The multidisciplinary scope of Buckminster Fuller’s work, encompassing art, design, architecture and more, was a natural fit at Black Mountain. He first came to the school to teach at the summer institute in 1948 and returned in 1949. The course he taught, titled “Comprehensive Design”, was an incubator of sorts for many concepts and methods that would become central to his varied and prodigious work. It was at Black Mountain that he and his students perfected the design of one of his most famous projects, the geodesic dome. The dome was licensed by the US military shortly after and implemented on military bases around the globe.
Fuller’s aesthetic presented a rich contrast to that of Josef Albers. While Albers sought to refine perception and awareness through serial repetition, Fuller utilized both artistic creativity and scientific innovation to promote the wholesale re-envisioning of traditional concepts. As stated in his 1972 essay, Breaking the Shell of Permitted Ignorance, “In order to really understand what is going on, we have to abandon starting with the parts, and we must work instead from the whole to the particulars.”