Rainbow Arch, 2001 / aluminum & stainless steel / 7 x 12.6 x 2.6 feet

from kennethsnelson.net

Q: Your work is often associated with the ideas of Buckminster Fuller. What was your relationship?

A: I was an art student just after World War II and I was attracted to the work of the Russian Constructivists and to the larger world of geometrical art that evolved worldwide in the first-half of the twentieth century. In the Summer of 1948, when I was twenty-one, Buckminster Fuller became a huge influence from the moment I met him at Black Mountain College in North Carolina. I went there from my home in Oregon to study only with Josef Albers the Bauhaus Master. Professor Fuller arrived for the summer session as a substitute for an architecture professor who withdrew at the last minute. It was Fuller's first teaching job.

His public lecture on the evening he arrived from New York was surprising and exhilarating, especially because we knew nothing about him and it was clear to all that his ideas were novel. He was not the celebrity that he later became. So in those short summer weeks virtually the entire small college, sixty or seventy people, decided to sign up and audit Bucky Fuller's class. I was assigned the role of class monitor.

Although his long lectures covered a menu of subjects, for me his presentation of three-dimensional geometry and its structural associations, delivered under the label "Energetic Geometry", was fresh, a bit mystical, and fascinating to all of us art-and-architecture students whose introduction to form was largely from the square-and-cube world of the Bauhaus. Even so, in his structure/geometry inventory there was no such thing as tensegrity; and the geodesic dome was then a pattern of thirty-one great circles surrounding a sphere, not the now familiar form based on the icosahedron.

All during the summer, the resident math professor Max Dehn softly protested that we students could have looked up all of "Bucky's" geometry right there in the math library, but Professor Fuller, superb salesman that he was, convinced us non-mathematical art students that he had discovered these marvelous geometrical relationships for the first time and for the good of humanity. But what he did add to it was his engineer's focus on the structural stability -- or not -- of the Platonic and Archimedean polyhedra - as well as an almost religious self invented doctrine which asserted that here resided the deepest secrets of nature, heretofore hidden from mankind. Whatever he claimed, he surely threw fresh light on the subject. It was this study and this sensibility, tying together form and structure, plus that strange mysticism which greatly affected me during my young Black Mountain summer sessions over fifty years ago. What Buckminster Fuller came away with in the following summer session, 1949, was work I had done at home that winter, an original idea, now called tensegrity.


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