of the most extensive personal archives…
Dymaxion Deployment Unit
The Dymaxion Deployment Unit was Fuller's 1940 circular corrugated-steel emergency shelter, mass-produced for the U.S.…
Dymaxion House
Buckminster Fuller's mass-producible, self-sufficient single-family dwelling, first designed in the 1920s and…
Dymaxion Map
The Dymaxion map is Fuller's polyhedral world-map projection onto an icosahedron that unfolds to show the continents as…
Dymaxion Sleep
Fuller's polyphasic sleep experiment (1932-1933): four 30-minute naps every six hours, two hours of sleep per day —…
Fly's Eye Dome
Fuller's 'autonomous dwelling machine' — a modular fiberglass dome designed in 1965, prototyped in three sizes…
Frameless Geodesic Dome
The frameless geodesic dome is Bruce Hauman's low-cost, self-supporting dome design derived from Fuller's self-strutted…
Fuller and Sustainability
Fuller's influence on modern sustainability: the 'Spaceship Earth' metaphor, ephemeralization, the Whole Earth Catalog,…
Fuller and the Military
Fuller's paradoxical military career — from WWI Navy rescue devices through DDU wartime shelters, Marine Corps geodesic…
Fuller at Black Mountain College
Fuller's pivotal summers at Black Mountain College (1948-49) — the Supine Dome failure, the 1949 geodesic success,…
Fuller in Conversation with Studs Terkel (1960)
A 1960 WFMT radio conversation between Studs Terkel and Buckminster Fuller, preserved in the Studs Terkel Radio Archive.
Fuller's 1927 Crisis
The pivotal biographical event — Fuller's 1927 near-suicide at Lake Michigan, his resolution to become 'Guinea Pig B,'…
Fuller's Death and Final Days (1983)
The circumstances of Fuller's death on July 1, 1983, at Anne's bedside in Good Samaritan Hospital — 'She squeezed my…
Fuller's Harvard Years
Fuller at Harvard: twice expelled as a student (1913-15) for blowing tuition on a Ziegfeld cast dinner and…
Fuller's Lost and Lesser-Known Inventions
The inventions that fell through the cracks: Fuller's Fog Gun atomized shower (1927), disc brakes at Phelps Dodge…
Fuller's Teaching Career
Fuller's academic career spanning four decades — from Black Mountain College (1948-49) through SIU Carbondale…
Geodesic Dome
The geodesic dome's journey from Walter Bauersfeld's 1922 Zeiss planetarium through Fuller's 1954 patent, military…
Geodesic Dome Passive Cooling
Fuller's 1940 discovery that the DDU stayed cool without mechanical air conditioning — a 'reverse chimney effect' where…
Geoscope
The Geoscope was Fuller's proposed 200-foot geodesic sphere covered in computer-controlled lights, designed to display…
Modern Applications of Fuller's Ideas
Contemporary deployments of Fuller's principles: tensegrity robots and NASA habitats, the fullerene nanomaterials…
Montreal Biosphère (Expo '67 U.S. Pavilion)
The afterlife of Fuller's Expo '67 U.S. Pavilion: a 1976 fire that destroyed its acrylic skin but spared the steel…
Necklace Dome
The Necklace Dome (1949) was Fuller's collapsible geodesic structure — aluminum tubes threaded with aircraft cable that…
Octet Truss
The octet truss is a lightweight space-frame structure patented by Buckminster Fuller in 1961, built from interlocking…
Old Man River's City
Old Man River's City was Fuller's 1971 proposal for a domed, crater-shaped terraced city in East St. Louis, designed to…
Open-Source & Low-Cost Geodesic Dome System
A Colaborativa.eu research project using digital fabrication to build cheap, self-assembled geodesic domes based on…
R. Buckminster Fuller and Anne Hewlett Dome Home
The Carbondale, Illinois geodesic dome house where Fuller lived from 1960 to 1971 was the only dome he ever inhabited…
R. Buckminster Fuller Professorship of Design Science
An endowed professorship established in 2021 at the Harvard Graduate School of Design honoring Fuller's design-science…
Radiative Cooling Materials
Materials engineered to cool surfaces below ambient temperature by reflecting solar radiation and emitting infrared…
School of Tomorrow / MartianMath
Kirby Urner's two interlocking curricula for teaching synergetics through Python and computational geometry — 'School…
Shelter Magazine
Shelter magazine (1931-1932): Fuller's architectural journal championing functional modernism and mass-produced…
Snelson-Fuller Tensegrity Dispute
The decades-long priority controversy over tensegrity — Snelson's 1948 invention, Fuller's appropriation and renaming,…
Spaceship Earth (EPCOT)
Spaceship Earth at EPCOT in Orlando, Florida — the world's only complete geosphere (164 ft diameter, opened 1982),…
Stockade Building System
The Stockade Building System (1922-1927) was Fuller's first commercial venture — a compressed-fiber block construction…
Synergetic Circus (1989 Tokyo exhibition)
A 1989 exhibition — the first comprehensive Buckminster Fuller show in Japan — held at Tochoji Temple Auditorium,…
The North Face and Buckminster Fuller
The collaboration and correspondence between R. Buckminster Fuller and the outdoor-gear company The North Face, whose…
The R. Buckminster Fuller FAQ: Synergetics
C. J. Fearnley's long-running, community-maintained FAQ on learning Fuller's Synergetics — recommended reading order,…
The Utopian Impulse: Buckminster Fuller and the Bay Area
The Utopian Impulse was a 2012 SFMOMA exhibition, the first to examine Buckminster Fuller's legacy in the San Francisco…
Triton City
Triton City was Buckminster Fuller's tetrahedronal floating-city proposal of the 1960s, engineered to house thousands…
Wichita House
The 1946 Dymaxion Dwelling Machine prototype built with Beech Aircraft in Wichita, Kansas — Fuller's closest approach…
World Game
World Game is an educational simulation developed by Buckminster Fuller in 1961 in which players cooperatively use his…
World Resources Inventory
The World Resources Inventory at SIU Carbondale — Fuller and John McHale's 1960s data-gathering project that cataloged…