Visionary Buckminster Fuller’s lasting impact on the Bay Area

We’re not working in geodesic domes, driving three-wheeled aerodynamic cars or living in round aluminum “Dymaxion” houses. But that doesn’t mean Buckminster Fuller — who, in the 20th century, devised these futuristic projects and thousands more — has faded from view.

Northern California was one place where his visionary influence took root during his lifetime (1895-1983) and where it continues to thrive, as “The Utopian Impulse: Buckminster Fuller and the Bay Area,” at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art through July 29, makes clear.

The show brings together artifacts ranging from the Whole Earth Catalog, North Face tents and the “Plastiki” boat made of discarded water bottles to the Dymaxion-car blueprint (Dymaxion was a brand name Fuller used for several of his designs), It’s a fascinating collage of plans, photographs, film and building models.

Smart design

Fuller’s most popular design, the geodesic dome, is everywhere — from colorful versions on playgrounds to Montreal’s Expo 1967 to Florida’s Epcot Center. But the mechanics of his projects are less important to museum exhibit curator Jennifer Dunlop Fletcher than his broad vision and passionate belief that smarter design could help change the world.

“In past considerations of him, people were a little too invested in doing exactly what Fuller proposed, rather than getting the bigger picture — his call for a design revolution,” Fletcher says. I think what resonates today is his drive, the sense that there are design solutions to some of the world’s problems.”

The exhibit isn’t a Fuller career retrospective, but there’s plenty about him in its introduction, which includes a two-hour excerpt from his 42-hour film, “Everything I Know,” and 450 entries from his “Synergetic Dictionary,” culled from the 22,000 of them that were typed on index cards.

There are also 13 big images from Fuller’s portfolio “Inventions: Twelve Around One,” and photographs of massive geodesic domes — both surviving (in Montreal) and decaying (in Baton Rouge, La.). These lead museumgoers to the heart of Fletcher’s premise:

“The Bay Area attracts dreamers, progressives, nonconformists and inventors,” she states in a text display at the show. “Buckminster Fuller was all of these. Though he never lived in the Bay Area, he lectured here often, and his ideas spawned many regional experiments in the realm of technology, engineering and sustainability.”

While three-quarters of the exhibit comes from the museum’s own collection, it also draws upon the massive Fuller archive — including 4,000 hours of film — acquired by Stanford University Libraries in 1999. The Stanford material includes drawings, plans and items such as a 1966 Popular Science magazine cover touting a “low cost sun dome you can build easily,” right in your own backyard.

From a photo of a 384-foot-wide railroad car repair dome in Louisiana (since demolished), the exhibit funnels down to a miniature model of the “Freedome,” a tent design devised by Bay Area resident Bob Gillis in 1975 to transform the geodesic dome into camping gear. At the center of the gallery is its successor, North Face’s full-scale “tensegrity” model, called Oval Intentions and made from the kind of ripstop nylon used in parachutes. It addresses another of Fuller’s ideas, dating as far back as the 1920s, to convert military production to civilian use. (A film clip shows Fuller visiting North Face in Berkeley in 1981.)

The museum revisits another dome project, which took place at Pacific High School in the Santa Cruz Mountains in the 1960s. At this experimental institution, one of the students’ first projects was building geodesic domes to be used as classrooms.

More fanciful are Fuller’s drawings for a silo-shaped “undersea island,” so elaborately detailed that it might have been inspired by Jules Verne. Decidedly modern is a 2005-06 project by IwamotoScott Architecture that envisions a “jellyfish house” on San Francisco Bay, which could filter toxic substances from the water.

Colorful drawings and two elaborate models convey a visionary, never-built project by San Francisco’s Ant Farm design collective. The idea was to develop a geodesic-domed Convention City in Texas in time for the 1976 U.S. Bicentennial, with an arena for real-time political debates. The entire nation could vote on critical social and political issues — just as “American Idol” viewers do for their favorite contestants now.

Influenced others

Fuller’s concept of sustainability is linked to environmental activist David de Rothschild’s Plastiki, a catamaran made entirely of recycled materials and kept afloat by some 12,500 plastic water bottles. It sailed from San Francisco to Sydney, Australia, in 2010 and is now back in its home port.

The Whole Earth Catalog, which reflected Fuller’s concept of the self-sufficient life, was published for about four years, starting in 1968. A selection of issues is displayed, as well as film of the 1972 “demise party” in San Francisco.

Beyond the Bay

Fletcher and the museum staff have searched beyond the Bay Area, too, rediscovering an agency created by Jerry Brown during his first stint as California governor, the Office of Appropriate Technology. From 1976 to 1983, it promoted solar energy, farmers markets, bicycling programs and the “whole life systems household.”

Despite the complexity of some of the architectural designs and blueprints on view here, Fletcher says Fuller championed simple solutions. “The geodesic dome should be put together,” she says, “with one tool and one hand behind your back.”

Contact Robert Taylor at features@mercurynews.com.