The genesis of the geodesic dome can be attributed to Buckminster Fuller’s ambitious quest to find order in the universe. Fuller was convinced that the Cartesian, orthogonal view of the world was fundamentally inaccurate. His search for, as he put it, “nature’s own coordinate system” led him on a lifetime journey of exploration of structure and process, one of whose paths led to his development of a three-way spherical grid and the invention of the geodesic dome. The geodesic dome, an icon of an avant-garde architecture of the 1950s and 1960s, was issued US Patent No. 2,682,235 on 29 June 1954. This brief history will attempt to familiarize the reader with Fuller’s intellectual exploration and show how it led to the invention of the geodesic dome...[+]