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Buckminster Fuller's World SIGHTINGS MAY 16, 2009

The strange career of a would-be seer

By TERRY TEACHOUT

Chicago

Was modernism totalitarian? That's coming at it a bit high, but it's true that more than a few top-tier modernists were also one-size-fits-all system-mongers who thought the world would be improved if it were rebuilt from top to bottom -- so long as they got to draw up the plans. Just as Arnold Schoenberg wanted to scrap traditional harmony in favor of his 12-tone system of musical composition, so did Le Corbusier long to demolish the heart of Paris and turn it into an ultraefficient "machine for living" dominated by cookie-cutter high-rise apartment towers. So what if the rest of the world liked things the way they were? Send in the bulldozers anyway!

It isn't that these artists were especially bloodthirsty. While some would gladly have sent their opponents to the nearest guillotine, most operated on the rosy-colored assumption that sweet reason would be sufficient in and of itself to usher in a kinder, gentler millennium. Take R. Buckminster Fuller, who has been forgotten by the public at large but whose work is still well-known enough in intellectual circles to be the subject of a major museum exhibition. "Buckminster Fuller: Starting With the Universe," which opened in March at Chicago's Museum of Contemporary of Art after a successful run at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, is pulling in more than enough visitors to have had its run extended through Aug. 9. Most of them, I suspect, are starry-eyed idealists who see Fuller as an all-American visionary and share his roseate belief that "man can do anything he wants" with the world. I doubt they've thought overmuch about exactly how one might go about passing such miracles -- and neither did their idol.

Fuller, who died in 1983, had one of the most curious careers imaginable. He called himself a "comprehensive anticipatory design scientist," but only one of his creations, the geodesic dome, has caught on, and its instantly recognizable appearance (a geodesic dome is a spherical structure made out of triangles) is far better known than the man who invented it. For most of his life, he tinkered away at equally fascinating-looking inventions that rarely proved to be practical. His polygon-shaped Dymaxion House and teardrop-shaped Dymaxion Car were hailed as prophetic in the '30s, but no one was prepared to put them into production, and now they exist only as sketches and one-of-a-kind prototypes. Later on he expanded his vision to encompass city planning on the widest possible scale, going so far as to envision placing a climate-controlled geodesic dome over the whole of Manhattan.

If such schemes bring Frank Lloyd Wright to mind, there's a good reason: Fuller was a Wright-like figure, a high-octane utopian who believed in the life-enhancing potential of modern technology. The difference was that Fuller lacked Wright's ruthless determination. He was either incapable of or uninterested in following through on his ideas -- and he was, unlike Wright, the opposite of an aesthete. The Dymaxion Car and Dymaxion House are logical, even elegant, but not truly beautiful, and the closer you look at them, the less attractive they seem.

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On the other hand, Fuller's ambitions extended far beyond the creation of beautiful cars and houses. Not until the '60s did he find his footing as a public figure, and when he did it was not as a designer but a seer, a prophet of change who believed that "utopia is possible now." He specialized in marathon lectures that enthralled a generation of long-haired youngsters who sat at his feet as he preached the gospel of world-wide interdependence and universal bliss. "One hundred percent instead of 44% of humanity," he said, "should enjoy not only a high standard of living, but freedom of intellectual and physical initiative as well as educational advantage and travel embracing the whole Earth."

Peter Drucker, who knew and (up to a point) admired Fuller, wrote in "Adventures of a Bystander," his 1979 memoir, that listening to him talk was "like being in a verbal Jacuzzi -- a pool of warm, swirling water, relaxing yet constantly moving and challenging." Yet Drucker also noted that "no one ever remembers a word Bucky says. But nobody ever forgets the experience." All of which suggests that he was at heart a lapel-grabbing crank with a touch of genius, the kind who knows the One Best Way to do everything better than anyone else.

Not only did Buckminster Fuller think big, but he was sure that the only way to fix the world was by fixing every corner of it simultaneously. "We are not going to be able to operate our Spaceship Earth successfully, nor for much longer, unless we see it as a whole spaceship and our fate as common," he declared. "It has to be everybody or nobody." It seems never to have occurred to him that his all-or-none "solutions" to the world's problems could only be imposed from above by a totalitarian regime, which doubtless explains why they continue to appeal to brainy technocrats who are no less sure of their own ability to make Spaceship Earth a clean, well-lighted place. All they need is enough money -- and, sooner or later, enough guns.

Mr. Teachout, the Journal's drama critic, writes "Sightings" every other Saturday and blogs about the arts at www.terryteachout.com. Write to him at tteachout@wsj.com.

Printed in The Wall Street Journal, page W14

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