The Utopian Impulse:Buckminster Fuller and the Bay Area

The Bay Area attracts dreamers, progressives, nonconformists, and designers. Buckminster Fuller was all of these, and though he never lived in San Francisco, his ideas spawned many local experiments in the realms of technology, engineering, and sustainability — some more successful than others. The first to consider Fuller's Bay Area design legacy, this exhibition features some of his most iconic projects, primarily drawn from the recently acquired print portfolio Inventions: Twelve Around One. The 13 works in the portfolio date from the late 1920s through the mid-1970s and include Fuller's 4D House, Geodesic Dome, World Game, and Dymaxion car, among other important inventions. The other half of the exhibition presents Bay Area endeavors inspired by Fuller's commingling of technology, ecology, and social responsibility, specifically projects concerned with improved living systems such as dwellings (temporary inflatable structures by Ant Farm and tents by The North Face and Sierra Designs); transportation (the Plastiki sailboat); and better access to information (Stewart Brand's Whole Earth Catalog and smart phones by Apple and Google). Fuller's radical idealism kept him from realizing most of his projects, and he never achieved the success he aspired to. Paradoxically, the view of Fuller as a nonconformist is exactly what links him to the many successful Bay Area innovators who aim for the kind of visionary thinking the designer has come to embody. San Francisco Museum of Modern Art