Don ZanFagna is the most fascinating technological soothsayer you’ve never heard of. Last year, when the artist/architect/engineer passed away, he left behind a basement full of boxes and crates stuffed with ideas that were well ahead of their time.

Sketched into dozens of notebooks and painted onto canvases were concepts for personal computers, scanners, and a little rectangular device whose functionality bears a striking resemblance to a Kindle (“all the world’s books in the palm of your hand” he wrote in the ‘70s). There were eery drawings predicting something going awry at the World Trade Center towers, collages filled with cyborgs and innumerable architectural renderings of sustainable living structures he called Pulse Domes.

>Sketched into dozens of notebooks and painted onto canvases were concepts for personal computers and scanners.

In his prime, ZanFagna was a dizzyingly prolific multi-hyphenate. He exhibited in museums like the Whitney and LACMA. He hung out with Andy Warhol, Yoko Ono and John Lennon. He designed the Rutgers School of Art and was a beloved professor at the school. By all measures he was was a successful artist, and yet, he’s barely Google-able.

“He’s one of those people who slipped through the cracks,” says Peter Falk, lead curator at Rediscovered Masters, a platform for highlighting the work of forgotten artists. “He was clearly a genius but purposefully chose to step out of the art market and not compete in that rat race.”

Falk along with Studio Vendome in New York City has curated a show highlighting a couple dozen of ZanFagna’s works. Looking at ZanFagna’s pieces is like rifling through an impeccably maintained time capsule from someone trying to predict what 2015 might look like. And in a way, that’s exactly what it is.

Insanely Varied Talents

ZanFagna was many things: An engineering-turned-art major, a star quarterback at Michigan who was drafted by the San Francisco 49ers to play football while at the very same time courted by the Brooklyn Dodger, Boston Red Sox New York Yankees to play pro baseball. He was a fighter pilot in the Korean War, a Fulbright scholar in Rome, an environmental activist who helped found Earth Day.

But really, you could probably just call ZanFagna a futurist. Much of his work is an artistically rendered warning about what might happen if we don’t respect the environment, technology and each other. He captured many of these thoughts on paper, which now hang on the gallery walls. “I started doing it because I couldn’t hold onto all the goddamn things that were going through my head,” he recalled during an interview from 2011. “It became a habit.”

You get the sense that much of his work is almost stream of consciousness, a reflexive outpouring of his ideas, of which he had many. “If I don’t write in this notebook, I’ll go nuts!” he wrote decades ago during a particularly tumultuous period where his Infra/Ultra Architectural Foundation was hitting snags with its, admittedly outlandish, architectural ideas.

>“If I don’t write in this notebook, I’ll go nuts!” he wrote decades ago.

A Pioneer of Sustainable Thinking

ZanFagna had developed the architecture studio to explore the future of sustainable housing. “We’re going to grow our houses someday,” he said. “We’re only a short step away before we’ll plant some things in the ground...we’ll have a house of some kind.” This vision was manifested in bubbled structures he called Pulse Domes. They borrow from the same underlying geometric principles of Buckminster Fuller’s geodesic dome, only ZanFagna’s renderings were more wild, drawing on natural structures like cave systems, termite mounds and beehives. Their main feature is a stretched chlorophyll membranes which would allow the structure to thrive on organic processes.

You see that same idealism in his musings about technology. He designed two Micro-Max systems, a series of prototyped objects that were something of an apocalyptic survival kit in case things went south. There’s the previously mentioned Kindle device, a scanner, a pack of seeds gathered from around the world, a DNA mixpack, and so on.

ZanFagna was musing on some pretty forward thinking stuff. So why did he fade into the background? “It just wasn’t something he bragged about,” says Joanna White, ZanFagna’s niece. “I mean, to not even know he was in the Whitney…”

ZanFagna was content to spend his time and energy on his work. Money, fame and recognition are the goal for some artists, but for ZanFagna they sucked time away from the most important aspect of art: Actually doing it. “There are people would sit in this chair never see a thing out there that would be worth doing,” he said in a documentary. “There isn’t a thing out there I couldn’t stop doing.”

Don ZanFagna, The Manhattan Project, Cyborgs and Pulse Domes will be at Studio Vendome through June 20.