I’ve often heard people say: ‘I wonder what it would feel like to be on board a spaceship,’ and the answer is very simple. What does it feel like? That’s all we have ever experienced. We are all astronauts on a little spaceship called Earth.” Buckminster Fuller

When I was a newly minted 23-year-old MIT Assistant Professor of Architecture in 1968, I was asked to give my first major presentation in a large, 2,000-person auditorium at Harvard, back-to-back with Thomas Hoving, who had just been named Director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. I was determined not to be nervous, but I knew my talk immediately followed his. And, as feared, at the end of his he told a joke that had the audience laughing so hard that I suddenly got stage fright for the first (and last) time of my life. Here’s the story he told.

Before being selected as the new director of the Met, Hoving had been New York City’s Chief Parks Commissioner (1966-67). The gist of his story was about moving from a local and unsophisticated organization to a worldly and cultured institution. His story characterized his board of other commissioners as an unworldly group to whom he proposed putting twenty gondolas in Central Park’s main pond. The discussion was apparently heated and deadlocked around cost, at which point one commissioner proposed: “Why don’t we just buy two, a male and female, and let them reproduce.” The Harvard audience exploded in laughter...[+]