Today marks the 117th birthday of Bucky Fuller! An architect, engineer, designer, inventor, and idealist, Buckminster Fuller developed numerous inventions, and is probably best known for creating the geodesic dome.

I just invent. Then I wait until man comes around to needing what I’ve invented.
― Richard Buckminster Fuller

On a related note, don’t forget to check out The Utopian Impulse: Buckminster Fuller and the Bay Area at SFMOMA (which features Fuller’s Dymaxion map printed on the cake pictured above)… the show closes July 29!

Photo via The Buckminster Fuller Institute.

We’ve been receiving a lot of Buckminster Fuller-inspired visitor postcards lately. This one makes note of the fact that although Fuller’s geodesic domes were sustainable and fulfilled many utopian ideals, living inside of them was incredibly awkward.

We are not going to be able to operate our spaceship Earth much longer unless we see it as a whole spaceship and our fate as common. It has to be everybody or nobody. – Buckminster Fuller

Buckminster Fuller thought of the world as a contained spaceship, where all of us are on board together, flying through space with a finite amount of resources. How do you think this metaphor can/cannot be helpful in working to solve problems today?

Stewart Brand, publisher of the Whole Earth Catalog, October 1966. He’s wearing a button that reads, “Why haven’t we seen a photograph of the whole earth yet?”

Come learn about Brand’s Whole Earth Catalog tonight in our Bucky Fuller exhibition at 6:30pm!

Photograph by Gene Anthony, © wolfgangsvault.com

Ever since R. Buckminster Fuller popularized the design in the mid-20th century, there’s been something captivating about the geodesic dome. While the structure typically makes architecture lovers salivate, now it’s conquering the heart of another type of urbanist: the city farmer. A new dome-based prototype promises an affordable method of rooftop aquaculture for apartment and commercial buildings—as the website calls it, getting “fish from the sky.”

(via A Geodesic Dome Promises Fish from the Sky - GOOD)

…A “live documentary” is like a film, but it all happens in person. I project images up on the screen and stand on stage narrating. And a band (Yo La Tengo) performs a live soundtrack. It’s a form that I like very much. As part of SFMOMA’s exhibit on Buckminster Fuller, I also made a multi-channel video installation that’s up now at the museum and will be there through August, I believe.

Read more: Sam Green’s Profile - The Bold Italic

Iwamoto Scott Architecture with proces2, Jellyfish House, 2005–6

via Open Space

tenderloingeographicsociety:

This new mid-Bay Muni station design, kinda love it.

From our Bucky Fuller exhibition.

See SFMOMA staff conserving Ant Farm’s “Convention City”!