A Fuller Lifestyle

From March 31 through July 29, 2012, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) will present The Utopian Impulse: Buckminster Fuller and the Bay Area, the first exhibition to consider Fuller’s local design legacy. The presentation will feature some 65 works, including prints, drawings, photographs, documentary video, books and models representing some of Fuller’s most iconic projects alongside those by Bay Area designers inspired by his body of work.

The Utopian Impulse opens by introducing Fuller, primarily with prints from Inventions: Twelve Around One portfolio (1981), as well as several key works on loan from the R. Buckminster Fuller Archive at Stanford University. Pairing the Fuller’s own drawings of projects dating from the late 1920s through the mid-1970s with iconic imagery of built work, the exhibition  commemorates his most well-known ideas, such as the 4D House (1928), a hexagonal autonomous dwelling meant to be optimally resource efficient and mass producible from factory-made kits that could be easily shipped anywhere and quickly assembled on site.

The exhibition also presents several of Fuller’s big-picture ideas, including his World Game (1969–71) project, a data-visualization system intended to facilitate global approaches in solving the world’s problems—or, in Fuller’s own words, to “make the world work, for 100 percent of humanity, in the shortest possible time, through spontaneous cooperation, without ecological offense or the disadvantage of anyone.”

Here at K2 we have been hugely inspired by Fuller’s thinking and can’t wait to see an amazing exhibition that celebrates his Bay Area endeavors.

Thanks to the SFMOMA for the heads up on this amazing show.