One thing you have to say about futurist, engineer, theorist, author and visionary Buckminster Fuller is that he was a big-picture guy; he was a man with a plan, actually an abundance of plans. Few people in the 20th century, let alone history, could compete with the number of inventive ideas the prolific Fuller came up with to solve the problems of a planet with limited natural resources and a burgeoning population, or have been as confident about the soundness of the utopian systems he devised to address sustainability, from optimizing human dwellings to fuel-efficient transportation. Sounds prescient, doesn't it? Ahead of his time, Fuller, who died in 1983, called himself a "comprehensivist," and advocated a global approach and an idealistic spirit of cooperation.
He may be best known for the geodesic dome, but as SFMOMA's architecture and design exhibition The Utopian Impulse: Buckminster Fuller and the Bay Area attests, he was more than the sum of his domes, though they get their due. Though he never lived in the Bay Area, Fuller nonetheless had an impact on the region, a magnet for nonconformists, dreamers and inventors who think outside of the box. That penchant for innovation is expressed through drawings, blueprints, photographs, ephemera, architectural models and prints from Fuller's portfolios. Half of the show focuses on his local inheritors - Governor Jerry "Moonbeam" Brown cites him as an influence - who have direct or indirect links to him, such as Stewart Brand and the Whole Earth Catalog; David de Rothschild's Plastiki catamaran made of recycled materials and buoyed by 12,500 plastic water bottles; The North Face, which adopted Fuller's "tensegrity" concept (tension plus integrity) for their forward-thinking tent design; and Thom Mayne of Morphosis, the firm behind San Francisco's controversial, environmentally-sensitive Federal Building.
The history and Fuller's legacy are interesting, but many of the materials, with the exception of project models like "Convention City" (1976), a proposal for a domed city/media circus in Texas, presented with a touch of neon and under glass like a dinner entree by Ant Farm, an architecture collective that incorporated performance, animation, installation and film, don't generate a particularly lively visual experience. Architect Nicholas de Monchaux's Local Code initiative, for instance, has an intriguing wall-mounted installation with several video screens and wooden shapes that correspond to city lots, but its concept isn't easy to grasp. It's frustrating that the explanatory labels for various displays, an essential component for understanding the exhibits, are placed in such a way that it's a challenge to figure out which text relates to what object. But judging from the capacity crowd that packed the galleries for a special preview - a convocation of youngish, stylishly dressed architects, designers and high-end, environmentally cool, 21st-century hippie types, including one guy in a turtleneck and groomed ponytail - this event is preaching to the converted and the already well-informed.
Personal archive
A highlight are two works by documentary filmmaker Sam Green, who made The Weather Underground, an Academy Award-nominated film about a group of 1960s radicals. Green, a San Francisco-based filmmaker with an inquisitive cast of mind, has produced a video titled A Relationship in 12 Fragments. It's based on Fuller's personal archive, Dymaxion Chronofile (a name straight out of 1950s sci-fi), and projected on a wall sculpture designed by Obscura Digital. Green has also created The Love Song of R. Buckminster Fuller, a live documentary-hybrid with slides, moving images, on-stage narration by Green himself and musical accompaniment by Yo La Tengo. Commissioned by SFMOMA, the piece examines Fuller's proposed projects for the Bay Area, including an immense floating tetrahedral city on the bay, and the utopian visions he hoped to achieve through a radical design revolution. (The performance, co-presented by the San Francisco International Film Festival, premieres at the museum's theater, May 1 at 7 & 9 p.m.)
In the midst of the crowd, it was hard to shake the specter of an outraged Rick Santorum pontificating at a recent campaign rally that he was "shocked, shocked!" that there were people who put the conservation of the planet above the voracious needs of its inhabitants. The flat-earth society, and count Santorum as a charter member, certainly won't have an affinity for this exhibition.
Through July 29 at SFMOMA.