Hunter Braithwaite visited the Buckminster Fuller exhibit at the Chicago Museum of Contemporary Art, and says the he "started off thinking that this guy was a genius, then shifted to kook, then settled on a mix of the two." You can determine for yourself by checking out the exhibit, on display through June 21st.

In this season of layoffs, the clichéd "doing more with less" seems inescapable. But did you know that the term wasn't coined by a regional manager somewhere, but by Buckminster Fuller, inventor of the geodesic dome, almost-inventor of the flying car, and founder of the modern day sustainability movement? Now you do.

Here is the back story: Fuller, twice-expelled from Harvard, unemployed, and unable to provide for his family, contemplates suicide on the shore of Lake Michigan. In the end, he decides against it, choosing instead to help as much of humanity as possible while using the smallest amount of resources. Or, to do more with less. If this came as a revelation, and you find yourself in the Chicago area before June 21st, check out Fuller's retrospective "Starting with the Universe" at the Museum of Contemporary Art.  
 
Luckily, the exhibition's curators do not share Fuller's passion for resource conservation. "Starting with the Universe" is a maximalist account of Fuller's life. Mining years of journals, the show is an in-depth narrative of Fuller's personal and professional growth. The walls are silkscreened with quotes, drawings, and enormous portraits of Fuller. There are models of his houses and developments. Unfortunately, the Dymaxion car isn't present. With a length of thirty feet, it wouldn't fit in the museum's freight elevator.

The exhibition charts Fuller's ambition as he moves from single-family homes to planned communities, from domed cities to plans for reallocating international resources. And toward the end of his life, things really took off. He made plans for cities that floated in the ocean. After that, he planned cities that floated in the sky. Some of these blueprints are little more than scribbles on notebook paper, but they raise the universal question, "what could he do had he lived for another decade?" The last room of the exhibition baits the viewer to pick up where Fuller left off. It is the Dymaxion study center, where visitors can browse over 400 volumes by and about Fuller.

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Orignal From: Buckminster Fuller: On Display in Chicago

发贴者 healthlifeblog 时间： 5/13/2009