Buckminster Fuller: engineer, genius, designer and inventor

It’s a funny-sounding name, ‘Buckminster Fuller‘, but to anyone who knows it, it’s the sound of pure design genius. At least for millions of students of engineering, sustainability or architecture - and for automobile designers too - it’s a name forever associated with innovations which broke new ground by looking to nature for their inspiration. Guided by hunches and a pure need to improve the world we live in, and the lives of those in it, Richard Buckminster Fuller’s work has had a massive influence on design across many disciplines and for billions of people.

‘Doing More With Less’ - the Buckminster Fuller design maxim

Having started out in the US Navy with an interest in engineering, and having made an attempt at developing a lightweight housing system in a partnership with his father-in-law, by 1922 Buckminster Fuller was out of work and on hard times. At this point, shortly after his daughter died, he decided to embark on an experiment to find out “…what a single individual [could] contribute to changing the world and benefiting all humanity.” Inspiring him was “the search for the principles governing the universe and help advance the evolution of humanity in accordance with them… finding ways of doing more with less“. Amongst the concepts which would go on to make him an international name in design was his favourite concept: the geodesic dome (above is ‘Spaceship Earth’, manufactured for Epcot Centre, out of titanium). Originally invented by a German engineer, Dr. Walther Bauersfeld, it was Fuller who brought the design to the attention of the mainstream and inspired the use of it in large-scale architecture.

Dymaxion cars & houses - and a world of domes, domes and more domes

As his skills and insight into design and engineering sharpened, Fuller developed his ‘Dymaxion’ system of thinking, which informed everything he did, and created. Among the many innovations and projects he came up with were the Dymaxion car (above) and a re-engineered version of the lightweight homes he had worked on years before, which he dubbed the ‘Dymaxion House’. Though these were favourably received at the time, they did not proceed to more than the prototype stages due to a range of reasons, including management problems and the outbreak of World War II. However, his biggest design statement - the geodesic dome - continued to grow in popularity, with more than half a million having been built around the world, with many still in use. Among the largest are the Seagaia Ocean Dome in Japan, and the Eden Project in England (below). His smallest design statement? Well, it wasn’t actually his, but a form of carbon that is shaped like a geodesic dome was named in his honour, in 1985. If you enjoyed this design article, take a look at the many others in our Great Design Monday archive!