Montreal’s Expo 67 was the most successful World’s Fair in history, a vision of the future laced with monorails and space-age architecture. Its stunning centerpiece was the Biosphere, a 250-foot tall geodesic dome designed by Buckminster Fuller, which remained on the site after the fair left town. For the 50th…
The internet is a big place. There’s so much to read and watch and listen to that it can be overwhelming. We all have those stories that we start, get distracted for one reason or another, and promise ourselves we’ll finish later. Well, if any of those stories were on Paleofuture, here’s your second chance!
NASA’s bizarre Super Ball Bot is unlike any robot ever built–it uses a net of wires and rods to move, and could someday explore harsh exoplanets. It also has an unlikely heritage: It was inspired by the ideas of a visionary from the 1960s building floating cities based on the same concept.
Buckminster Fuller was a world-renowned architect, math-obsessed designer, and affable weirdo. He died in 1983, but Fuller is still remembered fondly today for his geodesic domes and his three-wheeled cars. Despite extensive historical interest in the man, his FBI file has never been made public. Until now.
Buckminster Fuller was either a brilliant inventor or a nutcase charlatan, depending on who you ask. And perhaps no single invention of Bucky’s encapsulates that divide quite like his Dymaxion car. Was it a death trap or a feat of engineering genius? The Wall Street Journal recently tested out a functioning replica…
Between 1965 and 1970, radio broadcaster Studs Terkel held multiple interviews with designer and inventor Buckminster Fuller, exploring Fuller's life, his ideas, and what he hoped to accomplish. Recently, the creators of Blank on Blank edited together some of those interviews and set them to animation.
There's something jarring about hearing old interviews of legendary futurist Buckminster Fuller. He speaks at a rapid pace, like each word is racing to get out before the next. But both Fuller's style and his self-assuredness make it hard not to get swept up in his unbridled optimism about the future of technology —…
Buckminster Fuller was a designer, futurist, and humanitarian, from his famous dome to his perspective-changing map. Each year, the Buckminster Fuller Institute honors the visionary's legacy with a competition showcasing ingenious solutions for global problems.
Every year, 10,000 Danes come together for the Folkemødet, a celebrated "political festival" of spirited policy debate, which sounds extremely Danish. This summer, they'll be doing so in an incredible space: A beautiful, wood-and-steel geodesic dome.
Buckminster Fuller's Dymaxion Deployment Unit—an emergency shelter developed during WWII—isn't his most well-known work. In fact, for years, it's been unclear if any DDUs still existed. But this week, The New York Times tells the story of a handful of shelters that have resurfaced, after being abandoned on an army…
When Buckminster Fuller died, he was buried under a gravestone with a very peculiar inscription: CALL ME TRIMTAB. Fuller had uttered those words to a Playboy reporter in 1972 (this kind of thing happened a lot in the 70s) to describe the kind of effect he wanted to have on the world. But what did it mean?
The world has changed in countless ways since Buckminster Fuller invented the Dymaxion map in 1943. Wars have come and gone, populations have changed, and entire generations have passed. But Bucky's map endures, thanks to its endless adaptability—and to prove it, the Buckminster Fuller Institute recently invited the…
Dorion Sagan, son of Carl Sagan and Lynn Margulis, weighs in on the dialectical relationship between science and philosophy.
Most people know that Earth's landmasses once formed single supercontinent, but how said continent peeled away from itself – or the extent to which Earth's continents remain connected – is not always immediately apparent. That's where the Dymaxion map comes in.
When you're waiting for Buckminster Fuller to come down your chimney, what else are you going to munch on besides a geodesic dome made of gingerbread? Achieving so much crunchy perfection seems like a daunting challenge — but luckily there's a great instructional video that shows you how to make this happen!
Buckminster Fuller only designed about a dozen of domed structures to begin with, and many have either been torn down in lieu of new construction or simply left to rot. But not the dome at Materials Park in Ohio, it just received a $7 million facelift and is now listed on the National Register of Historic Places…
In 1936, artist Isamu Noguchi was working on his mural History Mexico when he forgot the equation for E=mc². Rather than just wing it, Noguchi instead asked his friend Buckminster Fuller for the formula. Here's the futurist/Dymaxion automaker/geodesic dome connoisseur's comically detailed response, which came to…
The key to nanotechnology may not be making tiny structures out of individual molecules. It may be forcing those structures to build themselves. And scientists appear to have found a way to make that happen.
Chances are you're too young to remember the days when traveling salesmen went door-knocking (unless you're still fending off pesky Avon women now), but at one point someone would've been offered a dome building, shown in this miniature sample size.
Only three of these back-to-front Dymaxions were ever built, but as there's only one remaining it was up to British architect Norman Foster (the man behind some of the most recognizable buildings in the world) to build the fourth himself.
