![]() Fuller defined “comprehensive designer” as “an emerging synthesis of artist, inventor, mechanic, objective economist, and evolutionary strategist.” It pleased him to resist categorization when Time magazine featured him on its cover in 1964, he said, “I seem to be a verb, an evolutionary process-an integral function of the universe.” He painted himself as a defier of conventional wisdom, a man unwilling to walk in the paths laid down by others. “A generalist known as the comprehensive designer,” says Alec Nevala-Lee in Inventor of the Future, his new biography. What was he? People called him a poet, a philosopher, a mathematician, an artist, an engineer, and a futurist. ![]() He was not actually an architect-he had neither the training nor the license. Buckminster Fuller’ itself sounds like a name made up by Evelyn Waugh.”)Īt sixty-four, Fuller was on the brink of astonishing fame. They enabled structures lighter and stronger than any before: “The horizons opened stagger belief.” (Huxtable’s colleague John Canaday struck a more skeptical tone: “Frequently he has been thought of as a mildly eccentric doodler with an oversize Erector set…. Fuller’s space frames and enclosures represent the greatest advance in building since the invention of the arch.” She hailed the revolutionary construction methods and the geometrical breakthrough: instead of posts and beams making the rectilinear boxes “that have been the accepted basis of architecture since the beginning of shelter,” the visionary Fuller used tetrahedrons and octahedrons, shapes inspired by crystals and atoms, to create “lacy frameworks of the widest versatility.” These unconventional forms could grow in any direction, she said. “The world of tomorrow is here today,” announced Ada Louise Huxtable in The New York Times. Installation view of the exhibition ‘Three Structures by Buckminster Fuller’ at the Museum of Modern Art, New York City, 1959Ĭritics raved. Museum of Modern Art, New York/SCALA/Art Resource
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |