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Join BFI for Park(ing) Day 2009!

parking day 2008

Friday, September 18th 9am-7pm
Bedford Ave and N. 10th Street
Brooklyn, NY


Come join The Buckminster Fuller Institute on Friday, September 18th as we participate in Park(ing) Day 2009, an international event that reclaims parking spots and transforms them into engaging, people-friendly public spaces for one day a year. These small, temporary public spaces provide a breath of relief from the auto-clogged reality of New York City, and aim to spark dialogue about our valuable public space and how we choose to use it. Our BFI spot, entitled The Buckminster Fuller Park, will be open all day for anyone that wants to stop by for some geodesic building, Fuller conversing, and general relaxation. We will also be handing out free fold-up Dymaxion Globes! Hope to see you there!

See more photos from last year's BFI park here

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Join BFI for the 2009 General Semantics Conference, September 11-13



September 11-13, 2009, Fordham University will host “Across the Generations: Legacies of Hope and Meaning”, an international conference sponsored by the Institute of General Semantics.

The three day conference features numerous keynote speakers, including a plenary talk by Dr. Michael Ben Eli of the Sustainability Laboratory, “The Cybernetics of Change, the Media and the Challenge of Sustainability” (Friday at 12:00 p.m.) and a panel session with BFI founder andf board member Jaime Snyder & BFI executive director Elizabeth Thompson, “Legacies of Hope and Meaning: Buckminster Fuller, Neil Postman, Alfred Korzybski and Marshall McLuhan” (Saturday at 11 a.m.).

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The 2009 Buckminster Fuller Challenge prize is awarded to MIT's Smart City Group in Chicago

2009 Challenge Winner
Left to right: Andres Sevtsuk, Dimitris Papanikolaou, William Lark Jr., Arthur Petron, Michael Chia-Liang Lin, Charles Guan, Ryan Chin. (Photo by Cassandra Davis)

June 6th, 2009: The second annual Buckminster Fuller Challenge prize was awarded to MIT's Smart Cities group for their winning project 'Sustainable Personal Mobility and Mobility on Demand'. The team of seven students received the Omni-Oculi prize sculpture and a check for $100,000. The ceremony at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago included presentations by the winning team, the runner-up project 'Dreaming New Mexico', represented by Kenny Ausubel of the Bioneers, and a panel discussion with 2009 jurors Bill Browning and Edie Farwell moderated by Susan Szenasy of Metropolis Magazine.

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JOIN US! for the Buckminster Fuller Challenge Conferring Ceremony on June 6th, 2009 at MCA Chicago

save the date

Join us for a weekend of celebration in Chicago, IL June 6th - 7th!
Click here for event details to date

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Student team from MIT wins the $100K Buckminster Fuller Challenge prize for their innovative urban mobility system

2009 Challenge Winner

Sustainable Personal Mobility and Mobility-on-Demand Systems (SPM/MoD), submitted by an interdisciplinary team of students at MIT has been selected as the winner of the prestigious 2009 Buckminster Fuller Challenge. The team will receive a $100,000 prize at a conferring ceremony on June 6th, 2009 at 2pm at The Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago followed by a reception and celebration featuring a presentation by design innovator Bruce Mau.

To learn more about the winner, the runner-up, and the honorable mentions visit: http://challenge.bfi.org

To read all the entries submitted to the 2009 Buckminster Fuller Challenge, visit the Idea Index.

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Entries to the 2009 Challenge published in the Idea Index



Wondering where breakthrough ideas addressing today's major crises are? Look no further, the entries to the 2009 Buckminster Fuller Challenge are now available for view in the Idea Index, an open-source database of solutions to the world's most pressing problems.

BFI at the Bronx Zoo's Earth Expo



April 2009, BFI was on site during the first annual Earth Expo at the Bronx Zoo with dozens of other organizations and companies, both local and international, to engage the public with issues of sustainability and conservation. Between distributing information about BFI and The Buckminster Fuller Challenge, we offered visitors a chance to get involved, physically, with Fuller's ideas through the construction of a newspaper geodesic dome.

Click here for more pictures from the event.

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BFI's 'Prototype' design and build program featured at events in New York City

Prototype

Launched in November 2008, BFI’s Prototype - a program bringing together local artists, designers & architects in the exploration of structure - meets monthly to engage in discussion, design and building new forms.

Prototype was commissioned to create structures for two recent events in New York City, click here to read more...