R. Buckminster Fuller

Inventor, architect, engineer and utopian visionary, R. Buckminster Fuller (1895-1983)  was one of the century's most original thinkers.  In 1927 Fuller designed the factory-assembled Dymaxion house, followed in 1928 by the three-wheeled Dymaxion car, for which Isamu Noguchi would sculpt a model.  Fuller is most well-known for his later invention of the geodesic dome, and for his holistic proposals to solve the world's economic, social and ecological problems.  Fuller's emphasis on the humanistic use of science and technology was a strong influence on the work of Isamu Noguchi, whom he met in 1929.  That year Noguchi sculpted a chrome-plated head of Fuller, and they developed a close friendship that lasted until Fuller's death in 1983.  Buckminster Fuller and Isamu Noguchi also shared a collaboration with architect Shoji Sadao, Executive Director of The Isamu Noguchi Foundation, Inc., who started working with Fuller in the mid-Fifties (founding Fuller and Sadao, Inc. in 1960) and whose collaboration with Noguchi on the sculptor's landscape projects began in the early 1960s.