American engineer, inventor, designer, and self-described "comprehensive anticipatory design scientist"; author of an eccentric but influential body of thinking on architecture, resources, and planetary planning, and of the geodesic dome, the most widely built of his inventions and the principal vehicle by which his ideas reached a general audience.
Fuller was expelled from Harvard twice, worked in his father-in-law's construction firm, and reached a personal crisis in Chicago in 1927 that he later described as the decisive turn of his life: standing by Lake Michigan, contemplating suicide after the death of his daughter and the failure of his business, he resolved instead to treat his remaining life as an "experiment" in what one unknown individual could do on behalf of humanity. The projects that followed — the Dymaxion house (1928), the Dymaxion car (1933), the Dymaxion world map (1943), the geodesic dome (patented 1954) — share the premise that design can solve political problems by reducing the material cost of meeting human needs to a level at which rationing by wealth becomes unnecessary. "Utopia or oblivion," in the title of his 1969 book, was his characteristic framing.
The geodesic dome was widely built: the U.S. pavilion at Expo 67 in Montreal (preserved today as the Biosphère), the Climatron at the Missouri Botanical Garden, thousands of domestic and military structures across the world. Fuller's larger theoretical work — Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth (1969), I Seem to Be a Verb (1970), the two-volume Synergetics (1975, 1979) — argues for a planetary consciousness organized around resource efficiency, renewable energy, and global information flows. "Spaceship Earth," "ephemeralization" (doing more with less), and "dymaxion" passed into general use.
The scientific reception has been mixed — his mathematics is eccentric, and the domes leak famously — but the cultural influence has been large, especially on the environmental movement (the Whole Earth Catalog was deeply Fullerian), on systems thinking, on post-1960s architectural and product design, and on the conceptual vocabulary of "planetary" thinking. The 1985 discovery of the carbon allotrope C60, whose molecular shape is a geodesic sphere, was named buckminsterfullerene ("buckyballs") in his honor.
Fuller is on the graph as the earliest sustained articulation of planetary thinking: "Spaceship Earth," ephemeralization, the finite-resource framing that became the environmental movement's founding vocabulary. He is the engineer-designer end of a lineage that on the critical side runs through Carson, Berry, and Klein.