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Photo by Lucilla Marvel

On January 31st the Center for Spirituality and Sustainability in Edwardsville, IL gave Buckminster Fuller their annual Sustainability Award “in recognition of his prescient awareness of the urgent necessity of planetary stewardship, his courage and creativity in breaking through apparent limits to design possibilities, his moral and spiritual commitment to applying intelligence for the welfare of the earth and its inhabitants, and for the insights and inspiration inherent in the principles he articulated and the designs he instantiated.”

The award was accepted by BFI Board member Lucilla Marvel.
Download a pdf transcript of Lucilla’s remarks.

The AICA USA award for best architecture or design show will be presented to Buckminster Fuller: Starting with the Universe, curated by K. Michael Hays and Dana Miller and appearing at the Whitney Museum of American Art last year. Second place goes to Design and the Elastic Mind, organized by Paola Antonelli (who participated in a panel discussion at last year’s Buckminster Fuller Challenge conferring ceremony at the Center for Architecture) at the Museum of Modern Art.

The International Association of Art Critics/USA bestows its annual awards honoring artists, museums and curators at the Guggenheim Museum in New York City on Mar. 2, 2009.

To inquire about attending the awards ceremony please send an email to aicausaprogram (at) gmail (dot) com

From ARTFORUM.com...

A Global Outlook
A self-proclaimed “comprehensive anticipatory design scientist,” R. Buckminster Fuller always had his sights fixed firmly on the future—and a quarter century after his death, it is his future we now inhabit. Our present, as architectural historian Sean Keller notes in his overview of Fuller’s career, is not exactly the one that Fuller imagined, but at a time of skyrocketing oil prices, global warming, and tense geopolitics, his prognostications—if not all his design solutions—seem cannier than ever before.

Part inventor, part architect, part engineer, and part ecologist, Fuller left us a sprawling inheritance that Artforum assesses here, on the occasion of his current traveling retrospective. In addition to Keller’s survey, architect Thom Mayne, artist Fritz Haeg, and architectural critics Michael Wang, Kevin Pratt, and Helene Furján offer distinctive takes on Fuller’s impact on realms ranging from buildings to biology and beyond. Keller, Mayne, and Wang’s evaluations are available online. For the rest, check out the November issue of Artforum.

thirteen.org

The Buckminster Fuller symposium at Cooper Union in New York City on September 12th and 13th was a resounding success! The sold-out event represented the culmination of the Whitney Museum's exhibit, Buckminster Fuller Starting with the Universe, which travels to the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago in March 2009.

Many thanks to extrememediastudies.org for the images above. To read their thoroughly blogged overview of the event click here.

We look forward to the Whitney Museum's posting of the video of the event in its entirety in the coming months.

Allegra Fuller Snyder's moving talk served as the touchstone for the entire event. Click "Read more" for the full text of Allegra's address.

by Thomas T. K. Zung

reprinted from BFI newsletter Trimtab, Vol.17 no.2

On July 12th, 2004, Fuller's 109th birthday, the U.S. Postal Service is releasing a commemorative Buckminster Fuller Stamp! 2004 was chosen as the year to release the stamp as it marks the 50th anniversary of Fuller's patent for the geodesic dome. The image by artist Boris Artzybasheff originally appeared on the cover of TIME magazine on January 10th, 1964. Special thanks go out to BFI Board Member Thomas Zung, who spearheaded this effort for a commemorative USPS stamp. Read below about how the stamp came to be.

Global Thinking


Buckminster Fuller was one of our world’s first futurists and global thinkers. His headquarters, the “Inventory of World Resources, Human Trends and Needs,” contained the findings of his extensive global research. Beginning in the 30s, Fuller correlated this data and made a number of important and accurate predictions about the future of our society. His work in this regard paved the way for contemporary trend watchers like Tom Peters, John Naisbitt, and Alvin Toffler.

In October 2004,  SNEC's Chris Fearnly began selecting, posting and periodically updating a collection of  "Buckminster Fuller In The News" articles which discuss Fuller or related subjects (geodesic domes, synergetics, fullerene chemistry, etc). Some articles highlight people who were influenced by Fuller but otherwise do not discuss Fuller or his work. Great work and many thanks Chris!
» click here to see the latest updates

from Jay Baldwin

A number of people have asked me, “How could Bucky believe in God and still claim to be a scientist? Would he likely agree with what has recently been dubbed, “Intelligent Design?” To answer this without falling into the ego-trap of attempting to mind-read Bucky, I hereby present some early quotes taken from the Synergetics Dictionary, E.J. Applewhite. Editor, (Garland, 1986), Synergetics 1 and Synergetics 2, by Buckminster Fuller and edited by E.J Applewhite. ”. and conclude with his final words on the subject taken from his last book, Cosmography, Kiyoshi Kuromiya, Adjuvant (Macmillan, 1992).

by Vinay Gupta from worldchanging.com

A Video News Report from 2030.

Anchor: Touting their movement as a combination of the economic theories of Mahatma Gandhi and the political science of Buckminster Fuller the Unplugged have now reduced the GDP of the United States of America by 20% over their 15 year programme.

Opponents of the movement call Unplugging an unscientific and cult-like political movement, but proponents say that "Unplugging" was the best decision they ever made. Let's hear from Jack Huston, a former investment banker...

from 'Interior Design' — August 2006 — Designers innovative pieces are informed by the works by Fuller, Safdie, and Van Der Rohe

In the 19th century, Chicago architect Louis Sullivan coined the phrase "form follows function." Today, the Chicago Furniture Designers Association borrowed the still-relevant words to dub its 2006 exhibit. "Form Follows Form, Architecturally Inspired Furniture," which was held September 21—October 28, presented the creations of Chicago designers that honor the tradition and the institution of architecture itself. Suddenly, the act of building furniture took on a whole new meaning, as designers integrated architectural concepts into their pieces. The show was held in the Upper Level Sculpture Gallery in the Paul V. Galvin Library at the Illinois Institute of Technology

Some of the entries in the juried show included a Buckminster Fuller-inspired chair by John Kriegshauser that is so structurally efficient, it weighs less than 3 pounds but can support a large man; an infinitely reconfigurable coffee table by Robert Frazier that takes it cues from Moshe Safdie; Dolly Spragins's whimsical "Windy City," inspired by the elasticity of skyscrapers; and Lisa Elkins's coffee table, which references Mies Van Der Rohe's Crown Hall.

Forget geodesic domes. Buckminster Fuller wanted to save spaceship earth by designing assembly-line homes - that would be delivered by zeppelin.

Boston Globe
By Drake Bennett | October 23, 2005


TODAY, WHEN PEOPLE hear the name R. Buckminster Fuller, most probably think of geodesic domes: leaky hippie houses, Cold War radar installations, Epcot Center, jungle gyms.


But as Michael John Gorman, a historian of science and a former associate curator of Stanford University's Buckminster Fuller Collection, writes in his illuminating new book, "Buckminster Fuller: Designing for Mobility" (Skira), those few associations hardly do justice to Fuller, who was born in Milton and died in 1983 at the age of 87.