Fuller at Black Mountain College

The place where the domes began, the lectures began, and the man who couldn't sell his inventions became the man who couldn't stop talking about them.

Fuller arrived at Black Mountain College in the summer of 1948 as a last-minute replacement. Chicago architect Bertrand Goldberg, who had agreed to teach architecture, cancelled. He recommended Fuller. Josef Albers, the college's leading figure, had reservations about an unknown substitute but extended the invitation. Fuller arrived two weeks after the session opened, pulling an Airstream trailer packed with geometrical models. Within days, Albers was won over — he wrote to Goldberg thanking him after Fuller delivered a three-hour lecture the first evening. Fuller's course was titled "Comprehensive Design."

He arrived at a career low point. Every Dymaxion invention — the car, the house, the Wichita House — had failed commercially. He had recently patented the Dymaxion Map (1946) and was immersing himself in geodesic geometry but had no institutional home, no income stream, and no audience. Black Mountain offered what he described as "freedom to fail." His quote: "I had a very free field on my comprehensivity at Black Mountain."

The summer 1948 session assembled one of the most remarkable concentrations of artistic talent in American history. Faculty included Albers (color theory, visual art), John Cage (Structure of Music), Merce Cunningham (dance), Willem de Kooning (painting), Elaine de Kooning, Richard Lippold (sculpture), Edgar Kaufmann Jr. (design), and Beaumont Newhall (photography). Students included Kenneth Snelson, Ruth Asawa (at BMC 1946-1949), Robert Rauschenberg, and Arthur Penn.

Fuller's project was to construct his first full-scale geodesic dome: forty-eight feet in diameter, twenty-three feet tall, 1,500 square feet of enclosed area, and less than 270 pounds. The materials were aluminum venetian blind strips — the best the college's limited budget could afford. Students measured, computed tensile strength, coded each strip, and marked connection points. When tension was applied, the structure collapsed to the ground. Fuller dubbed it "the Supine Dome" — a dome that lies flat is supine, not a dome at all. His response: "You succeed when you stop failing." An article in the BMC Journal argues the failure was purposeful — Fuller deliberately used materials "designed to fail," using Black Mountain as a place where failure was a productive agent in the learning process.

On August 14, 1948, the summer community staged the first English-language performance of Erik Satie's surrealist play Le Piège de Méduse (The Ruse of Medusa). Fuller played Baron Medusa, Arthur Penn directed, Cunningham choreographed, de Kooning designed the sets, Cage played the piano score, and M.C. Richards translated. The experience reportedly "loosened Fuller's rigid tendencies." Fuller credited Penn with teaching him presentation techniques that enhanced his later marathon lectures — the transformation from tongue-tied engineer into charismatic performer may have begun on that stage.

After Albers departed BMC, the remaining faculty asked Fuller to return to direct the 1949 Summer Institute, on Albers's own recommendation. He brought twelve students from the Institute of Design in Chicago (the "New Bauhaus") — BMC called them "The Twelve Disciples." He also invited painter Emerson Woelffer. The 1949 dome used sturdier materials: metal telescoping curtain rods from the Woolworth's in Asheville. Fuller and his students constructed a dome of thirty-one-great-circle necklace construction, initially assembled in Chicago over the winter and reconstructed at BMC. This dome stood. A famous photograph shows students lifting it to demonstrate its lightness.

Two students from these summers became central to Fuller's legacy. Kenneth Snelson, "electrified" by Fuller's first lecture, returned home to Oregon and created the "Early X Piece" — the first tensegrity structure — over the winter of 1948-49. When he showed it to Fuller the following summer, the encounter launched one of the most contested priority disputes in twentieth-century design history. Ruth Asawa, studying under both Albers and Fuller, learned to utilize everyday materials in her sculpture; Fuller later said: "I consider Ruth Asawa to be the most gifted, productive, and originally inspired artist that I have ever known personally."

Eva Díaz's The Experimenters: Chance and Design at Black Mountain College (University of Chicago Press, 2015) is the most thorough scholarly treatment of Fuller at BMC. Structured around Albers, Cage, and Fuller as three rival models of experiment, the book argues their "discordant yet equally hermetic" approaches all favored testing procedures over personal expression. All three valued experiential learning, but in radically different ways: Albers emphasized perceptual flexibility, Cage developed chance and indeterminacy, and Fuller pursued comprehensive design and technological solutions. Their explorations in "materials, form, chance, and indeterminacy were never less than electrifying."

The significance of Black Mountain for Fuller's career cannot be overstated. As his daughter Allegra Fuller Snyder said: "For most of the rest of his life, Bucky taught at many, many hundreds of campuses, around the country, around the world — but it had all started at Black Mountain." He arrived as a man whose inventions had all failed; he left as a teacher whose ideas electrified everyone who heard them. The geodesic dome, born in the fields of North Carolina, went on to be produced over 300,000 times worldwide. Visitor James Fitzgibbon later recommended Fuller to North Carolina State's School of Architecture, which led to Synergetics Inc. in Raleigh (1955) and the dome's path to the Ford Rotunda, the DEW Line, and the Montreal Biosphere.

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Fuller at Black Mountain College (research)

Fuller at Black Mountain College

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