Design Icon: 8 Works by Buckminster Fuller

German engineer Walter Bauersfeld can take credit for erecting the first geodesic dome in 1926, a replica of the night sky that glowed with nearly 5,000 stars. But Fuller’s work popularizing these hyper-efficient structures led to their mass adaptation around the world—more than 300,000 exist at last count. During a teaching stint at Black Mountain College from 1948-1949, Fuller refined synergetic geometry and the dome concept, utilizing a spherical arrangement of triangles to cover more space with less material. Bucky was soon creating domes for the U.S. military (covering, among other things, radar station in the Arctic Circle) and the Ford Motor Company, and popularizing the concept with worldwide audiences at the 1954 Milan Triennale.