Story: Michael Stewart • Illustration: Cole Gerst In 1920, Buckminster Fuller began documenting his life in 15-minute intervals. He’d continue doing so until his death 63 years later. The collection is known as the Dymaxion Chronofile, and it’s a comprehensive chronological documentation of Fuller’s life. It includes detailed notes and sketches, incoming and outgoing correspondence, and even minutiae like his dry cleaning bills. At more than two hundred thousand pages (or 270 linear feet), the Dymaxion Chronofile makes Buckminster Fuller one of the most documented human beings of all time. And yet the Chronofile, now housed at Stanford University Library, is very rarely how people discover Fuller. “I was trying to design some furniture and studying geometry a few years back, and his name kept popping up. So I started reading more and more about him, and I got so fascinated with him that I dropped the furniture project entirely and just dove into this book,” says Cole Gerst, author and illustrator of Buckminster Fuller: Poet of Geometry. “He's so multi-dimensional.”

Fuller is perhaps best known for the popularization of the geodesic dome, a term he coined for the spherical architectural oddity. While not the dome’s inventor, Fuller’s experiments and mathematical analysis of the structure did earn him the...US patent in 1954. His research was motivated by an effort to solve housing. “That's the type of man he was. He really strived to buck the system and make housing cheap, fast, and affordable. He saw people suffering, and he saw homelessness. He actually had a child die due to bad living conditions. That was kind of his inspiration to do this,” says Gerst. “We are called to be architects of the future, not its victims.”

An entirely original and somewhat oddball design for which Fuller is known is the Dymaxion Car. Inspired by the fuselage of an airplane, the vehicle was called a 4D Transport when it was conceived in 1928. Fuller later rebranded the vehicle using the term Dymaxion—a portmanteau for dynamic, maximum, and tension, which he’d go on to apply to many of his inventions. Fuller imagined the car, featured at the Chicago World’s Fair in 1933 and 1934, as an Omni-Media-Transport. In other words, man’s first step towards a flying car. Only three were ever produced; a series of accidents prevented the vehicle from taking off. “Some of his designs were more or less failures. The Dymaxion Car was just way ahead of its time,” Gerst says.

In an interview with Playboy in 1972, Fuller recalled, “In 1927 I had said, ‘How many years ahead will I have to go before anything and everything that people are now exploiting becomes obsolete?’ I figured that if I could get out beyond the point where anyone’s interests were being threatened by what I was doing, everyone would leave me alone and I could really operate.” He continued, “I saw that if I could go 50 years ahead, everybody would leave me alone. And that’s exactly the way it happened. I was allowed to do anything I wanted.” For Fuller, 1927 was a significant year. While still reeling from the death of his first daughter in 1922, Fuller’s second daughter Allegra was born. Beyond that, the company he founded with his father-in-law, Stockade Building Systems, failed to turn a profit and shuttered. Fuller lost his job as president, and took to drinking. While walking along Lake Michigan one night, Fuller contemplated suicide. In his depressed state of mind, he considered how the insurance payment could quickly resolve his family’s financial woes. But standing at the shore, Fuller instead experienced an epiphany. As he tells it, he realized that he did not belong to himself, but rather to the universe. He did not have the right to eliminate himself. And thus, Fuller resolved to embark upon "an experiment, to find what a single individual can contribute to changing the world and benefiting all humanity." But Fuller’s experiment actually began 32 years earlier in July of 1895, when he was born in Milton, Massachusetts. Much of his childhood was spent on an island off the coast of Maine. As a boy he was a tinkerer, and by the age of 12 he had invented an alternative rowing system for boats that allowed one to push to row—essentially an inverted, underwater umbrella. Fuller attended Milton Academy, and then studied at Harvard until he was expelled for “carousing.” He ultimately re-enrolled at Harvard, but was expelled again, this time for "irresponsibility and lack of interest." Fuller married his wife Anne Hewlett in 1917. Around the same time, he enlisted in the Navy to serve in World War I. He would go on to invent a sort of winch that could fish early airplanes, and their pilots, up out of the water. Gerst says, “His time in the Navy was a really big influence for him. He was around ships, and the way ships were designed—the sails, and the mast, and the tension of the ropes—that all really worked into his designs later on. Also, the mass-producing of parts, molded and pressed metal, that all influenced him.” For all the influence the Armed Forces had on Fuller, he ultimately returned the favor. According to a TIME magazine feature published in 1964, “the famed domes of Bucky Fuller have covered more square feet of the earth than any other single kind of shelter. U.S. Marines have lived and worked in them from Antarctica to Okinawa.” And the private sector benefited as well. The article continues, “More than 50 companies have taken out licenses to make them in the U.S. alone. The small domes are light enough to be lifted by helicopter, and they practically build themselves.”

Ironically, the impact of the dome would eclipse Fuller’s own housing effort, known as the Dymaxion House. Inspired in part by the grain silos of the midwest, the house was the embodiment of Fuller’s “do more with less” ideal. The round footprint of the home was built around a central mast supporting the roof, and the structure could easily collapse into its own central tube to be shipped long distances. It was made of aluminum – expensive at the time, but a material which Fuller recognized the potential of for its weight, strength and durability. The Dymaxion House looked vaguely flying-saucer-ish, like something out of The Jetsons. And that aesthetic is appropriate when you consider the home was designed to be produced in the no-longer-in-use aircraft manufacturing plants abundant after World War II. (The U.S. Army actually commissioned Fuller to send earlier units, manufactured in Wichita, Kansas, overseas during the war.) The house would have been affordable, transportable, and energy efficient. But only two complete Dymaxion House prototypes were ever produced owing to the fact that Fuller was a perfectionist. He refused to allow what he ultimately considered an unfinished design to be manufactured at scale.