Buckminster Fuller, Dymaxion House, 1945–1946.

Elaine de Kooning (center) and students Ray Johnson (right foreground) and Albert Lanier (far right foregound) work on Buckminster Fuller's Supine Dome, as Fuller (background, in glasses) looks on.

Buckminster Fuller's Dymaxion Car

"The things to do are: the things that need doing, that you see need to be done, and that no one else seems to see need to be done."

Fuller inside his Geodesic Dome in 1949.

Inspired by Bucky Fuller’s geodesic domes, the team behind Coopus Maximus arranged plywood between six metal hinges according to a prototype originally built in cardboard.

Its triangulation evokes a playful spirit of Bucky Fuller, as does its idea of shelter temporality -- which can be paralleled to Fuller’s ‘Lightful Houses’ or even his Dymaxion House and Car in the 1930s. According to N55, the Walking House was directly inspired by the traditional nomadic culture and horse carriages of the Romani people.

Your Private Sky: R. Buckminster Fuller: Discourse by Joachim Krausse and Claude Lichtenstein (Lars Müller Publishers, 1999). Take a close look at one of the greatest visionaries of the 20th century.

The uppermost longhouse of the VitraHaus opens onto a balcony. This view overlooks Gehry's factory and Buckminster Fuller's Dome.

Geodesic domes were first popularized by R. Buckminster Fuller in the mid-twentieth century, but the extremely strong and stable structures have since been developed into sustainable, wind-resistant models. Oregon Dome produces wind and hurricane resistant geodesic dome kits in thousands of plans, sizes, and shapes. Each can easily be built by the customers themselves, no special equipment necessary.

Buckminster Fuller

"Make the world work, for 100% of humanity, in the shortest possible time, through spontaneous cooperation, without ecological offense or the disadvantage of anyone." While Fuller’s ultimate goal was audacious, the idea of a real-time simulation in the ‘60s, accessible to before widespread access to computing, was just somewhat less ambitious. Fuller’s game—so-called to be accessible to everyone—was a further expansion of his Spaceship Earth philosophy, and is currently being utilized as a model by the O.S. Earth Institute. (Pictured: Bucky's Time cover from 1964.)

The March 1, 1943 issue of Life magazine included one of publishing’s more intriguing fold-outs; the first example of Buckminster Fuller’s Dymaxion Map. Less outlandish today, in an age of Feltron and infographic overload, Fuller’s fold-out projection was an outlier that raised serious philosophical and political points. With no fixed direction and less distortion than then-current maps, the Dymaxion Map sought to do away with judgements based on size and position, and make the underlying point that we’re all together on spaceship Earth. Fuller deliberately presented humanity as "one island, in one ocean," so we could better face our common problems together.

Buckminster Fuller Dymaxion House

Buckminster Fuller, Wichita House

Buckminster Fuller dome transport

Cloud Structure, Buckminster Fuller

Buckminster Fuller, Fly Eye Dome

R. Buckminster Fuller holds up a Tensegrity sphere in 1979.

Our Fuller cocktail table's sculptural shape is inspired by mid-century designs. Thick slabs of wood are carved by master woodworkers into fluid shapes with rounded bull-nose edges, giving Fuller a stunning silhouette. #furniture #madeinamerica

Isolated Building Studies: Fuller Park

R. Buckminster Fuller is credited with inventing the geodesic dome, and designing over 3000 domes

Buckminster Fuller's Montreal Biosphère. Photo via Flickr/Muninn

Buckminster Fuller with his Dymaxion Can and Fly Eye Dome

Progressive thinkers like Buckminster Fuller have been trying to "futurize" our mobility for decades. Fuller's 11-seat Dymaxion never made it past the concept stage, but it serves as a reminder that the multi-passenger car-sharing concept is not new. © Gregory Gibbons, Courtesy Ivorypress Dymaxion

I love the nearly baroque details of this poster depicting Buckminster Fuller's Epcot's Spaceship Earch in Orlando, Florida.

Fuller, Overby, and Chay smoothed out such irregularities with custom millwork wrapping the planes. The bed is the “Vevelstad

Piet Oudolf's garden framed by Herzog & de Meuron's VitraHaus and the Buckminster Fuller Dome on the Vitra Campus at Weil am Rhein.

Herzog and de Meuron's VitraHaus, which recently celebrated its 10th anniversary, is connected to the Buckminster Fuller dome via Oudolf's natural landscape.

The firm and its team of volunteers fabricated the Buckminster Fuller–esque dome out of 450 recycled umbrellas.

Desk Lamp: Fuller Brush Man by Garret & Garage Brass, walnut, leather, rawhide lampshade

The ends of the longhouse structures feature large glass windows and the very top one opens onto a balcony that overlooks the Vitra campus. The white dome was designed by Buckminster Fuller and built in Detroit, Michigan, in 1978 before going up for sale in 2000, at which time Vitra purchased it and shipped it to Weil-am-Rhein. Frank Gehry designed the factory in the background as well as entrance gate and building that houses the Vitra Design Museum.

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.

A tribute to the late visionary architect Richard Buckminster Fuller, the Geodesic Installation at Premiere Vision Exhibition in Paris debuted in 2009.

To help showcase America’s achievements at the 1967 World’s Fair in Montreal (and potentially distract crowds from the UK pavilion, manned by hostesses sporting the newly popular miniskirt), the U.S. government recruited Buckminster Fuller to design a geodesic dome. The choice proved inspired; more than 5 million traveled to the glittering American pavilion, encased in a clear acrylic cover, to see myriad displays, such as Apollo spacecraft, While it proved eye-catching during the Expo, the cover also proved extremely flammable; a fire reduced the dome to a mere steel skeleton in 1976. In a meaningful tribute to Fuller’s legacy, the site has since been turned into an environmental museum.

Buckminster Fuller's Fly's Eye Dome with Sunbrella pillows. The exhibition "Exteriors" will be on view at LongHouse Reserve through October 4, 2014.