Description

architect

Richard Buckminster Fuller (1895–1983), was born in Milton, Massachusetts and educated at the Milton Academy. After two short stints at Harvard, Fuller served in the U.S. Navy and worked as a laborer and mechanic. He married Anne Hewlett in 1917, and later joined his father-in-law in creating a building company. After the failure of this company and the loss of a daughter, Fuller began designing and marketing a number of inventions and writing and speaking widely about his work and ideas. In 1948 he taught at the Summer Institute at Black Mountain College in North Carolina, beginning a period of collaboration with universities that eventually resulted in a professorship at Southern Illinois University, Carbondale in 1968. Over the course of his career, Fuller became quite well-known for, among other things, his Dymaxion house, car, and map and the geodesic dome. Fuller continued his work and speaking around the world until his death of a heart attack.

It was during his first residencies at Black Mountain College that he began work on his most famous invention, the geodesic dome. Over the next few years, Fuller visited a number of universities, including MIT, the Institute of Design in Chicago, and Washington University, where he continued to develop the dome. While Fuller was visiting MIT, he served in several capacities: as a lecturer, a critic, and a group project advisor. In 1950, Fuller worked with a group of students to erect a wooden geodesic dome, one of the first of such structures to be built. This dome now in the collection of the MIT Museum.

In January 1951 Fuller participated in a conference and exhibition entitled “Housing, a national security resource.” For this conference, a student team expanded on work that Fuller had carried out at Chicago, and presented a design for a quickly-deployed, prefabricated home based on the geodesic dome and the “standard of living package.”

In 1952 Fuller participated in a second conference, “Housing mass produced.” For this conference, another group of students prepared a project based on the dome and the standard of living package. After his academic work at MIT, Fuller worked with Lincoln Laboratories on several radome projects.

Later in his life Fuller visited MIT as a speaker. In 1972 he appeared as part of a series of lectures on the subject of world peace, and later in the decade to speak about the transcendentalist Margaret Fuller, his great-aunt.