“Synergy,” a word commonly used by Internet start-ups and merging finance companies (we assume), will be part of the wallpaper that welcomes visitors to SFMOMA’s upcoming Buckminster Fuller exhibition. Like his Dymaxion car and Geodesic dome, the buzzy portmanteau is an example of Bucky's unique, highly imaginative perspective on the world, which the museum will explore in its exhibition “The Utopian Experience” opening at the end of this month.
“To be clear, it’s not so much a show just about Fuller,” curator Jennifer Dunlop Fletcher told ARTINFO. In addition to an entire wall of index cards with words the late visionary dreamed up, it also includes low-cost laptops from Yves Behar and Nicholas Negroponte’s "One Laptop per Child" initiative; the North Face’s Oval Intention, the first dome-shaped tent to best the sheet-thrown-over-a-rod design (demonstrating Fuller’s notion “tensegrity,” or tensional integrity, if you will); David de Rothschild’s Plastiki sailboat, the recycled catamaran of 12,500 plastic water bottles that sailed from San Francisco to Australia; and Stewart Brand's comprehensive "Whole Earth Catalog."
What do they all have in common? An outlook on the way we live that is not only unique to the Bay Area but also to Fuller, who never actually lived there: a Utopian vision of a future shaped through socially- and ecologically-conscious design. The impetus for putting the show together, Dunlop Fletcher said, was to show a portfolio featuring 13 of Fuller’s most radical designs that never gained traction, and seeing the ways that projects since the '70s have cited them as a source of inspiration. The juxtaposition of designers' products alongside Fuller's never-realized inventions frame him as a visionary and an inspiration. His emphasis on the importance of ecology in tandem with technology have made a visible, lasting impact on the Bay Area.
"We're really positioning him as this source of big, grandiose ideas, rather than a failed designer," said Dunlop Fletcher. The exhibition includes his visions for a 4D house, the Undersea Island-Submarisle, and a video he created later in his life, called "48 Hours of Everything I Know" — two days of him looking into the camera and delivering what is, essentially, a brain purge. His strength, as this show emphasizes, was his language and presentation. During his life, he spoke to everyone in the Bay Area, from students at tech-savvy Stanford and the hippie-minded University of California in Berkeley, to prisoners at St. Quentin, politicians, and regular people.
"They really like his status as an outsider, and someone committed to technology who saw design as having a social impact or revolution," said Dunlop Fletcher. "I want to set the stage with that, to look at his performance and his way of talking, and then show his portfolio holistically." Because only looking at his unrealized blimp-shaped, three-wheeled car wouldn't convey the type of person he was — a visionary who sought solutions in transportation, housing, efficiency, and beyond, always looking for better ways to keep this large spaceship Earth moving forward.
"The Utopian Impulse" is on view at SFMOMA March 31 through July 29. To see Buckminster Fuller's dynamic designs, plus a few others from contemporary visionaries, click the slide show.