Buckminster Fuller

Buckminster Fuller (1895–1983) was twice expelled from Harvard before working as a mill mechanic and, during the First World War, a US Navy radio operator and crash-rescue boat commander. After his Stockade Building System company failed in the mid-1920s, he described a moment of crisis beside Lake Michigan in 1927 that redirected him toward what he called comprehensive design — “doing more with less” — a philosophy he named Dymaxion and extended into synergetics, his geometric account of how whole systems behave. He patented an improved geodesic dome in 1954, decades after Walther Bauersfeld’s original 1925 design, and went on to build thousands of them worldwide. In the summers of 1948 and 1949 he taught at Black Mountain College, where he worked alongside John Cage, before holding a research professorship at Southern Illinois University Carbondale from 1959 to 1975. He received 28 US patents and the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1983.