Fuller's Teaching Career

Four decades of marathon lectures, collapsing domes, and "thinking out loud."

Fuller's teaching career began at Black Mountain College in the summer of 1948, when Josef Albers invited him to participate in the Summer Institute. Among his students that first summer were Ruth Asawa and Kenneth Snelson, both of whom would go on to distinguished careers in sculpture and structural art. The group's first geodesic dome attempt — the Supine Dome — famously collapsed, but the Necklace Dome succeeded, becoming the first realized geodesic structure. Fuller returned as Summer Institute Director in 1949, bringing colleagues including Emerson Woelffer and students from Chicago such as Masato Nakagawa. It was also at Black Mountain that John Cage encouraged Fuller to overcome his shyness about speaking in public, a nudge that helped launch one of the twentieth century's most prolific lecture careers. As his daughter Allegra Fuller Snyder later recalled: "For most of the rest of his life, Bucky taught at many, many hundreds of campuses... but it had all started at Black Mountain."

A decade later, SIU President Delyte Morris and Harold Cohen recruited Fuller to Southern Illinois University Carbondale after his 1959 New York apartment fire. His position — Research Professor of Design Science Exploration — was described frankly as "more a celebrity role than a teaching job," but Fuller made it substantive. His curriculum philosophy, "Everything is Design," wove together systems theory, cybernetics, and practical design, and his two-week intensive workshops became the highlight of the year for third-year design students. John McHale joined the faculty in 1962 and co-ran the World Resources Inventory with Fuller; Medard Gabel, a 1971 SIU design graduate, became his World Game collaborator. Fuller's titles escalated over the years — Research Professor, then University Professor (1968), then Distinguished University Professor across the SIU system (1972) — and he remained emeritus until his death in 1983. During his Carbondale years he lived in a geodesic dome at 407 S. Forest Avenue, the only geodesic dome he ever inhabited and the only property he ever owned, and produced nine patents, eleven books, and the design for the Montreal Biosphere.

Harvard had expelled Fuller twice as an undergraduate at Adams House — reportedly for passing bad checks while pursuing chorus girls — which made his return in 1961-62 as Charles Eliot Norton Professor of Poetry all the more remarkable. The Norton Professorship, one of Harvard's most prestigious appointments, had been held by T.S. Eliot, Igor Stravinsky, and e.e. cummings, among others. Living at Quincy House, Fuller delivered the kind of performances that defined his reputation: the Harvard Crimson reported that he "spoke for two and a half hours without script or notes... spewed forth his thoughts at breakneck pace." Contemporaries called him "technology incarnate." Harvard elected him honorary Phi Beta Kappa in 1967.

Fuller's teaching style was inseparable from his public identity. He called his lectures "thinking out loud" sessions, and they routinely lasted two to six hours or longer, delivered entirely without notes or scripts. Even into his eighties he gave roughly a hundred lectures per year at universities around the world. The most famous sustained example is "Everything I Know," a 1975 lecture series in which Fuller spoke for forty-two hours over two weeks, later transcribed and published. From 1972 to 1977 he simultaneously held a World Fellow in Residence appointment at a University of Pennsylvania consortium, adding yet another institutional home to a career that had ranged from the experimental margins of Black Mountain College to the most traditional podiums in American higher education.

Sources

Fuller's Teaching Career — research notes

Fuller's Teaching Career

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Sources