With a one-man show about him traveling the country, the late futurist is finally getting his due.

By Ken Coupland
April 2001



Ron Campbell as Bucky Fuller in R. Buckminster Fuller: The History (and Mystery) of the Universe. Photograph by David M. Allen.

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Embrace the principles that made R. Buckminster Fuller such a maverick architect and theorist when you visit the Buckminster Fuller Institute. The R. Buckminster Fuller FAQ page contains all of the quick reference data on Fuller.

By turns an inventor, architect, engineer, mathematician, poet, and all-around cosmologist (not to mention the developer of the geodesic dome), Richard Buckminster Fuller was often dismissed during his lifetime as an impractical dreamer. In fact a profoundly original thinker who was truly ahead of his time, Fuller was one of the earliest proponents of renewable energy, which he incorporated into many, if not all, of his designs. Beginning this line of inquiry in the 1920s, Fuller anticipated our current perception of the planet as a single integrated system by more than half a century.

Although lionized on university campuses in the sixties and seventies, where his marathon lectures electrified a generation of students, Bucky's star has dimmed in recent years; since his death at age 87 in 1983, he has been unjustly relegated to the status of washed-up counterculture icon. But all that may be changing. Last year Your Private Sky, the largest ever exhibition of Fuller's work, toured several major European venues. And now there's a play about him, the quirkily titled R. Buckminster Fuller: The History (and Mystery) of the Universe.

Premiering at the San Diego Repertory Theater in April 2000, the one-man show--a surprisingly moving and frequently hilarious evocation of the great man's spirit--moved this past summer to San Francisco, closing after a second extended run. The production has enjoyed the kind of repeat business and sold-out performances that any Broadway producer would kill for. With a booking in Chicago earlier this year and another still to come (in June and July at Seattle's Intiman Theatre), a New York City premiere is currently in the discussion stages.

The show has struck a responsive chord with audiences looking for renewed meaning on the cusp of the new millennium, not least because of actor Ron Campbell's astonishing performance as Fuller. In a demanding role, the actor eloquently expresses Fuller's humanity, unbridled optimism, and, periodically, bleak despair in the face of a culture that has been slow to heed his vision of a sustainable future.

D. W. Jacobs, the play's writer and director, believes Fuller's ultimate contribution might well have been his approach to the design process. "Everything, for Bucky, was a design issue," Jacobs says. "He was asking, 'How do you approach problems comprehensively?' How do you look at the big picture and alternate that with what he used to call 'diving into the details'? He really believed you had to plunge into the pool of specialized knowledge, then come back out of it and look at the larger world and how it fits in with other kinds of information." That, come to think of it, is largely akin to what Jacobs and company have achieved with this eminently fitting tribute.



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