Luis Fernández-Galiano, Norman Foster   Richard Buckminster ‘Bucky’ Fuller (1895-1983) was an American genius who defied categorisation. He could be described as a green environmentalist, prophetic visionary, architect, mathematician, mapmaker and teacher, although he is most popularly kno

Luis Fernández-Galiano   4D Thinking: Light Works for the Planet Born in 1895 into a distinguished family of Massachusetts – which included Margaret Fuller, his grandaunt, a feminist and writer linked with the transcendentalist circles of Emerson and Thoreau –, Richard Buckm

Hsiao-Yun Chu   There is luck in everything. My luck is that I was born cross-eyed, and was ejected so frequently from the establishment that I was finally forced to either perish or to employ some of those faculties with which we are all endowed – the use of which

Allegra Fuller Snyder   Bucky, my father, Buckminster Fuller, was a great teacher and I think I was probably one of his first students. Whatever he was working on was of powerful, and central, concern for him. He did much of his work at home. As my own perambulations brough

Thomas T.K. Zung   In Milton, Massachusetts, around 1900, while other children were making square houses out of long sticks, Richard Buckminster Fuller, Jr., – ‘Bucky’, as he preferred to be called – was using toothpicks and dried peas to make triangle models. He had a

Mark Wigley   Buckminster Fuller produced some of the most radical projects ever seen, devoting much of his extraordinarily energetic life to exploring the question of the house. Yet it was one of his greatest achievements to have never really designed a house as

Norman Foster   The vast silver Zeppelin overhead Chicago was a truly awesome sight, stopping the citizens of the Windy City in their tracks and halting traffic. With a length of 236 meters and a diameter of 30, it was the equivalent of a typical American city block

Shoji Sadao   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

Deyan Sudjic   The Sainsbury Centre weighs 5,619 tons. Norman Foster knows that now, but on the day that Buckminster Fuller asked him the question, Foster had to go home and do some calculations.  “I wrote a letter back to him. I made some very interesting discover

Fred Turner   In 1965 Buckminster Fuller was 70 years old. Short, plump, bespectacled, and when he spoke in public, often clad in a three-piece suit with an honorary Phi Beta Kappa key dangling at its waist, Fuller looked like nothing so much as an early 20thcentu