Location: US 70 (State Street) west of Cragmont Rd. in Black Mountain
County: Buncombe
Original Date Cast: 2013
Buckminster Fuller, inventor, architect, engineer, educator, and environmental advocate, was born on July 12, 1895, in Massachusetts. Twice dismissed from Harvard University, he never completed his formal education, yet he was the recipient of 47 honorary doctorates. Following a failed business venture with his father-in-law, when Fuller was in his early thirties, he found himself broke and unemployed with no prospects. He determined to devote himself to solving global sustainability issues such as housing, transportation, environmental damage, and poverty, by doing “more with less.” Never limited to a particular field, he considered himself a “comprehensive anticipatory design scientist.”
In the summer of 1948 Fuller accepted an invitation by former Bauhaus artist Josef Albers to teach at Black Mountain College, a progressive school that was a perfect match for the visionary. It was Fuller’s first extended teaching assignment, and, although he arrived as a virtual unknown, as the summer progressed, many of the students and faculty, and even members of the community, had begun to sit in on his marathon thought-provoking lectures.
Fuller had been considering forms of shelter that used less material and energy than traditional buildings and his goal for the summer was to construct a 48-foot dome based on “energetic-synergetic geometry.” He bought the best material for the project that he could afford at the time—aluminum venetian blind strips. He was fairly sure that the strips would not be strong enough for the dome to stand, and his experiment was, indeed, literally a flop. Dubbed the “Supine Dome,” the project was part of the process of experimentation. As Fuller would say, “You succeed when you stop failing.”
The next summer Fuller and his students and colleagues at Black Mountain College erected the prototype of the “Autonomous Dwelling Facility with a Geodesic Structure” with more suitable materials. It would not be long before Fuller’s geodesic domes would gain worldwide attention and acceptance. Ford Motor Company commissioned the Ford Rotunda Dome in 1953 and the U.S. military began to use “radomes” to house radar antennas.
Fuller’s daughter, Allegra Fuller Snyder, would later say, “For most of the rest of his life, Bucky taught at many, many hundreds of campuses, around the country, around the world—but it had all started at Black Mountain.” Fuller died in 1983. The following year, when experimental chemists discovered a carbon molecule in which the atoms formed a geodesic-like structure, they named it buckminsterfullerene.
References:
Vincent Katz, Black Mountain College: Experiment in Art (2002)
Mary Emma Harris, The Arts at Black Mountain College (1987)
Nancy B. Solomon, ed., Architecture: Celebrating the Past, Designing the Future (2008)
Buckminster Fuller Institute: https://www.bfi.org/about-bucky/buckys-big-ideas/geodesic-domes