Location: Espacio Fundación Telefónica, Madrid

Dates: Nov 2020 - Mar 2021

For some, Fuller was the Leonardo da Vinci of the 20th century. He dedicated his life to finding solutions that would ensure that the world worked better for everybody. Through his thinking, he was able to anticipate some of the major crises of the 20th century surprisingly accurately.

A virtually unclassifiable visionary and investigator, Fuller created a seemingly never-ending body of work that crossed over disciplines such as architecture, engineering, philosophy and education, through a vision of design that was capable of changing the world.From questions of mobility and housing to education and the use of big data, his thinking included a number of questions that Covid-19 has put at the very heart of the world’s agenda.

Exhibition design

To design the exhibition layout we used a mesh capable of dividing the space and organizing the routes, which was projected on the ground of the room and was made up of the twenty triangles of the icosahedron in which Buckminster Fuller represented his famous Dymaxion Map.

Dymaxion Chronofile Immersive Installation

In 1917, at the age of twenty-two, Fuller decided to embark on an experiment that was to last until his death in 1983, in which he himself was the guinea pig. It consisted of creating an archive as detailed as possible of the life of a person born in 1895, which chronicled the world´s trans - formation over the course of the new century.

Every day he collected and archived any personal document pertaining to his activities that had passed through his hands: letters he had sent and received, handwritten notes, drawings and plans, newspaper cuttings, brochures and even train and plane tickets, medical prescriptions and correspondence from his lawyer. Conserved at Stanford University since 1999, the 145,000 personal documents that comprises the Dymaxion Chronofile make Richard Buckminster Fuller’s life one of the best documented in history.

Tetrascroll

At 80, Fuller meets Tatyana Grosman, founder of Universal Limited Art Editions. Together they give shape to a unique book, a tale based on the tetrahedron (a solid made up of four triangular faces) starring Goldilocks and the three bears in which Fuller summarizes all his ideas about time, physics, synergy and The cosmos. Tatyana works for two years on the TETRASCROLL, a book capable of representing the three-dimensionality of Fuller's ideas, an illustrated book, made up of triangular sheets of more than 1 meter in height, which, when connected at their base, allow the generation of a device self-supporting and three-dimensional.

Curatorship

Rosa Pera, José Luis de Vicente

Graphic design

Opisso Studio

Audiovisual design

Cynthia González

Pics

Javier de Paz