Buckyverse

We Are All Astronauts

An exhibition catalog, We Are All Astronauts: The Universe of Richard Buckminster Fuller as Reflected by Contemporary Art (Kerber, ISBN 978-3866785762), produced by the Marta Herford museum. It pairs three scholarly essays on Fuller's design philosophy, his lifelong proximity to artists, and his afterlife in contemporary art with a catalog of works by roughly twenty present-day artists who reinterpret his ideas.

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We Are All Astronauts

We Are All Astronauts: The Universe of Richard Buckminster Fuller as Reflected by Contemporary Art is an exhibition catalog (German: Wir sind alle Astronauten) published by Kerber and authored by Joachim Krausse, Dana Miller, and Roland Nachtigäller. Produced for an exhibition at the Marta Herford museum, curated by the Marta Herford team together with Markus Richter, it examines how contemporary artists freely reinterpret rather than literally quote Fuller's forms and ideas. The book combines historical essays on Fuller's work with a catalog of recent art that "plays loosely" with his legacy.

Overview

The book is a bilingual (German/English) catalog accompanying the exhibition We Are All Astronauts at the Marta Herford museum. Its title echoes Fuller's "Spaceship Earth" framing — the notion that every human is effectively an astronaut aboard a single planetary vessel. In his preface, museum director Roland Nachtigäller frames the project as an attempt at "rescuing the utopian in the 21st century," noting a fascination with Fuller that re-emerged in a "disillusioned and sober epoch" whose catastrophe scenarios "suddenly seem less like pleasantly scary science fiction, and more like real signs." He stresses that the exhibition is not about quotation, explicit reference, or re-enactment, but about "a loose playfulness with early ideas and works, and their continuation and projection onto one's own work."

The catalog's central thesis, articulated across its essays, is that what most interests contemporary artists is not Fuller's literal forms but "a fundamental fascination with his systematically open thought process and his more artistic than technologically fixated view of the world" — including the "yes, but…" generated by his many failed projects.

Contents and structure

The book is organized around three scholarly essays followed by an artist-by-artist catalog section:

  • Preface / Vorwort by Roland Nachtigäller, director of Marta Herford, situating the exhibition in the museum's program of dialogue between contemporary art, architecture, and design (a program whose earlier highlight was a presentation of Richard Neutra's European buildings).
  • Joachim Krausse, "Thinking, Building, and Living: The Formation of Buckminster Fuller's Key Concepts in His Lightful Houses" — a detailed historical-archival essay on Fuller's earliest design work.
  • Dana Miller, "Thought Patterns: Buckminster Fuller, the Scientist-Artist" — a survey of Fuller's lifelong engagement with the art world.
  • Markus Richter, "Jitterbug Variations: Buckminster Fuller in Contemporary Art" — a critical essay mapping how artists since the 1960s have transformed Fuller's ideas.
  • Catalog of contemporary artworks — entries documenting works by roughly twenty artists, with reproductions, titles, media, and dimensions.

The reproduced source also appends a back-of-book index drawn from Fuller's own writing on Spaceship Earth (entries such as "Great Pirates," "energy slaves," synergy, and Spaceship Earth themes), reinforcing the title's connection to Fuller's planetary worldview.

Krausse: the Lightful Houses and design philosophy

Krausse's essay reconstructs the genesis of Fuller's design thinking from archival documents he identified at the Buckminster Fuller Archive (then in Santa Barbara, now the R. Buckminster Fuller Collection at Stanford). He argues that although Fuller consistently dated his turning point to a mystical experience in 1927, the actual design work on his "house on a mast" belongs to January–April 1928, in a previously unknown group of materials Fuller labeled Lightful, Lightful Houses, and Lightful Products — the basis for the 4D / 4D Time Lock book and ultimately the Dymaxion House.

Key threads of the essay include:

  • The programmatic Lightful drawing, which depicts not a house but "the world for which the house is meant," with the globe at the center and a catalog of vertical structures (mast, tree, pagoda, skyscraper, lighthouse) radiating outward.
  • Fuller's maxim of designing "from the inside out," which Krausse links to his lifelong propensity for inversions — the Jitterbug transformation, Noah's Ark #2, and ultimately the tensegrity principle.
  • "From metaphor to model": the "fountain of life" image (traced to Fuller's great-aunt Margaret Fuller-Ossoli), which becomes a working model for environment controlling and recurs from the Lightful house through the Wichita House, the Fountain Factory cotton-mill design (1951), the Climatron (1960), and the Montreal Expo '67 dome.
  • The claim that Fuller's house-oriented thinking (1928–1967) constitutes an independently developed practical systems theory, which Fuller recognized matched Ludwig von Bertalanffy's general systems theory — placing him among the pioneers of systems thinking.

Miller: Fuller as scientist-artist

Miller's essay documents Fuller's deep, sustained involvement with artists, which he considered essential because artists "had resisted specialization and maintained their inherent ability to think independently, intuitively, and comprehensively." For Fuller the highest compliment was to call someone a "scientist-artist." The essay traces episodes including:

  • Fuller's circle at Romany Marie's Tavern in late-1920s Greenwich Village and his lifelong friendship with Isamu Noguchi (who made a chrome-plated bust of Fuller decades before Warhol's silver Factory).
  • His summers teaching at Black Mountain College (1948–1949), encounters with Josef and Anni Albers, John Cage, Merce Cunningham, and Ruth Asawa, his lead role in The Ruse of Medusa, the failed "Supine Dome," and the contested origin of tensegrity with Kenneth Snelson.
  • His rising visibility in the 1960s art world: MoMA's Three Structures (1959–60), the Primary Structures exhibition (1966), engagement with Robert Smithson ("Entropy and the New Monuments"), Susan Sontag's "new sensibility," and Jasper Johns's Map based on the Dymaxion Air-Ocean World Map.
  • The Expo '67 Skybreak Sphere / U.S. Pavilion, his influence on media and counterculture collectives (Stan VanDerBeek's Movie Drome, Raindance/Radical Software, Ant Farm, USCO), and his late lithographic artwork Tetrascroll (1977).

Miller concludes that Fuller — who called himself "Guinea Pig B" and whose adult life she frames as "a single performative experiment" — was "unquestionably a scientist-artist of the highest order," anticipating forms in nature later confirmed, such as the C60 carbon molecule.

Richter: Jitterbug variations in contemporary art

Richter's essay uses the Jitterbug transformation — Fuller's discovery that the cuboctahedron can be transformed step-by-step through icosahedron, octahedron, and tetrahedron — as a metaphor for the ongoing transformation of Fuller's ideas in art. He notes that contemporary works are often "interpretations of interpretations," mediated by Stewart Brand's Whole Earth Catalog, the geodesic domes and zomes of hippie communes (Drop City, Libre, Red Rockers), and successor architecture groups (Archigram, Ant Farm, raumlaborberlin, N55).

He then surveys the exhibition's artists and the tendencies they embody, including:

  • Tomás Saraceno (Airport Cities, after Fuller's Cloud Nine) and Olafur Eliasson (Model room, with Einar Thorsteinn) as "comprehensive designers" working with scientists.
  • The "buckyball" / buckminsterfullerene (C60) lineage, taken up by Kerstin Stoll, Ai Weiwei (a hand-carved Huanghuali-wood fullerene), Attila Csörgő (Football World Map), and Kai Schiemenz (a deformable geodesic beanbag).
  • Skeptical and ephemeral counterpoints to Fuller's "all too perfect" geometry: Albrecht Schäfer (Ocellus), Michel François (Souffles dans le verre), Tobias Putrih (Quasi Random), Beat Zoderer, and Tilman Wendland, for whom imperfection is where "the poetry starts."
  • Works engaging Fuller's politics and military entanglements: José Dávila (When Buildings Become Clouds, 25 Great Circles), Lucas Lenglet (anti-tank obstacles recalling a tensegrity mast), and Pedro Reyes (Ciclomovil, a zero-emission human-powered vehicle echoing the Dymaxion Car).

Other catalog artists include Björn Dahlén, Simon Dybbroe Møller, David Maljković, Hermann Maier Neustadt, Riccardo Previdi, and Silke Riechert.

Key themes

  • Free reinterpretation over literal quotation. The recurring premise is that artists today extend, transform, and "play with" Fuller's ideas rather than reproduce his forms.
  • The fountain and environment controlling. Krausse's reading of Fuller's architecture as dynamic, membrane-like systems regulating flows of air, light, and energy.
  • Inside-outing and inversion. A through-line connecting design philosophy, the Jitterbug, and tensegrity.
  • Art–science convergence. Fuller's belief that artists and scientists are complementary, and his ideal of the "scientist-artist" / "comprehensive designer."
  • Utopia, failure, and skepticism. The catalog repeatedly stages a productive tension between Fuller's optimism and the critiques (from Smithson onward) of his perfect, sometimes "totalitarian," geometries.
  • Spaceship Earth. The title positions the whole project under Fuller's planetary ethic of shared responsibility and finite resources.

Significance

The catalog is a substantive scholarly and curatorial document rather than a promotional pamphlet. Krausse's essay contributes original archival research on the Lightful materials and the formation of Fuller's key concepts; Miller's essay collects and argues for the under-recognized depth of Fuller's exchange with the 20th-century art world (which she notes "goes unnoted in most recent art historical accounts"); and Richter's essay maps nearly sixty years of artistic reception. Together they frame Fuller less as an engineer-architect and more as a systems thinker and "scientist-artist" whose influence continues to mutate through contemporary practice — and they make the case that themes like Spaceship Earth, sustainability, and responsible resource use are now the most resonant parts of his legacy.

See Also

Sources

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