At the time that the firm Foster Associates was starting out, around 1967, the Argentinian designer and critic Tomás Maldonado conceived a sophisticated theory of environmental design that he would put down in La speranza progettuale (published in the United States in 1972 as Design, Nature, and Revolution). In one of the most controversial lines of this text, Maldonado criticized Buckminster Fuller and his proposal to cover part of Manhattan with an immense translucent bell that would completely neutralize the island meteorologically. The main reproach was directed at the proposal’s lack of information on specific environmental conditions of that artificial habitat. In Maldonado’s opinion, the project portrayed Fuller as an engineer with admirable imagination but also dangerous ingenuity in matters of ecology. On a more general plane, this critique was a rejection of Fuller’s technocratic utopianism, by which the best use of resources through ever more efficient technologies would end up making politics superfluous, replaced by design...[+]