Date/place of birth:
12 July 1895
Milton, Massachusetts
Date/place of death:
1 July 1983
Los Angeles, California
Relationship to the college:
Guest Faculty
1948 Summer Session in the Arts
Director and Guest Faculty
1949 Art Institute
Profession:
Inventor
Engineer
Lecturer INTERNAL LINKS
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When Chicago
architect Bertrand Goldberg, who had agreed to teach at the 1948
summer session at Black Mountain, had to cancel at the last minute,
he recommended Buckminster Fuller as a replacement. Despite Albers’s
reservations about inviting an unknown person at the last minute, he
extended the invitation, and Fuller arrived two weeks after the
session opened. Only two days later, Albers wrote to Goldberg
thanking him for sending Fuller, who the previous evening had given
a three-hour lecture. The college hoped he would return.
In 1948 Fuller was at a turning point in his life. His Dymaxion
Dwelling Unit (Wichita House), though hailed as a low-cost solution
to the postwar housing crisis, had, like his previous Dymaxion
inventions, never reached production. In the meantime, he had
immersed himself in a study of the geometry of geodesics, a term
that describes an arc of intercrossing great circles on a spherical
form. His first application of this geometry was the Dymaxion World
Map – a map which when flattened minimized the distortion of land
and water masses. The map received a patent in 1946. |
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Buckminster Fuller, 1948. Photograph by Hazel Larsen Archer. The
dome in the upper left corner is the model for the "supine" dome.
Permission Erika Zarow. |
The second application of
geodesic geometry to a specific project was the creation of hemispherical
domes which could be used as houses or span vast areas. The project for
the summer of 1948 was construction of his first dome based on geodesic
geometry. When the dome of Venetian blind strips did not rise as
predicted, it was christened the Supine Dome. (Supine
Dome)
The summer at Black
Mountain was Fuller's first teaching experience and it took place at a
critical moment in his career. Most of the community sat in on his classes
and students as well as many faculty were captivated not only by his
presentation of geodesic geometry but also by his vision for a world in
which technology would provide solutions to the worlds problems of
housing, hunger and other dilemmas. Among the students officially
registered in Fuller's class were four who would become architects and designer/builders: Albert
Lanier, Lu Lubroth, Warren Outten, and Paul Williams as well as a young
art student from Oregon, Kenneth Snelson.
The summer at Black Mountain was one of the college’s most successful. The
guest faculty included, besides Fuller, John Cage, Merce Cunningham,
Willem de Kooning, Richard Lippold, Edgar Kaufmann, Jr., and Beaumont
Newhall. Besides teaching his class in architecture, Fuller played the
role of the Baron Medusa in the production of Erik Satie’s Le Piège de
Méduse directed by a student Arthur Penn.
Fuller spent the winter teaching at the Institute of Design in Chicago
where he lived with Warren Outten and Mary Phelan Outten (Bowles), two
Black Mountain students from the 1948 summer.
At Black Mountain over the 1948-49 winter a crisis culminated in the
resignations of Theodore Dreier, the last of the college founders, along
with Josef and Anni Albers and other members of the arts faculty. On the
recommendation of Josef Albers, the remaining faculty asked Fuller to
return to direct the 1949 summer session. Fuller accepted and invited as
summer faculty Chicago friends and colleagues: Emerson and Diana Woelffer,
John and Jano Walley, and two Indian dancers, Vashi and Pra-Veena. He also
brought a group of students, his “Twelve Disciples” (Black Mountain
designation): Louis Caviani, Arthur Boericke, Eugene Godfrey, Mary Jo
Slick Godfrey, Joseph Manulik, Alan Lindsay, Jeffrey Lindsay, Ysidore
Martinez, Donald Richter, Robert Richter, Masato Nakagawa, and Harold
Young.
The plan for the summer was to continue work on the Autonomous Dwelling
Facility with a Geodesic Structure which Fuller and his students had
designed at the Institute of Design. He brought with him a small model
showing the dome and enclosed house. The dome, which could be collapsed
and moved, provided a controlled environment; the house could also be
collapsed into a trailer-like form and transported. The project for the
summer was to make and test an double-walled plastic cover for the dome. (Autonomous
Dwelling Unit)
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The second project was to cast fibreglass forms for a
different dome. Each form was
to have a compound curvature (both concave and complex). A plaster mold
was made and then laid with fibreglass cloth laminated with resin.
Unfortunately, in the heat and humidity of the summer, the fibreglass
would not dry, and the project was abandoned.
Students (left to
right): Joseph Manulik, Eugene Godfrey, Mary Jo Godfrey, Jerry
Levy.
Photograph Kenneth
Snelson. |
Fuller’s two summers at
Black Mountain were to have far-reaching influence. Among other things, he
attributed his considerable success in lecturing to Arthur Penn, a young
student who was later to become a successful director of film and stage.
Penn had used techniques to help Fuller forget himself and assume the role of another character. The
friendships formed in the summer of 1948 with John Cage, Merce Cunningham,
Ruth Asawa, Theodore and Barbara Dreier, and Josef and Anni Albers were to
last a life-time. The Institute of Design students were to form the core
of those involved in the further development of Fuller's domes.
Among the visitors in the summer of 1948 was James Fitzgibbon who had
taught with Henry Kamphoefner at the University of Oklahoma. Kamphoefner
had been invited to head the newly formed School of Architecture
(presently, School of Design) at the North Carolina State College of
Agriculture and Engineering (presently, North Carolina State University)
in Raleigh, North Carolina. Fitzgibbon was to join him there. As part of
his program to modernize and revitalize the curriculum, Kamphoefner
planned to invite esteemed guest lecturers. Fitzgibbon recommended Fuller,
and Fuller gave his first lectures in Raleigh in March 1949. In later
years faculty assisted Fuller with technological and design assistance for
the domes. James Fitzgibbbon was a Fellow in the Fuller Research
Foundation, and in 1955 he started his own firm Synergetics Inc. in
Raleigh. (David Louis Sterrett Brook, Henry Leveke Kamphoefner, the
Modernist, Dean of the North Carolina State University School of Design
1948-1972 © Draft manuscript, May 1, 2007)
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