Buckminster Fuller at the Whitney

If you haven’t been over to the Buckminster Fuller (1895-1983) exhibit at the Whitney Museum yet, I highly recommend it – you have until September 21 to check it out. I went last Friday night with a friend who’d already gone once and was eager to see it again. I discovered that this is not your usual art exhibit and Fuller was not your usual artist. In fact, he was also an inventor, architect, humanitarian, and philosopher. He quite aptly referred to himself as “a comprehensive anticipatory design scientist.”

I’m a devotee of many museums on the Upper East, but The Whitney has held a special place in my heart ever since I saw the fantastic Mark Rothko Exhibit there in 1998. There’s just something about this museum… what they’ve done with the Fuller exhibit is comprehensive and enlightening. Getting a window into a brain as creative as his is inspiring, to say the least.

When you go, what you’ll see on the museum’s first floor is the only surviving prototype for Fuller’s three-wheeled van/bus called the Dymaxion Car, designed in 1933. It’s blue and holds 11 passengers. It’s kind of a cross between a blimp, a VW bus, and one of those mod Airstream trailers. If you’re like me, you’ll probably walk around it chuckling to yourself then laugh out loud when you see old black and white footage of it in action on the video screen nearby. Thanks to it only having one wheel in back, the rear actually swings into place when parallel parking, like a controlled fishtail motion. This vehicle is delightfully wacky.

Upstairs, I learned that Fuller, among many other things, also designed houses (a.k.a. “dwelling machines” or “autonomous dome homes”), airplane hangars, and even devised a triangle-based way of configuring the world map so that its proportions were more realistic. The curators have supplied us with all kinds of relevant sketches, models, photographs, and video footage of Fuller explaining his work. While he was a fan of the “tetrahedron,” a triangle with four sides, many of his structures turned out to be round (oh, how limited is my knowledge of physics and engineering and even geometry…).

Fuller is probably most famous for inventing the Geodesic Dome. To envision one, think Epcot Center. One of his domes was used for the U.S. Pavilion Expo 67 in Montreal and another served as the roof of the Ford Motor Company Rotunda in Michigan, until it burned down. The crazy thing is that we have a geodesic dome right here on the Upper East: the Caspary Auditorium at Rockefeller University on York at 66^th (pictured, right). I’d noticed it in passing before, but after going to the exhibit, I walked over to take another look. Nestled in the trees, with the sun glinting off its panels, it is truly a beautiful and unique structure.

It’s hard to say what impresses me most about this multifaceted inventor. I think maybe it’s how flexible this man’s brain seems to have been; he definitely thought “outside the box.” Besides, he was globally-minded (concerned about the distribution of resources), and ecologically aware (constantly attempting to reuse materials and adhering to a less-is-more credo).

Fuller was genuinely attempting to make the world a better place. His ideas were big, yet my friend and I marveled – with our faces pressed as close to the pieces as the guards would allow – at how incredibly detailed and precise his drawings were. After hearing all the grand, abstract proclamations of politicians at the conventions over the last two weeks, it was refreshing to learn about someone who was trying to effect large-scale change in such a hands-on way.

From a design perspective, I am personally drawn to his futuristic style. His Dymaxion homes and other dwelling projects have a sixties/spaceship feel, like they are straight out of The Jetsons cartoon, (though some of them, remarkably, were designed thirty years before this aesthetic became popular.)

Fuller was ahead of his time on many fronts – perhaps his ideas are still ahead of our time. This is probably why some of his plans were originally misunderstood and never came to fruition. But this also why he has had a lasting influence.

And by the way, if you just can’t get enough, there is a Buckminster Fuller Symposium down at Cooper Union Sept 12-13.