Tidal pool.  Photo: Joseph G. Brin

In grade school, the rare sighting of my teacher in the grocery store, evoked intense excitement as if I had encountered something almost forbidden, an exotic bird strutting and feeding outside its natural classroom habitat.

Teaching is a magical conjuring that soars like a bird between sensitivity and bombast, and then swoops down to alight on a branch, hopping from wisdom to new beginnings. It is, undeniably, a kind of performance.

Select phrases collected from my teachers glint in the sun, standing out over time like smooth white pebbles on the beach. Many of these pebbles in my collection come from the enormously talented and beloved architect/teacher Jim “Fitz” Fitzgibbon at Washington University School of Architecture. The sheer force of his expansive personality, creativity, and energetic teaching bowls me over to this day. He always had a careful, skeptical ear for the jargon-ridden presentations student architects are prone to. You could hear him bellowing from across the hall:

“What’s the Big Idea?”

“That’s just rubberized geometry!”

“Some places reek of design. I tell you, I couldn’t wait to get out of there!”

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“Comprehensive Anticipatory Design Science” was what Bucky Fuller, with characteristic verbosity, called his strategic approach to solving complex problems, and he issued a call for a “Design Science Revolution.” Every year, the Buckminster Fuller Institute (BFI) honors one of the brave souls who takes up the challenge, and shows how we may “make this world work for all.” On Wednesday, the BFI announced that this year’s $100,000 prize will go to Operation Hope, a project that has worked for more than 40 years to reverse the process of desertification and protect Zimbabwe’s grasslands.

In 1992, the Zimbabwean wildlife biologist, farmer, and politician Allan Savory founded the Africa Center for Holistic Management (ACHM) to further his efforts to combat the depletion of grasslands while maintaining the health of livestock. On a 6,500-acre rangeland learning center, Savory and his associates—including his wife and five African chiefs—established a previously unsuspected cause of desertification: a faulty decision-making framework. Operation Hope employed a new approach called “holistic rangeland management” and achieved astonishing results, transforming barren land into green grass and open water, and increasing livestock by 400 percent.

This incredible ecological transformation has far-ranging ramifications, “mitigating climate change, biomass burning, drought, flood, drying of rivers and underground waters, disappearing wildlife, massive poverty, social breakdown, violence and genocide.” If that isn’t enough to merit socially-responsible design’s highest award, then I don’t know what is.

Image: courtesy the Buckminster Fuller Institute

The Grid Book wants to show us that the history of building, composing, computing, mapping, lending, painting, printing, trading, and writing—the history of modern existence, in other words—is really a history of the grid.

This is ambitious. By a bit too much, as it turns out. The author, Hannah Higgins, isn’t quite able to map out all the facts she needs, nor always plot a convincing narrative course between the ones she does locate. The result is a breezy survey, accessibly written and sometimes provocative, but lacking the rigor and regularity of the grid itself.

Still, The Grid Book deserves attention for its glimpses into the secret life of this ever-present meme, which is central to the image of modern networked society. Going “off the grid,” after all, is an act of cultural as well as technological subversion. And aren’t all grids made to be broken?

Higgins defines the grid as “an organized set of modules that allow for manipulation and creativity.” Her first chapters, which postulate brick walls and tablet writing as proto-grids that have been with us for thousands of years, suggest that this modularity has an instinctual appeal to humans. City plans and map projections formalized the grid as a field of intersecting lines, which gave us the Mercator projection. This gridded worldview is everywhere—and The Grid Book is at its most intriguing uncovering some of the less obvious manifestations. Read more…

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Recently brought to our attention: two short documentary films on a pair of intriguing midcentury architectural anomalies—an enormous Bucky Fuller dome in the woods of Louisiana (demolished in 2007; left) and a wildly ambitious art-school construction project in Cuba (abandoned in 1965 but now underway again after a four-decade hiatus.) Read on for more information, plus clips from the films. Read more…

This year’s Metropolis Conference, at the 2009 ICFF, focused on innovation—how designers, architects, businesses, and schools are reinventing themselves to fit 21st-century models. Now, videos from the day-long conference are available over on our Multimedia site. You can get a taste of the presentations from the one-minute trailer above. (Having trouble viewing it? Try this YouTube link.) Here’s the full program: Read more…

Our July issue is hitting newsstands and subscriber mailboxes as I write this and the issue includes a feature article on the legacy of Buckminster Fuller. A few weeks ago, our editors participated in a series of lectures and events sponsored by the Buckminster Fuller Institute, including the awarding of the first annual Buckminster Fuller Challenge prize, which was sponsored by Metropolis. At a conferring ceremony at the Center for Architecture in New York City on Monday, June 23rd, the BFI honored ecologist John Todd for his innovative approach outlined in his paper: Comprehensive Design For A Carbon Neutral World: The Challenge of Appalachia. Read more…