Friday, September 18th 9am-7pm
Bedford Ave and N. 10th Street
Brooklyn, NY

Come join The Buckminster Fuller Institute on Friday, September 18th as we participate in Park(ing) Day 2009, an international event that reclaims parking spots and transforms them into engaging, people-friendly public spaces for one day a year. These small, temporary public spaces provide a breath of relief from the auto-clogged reality of New York City, and aim to spark dialogue about our valuable public space and how we choose to use it. Our BFI spot, entitled The Buckminster Fuller Park, will be open all day for anyone that wants to stop by for some geodesic building, Fuller conversing, and general relaxation. We will also be handing out free fold-up Dymaxion Globes! Hope to see you there!

See more photos from last year's BFI park here

September 11-13, 2009, Fordham University will host “Across the Generations: Legacies of Hope and Meaning”, an international conference sponsored by the Institute of General Semantics.

The three day conference features numerous keynote speakers, including a plenary talk by Dr. Michael Ben Eli of the Sustainability Laboratory, “The Cybernetics of Change, the Media and the Challenge of Sustainability” (Friday at 12:00 p.m.) and a panel session with BFI founder andf board member Jaime Snyder & BFI executive director Elizabeth Thompson, “Legacies of Hope and Meaning: Buckminster Fuller, Neil Postman, Alfred Korzybski and Marshall McLuhan” (Saturday at 11 a.m.).

Left to right: Andres Sevtsuk, Dimitris Papanikolaou, William Lark Jr., Arthur Petron, Michael Chia-Liang Lin, Charles Guan, Ryan Chin. (Photo by Cassandra Davis)

June 6th, 2009: The second annual Buckminster Fuller Challenge prize was awarded to MIT's Smart Cities group for their winning project 'Sustainable Personal Mobility and Mobility on Demand'. The team of seven students received the Omni-Oculi prize sculpture and a check for $100,000. The ceremony at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago included presentations by the winning team, the runner-up project 'Dreaming New Mexico', represented by Kenny Ausubel of the Bioneers, and a panel discussion with 2009 jurors Bill Browning and Edie Farwell moderated by Susan Szenasy of Metropolis Magazine.

Join us for a weekend of celebration in Chicago, IL June 6th - 7th!
Click here for event details to date

April 2009, BFI was on site during the first annual Earth Expo at the Bronx Zoo with dozens of other organizations and companies, both local and international, to engage the public with issues of sustainability and conservation. Between distributing information about BFI and The Buckminster Fuller Challenge, we offered visitors a chance to get involved, physically, with Fuller's ideas through the construction of a newspaper geodesic dome.

Click here for more pictures from the event.

Portland Center Stage presents the award-winning play R. Buckminster Fuller, The History (and Mystery) of the Universe on stage at Gerding Theater at the Armory in Portland, Oregon.

Click here for more information and to buy tickets.

The Buckminster Fuller symposium at Cooper Union in New York City on September 12th and 13th was a resounding success! The sold-out event represented the culmination of the Whitney Museum's exhibit, Buckminster Fuller Starting with the Universe, which travels to the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago in March 2009.

Many thanks to extrememediastudies.org for the images above. To read their thoroughly blogged overview of the event click here.

We look forward to the Whitney Museum's posting of the video of the event in its entirety in the coming months.

Allegra Fuller Snyder's moving talk served as the touchstone for the entire event. Click "Read more" for the full text of Allegra's address.

Friday, September 19th 9am-6pm
Bedford Ave and N. 10th Street
Brooklyn, NY

Come join The Buckminster Fuller Institute on Friday, September 19th as we participate in Park(ing) Day 2008, an international event that reclaims over 200 parking spots in 50 cities and transforms them into engaging public spaces one day a year. Our BFI spot, entitled The Buckminster Fuller Park, will be open all day for anyone that wants to stop by for some geodesic building, Fuller conversing, and general relaxation. Hope to see you there!

For further information, including a complete list of this year's Park(ing) spots, please visit the official Park(ing) Day NYC website.

Friday, September 12 - Saturday, September 13
The Great Hall of the Cooper Union
7 East 7th Street, at Astor Place
New York, NY

For more information and to purchase tickets, please visit the Whitney Museum's website

Visionary designer, philosopher, poet, inventor, engineer, and advocate of sustainability, Buckminster Fuller was one of the great transdisciplinary thinkers of the last century with a legacy that extends to nearly every field of the arts and sciences. This symposium takes its cue from Fuller's dictum, "I always say to myself, what is the most important thing we can think about at this extraordinary moment," and explores the diverse ways in which contemporary scholars and practitioners are pushing Fuller's ideas and projects into the 21st century.

Left to right: Joseph Clinton, BFI Board Member; Dr. John Todd; Neal Katz, BFI Board President; Allegra Fuller Snyder, BFI Board Chair; Elizabeth Thompson, BFI Executive Director. (Photo by Martin Seck)

The first annual Buckminster Fuller Challenge prize was conferred to Dr. John Todd at a packed-to-capacity ceremony at the Center for Architecture in New York City on Monday, June 23rd, 2008. Dr. Todd was presented a check in the amount of $100,000 for his winning project Comprehensive Design for a Carbon Neutral World: The Challenge of Appalachia. Dr. Todd was also presented the OmniOculi, a limited edition sculpture by artist Tom Shannon, commissioned for the Challenge.

The Buckminster Fuller Institute invites you to attend a week of gallery openings, panel sessions, film screenings, and celebrations taking place June 23rd through June 28th in New York City.

Click "Read More" below to see the full schedule of events.

Buckminster Fuller: Starting with the Universe
on view June 26, 2008-September 21, 2008

R. Buckminster Fuller (1895-1983) was one of the great American visionaries of the 20th century. Best-known as the inventor of the geodesic dome, Fuller devoted much of his life to resolving the gap between the sciences and the humanities, which he believed was preventing society from taking a comprehensive view of the world. His theories and innovations traversed the worlds of architecture, visual art, literature, mathematics, molecular biology, and environmental science and have had a deep impact on all of those fields.

In addition to the Whitney Museum show, there will be a number of exciting events throughout June in New York City. We will announce the details as they become available.

For more information about the Whitney show, please visit: http://www.whitney.org/www/exhibition/upcoming.jsp

To download the Whitney Museum's press release about the show, click here [pdf]

A symposium about Fuller and his influence on contemporary Architecture and Art

Friday, April 25 from 10:00am – 6:00pm

Harvard Graduate School of Design
48 Quincy Street
Gund Hall, Piper Auditorium
Cambridge, MA 02138

Session I: 10am – 12pm

• Shoji Sadao, “Working with Fuller”
• Michael Hays, “Fuller’s Geo-logic”
• Antoine Picon, “Fuller’s Digital and Utopian Avatars”

Session II: 1-3pm

• Jesse Reiser, “Non-linear Geodesics”
• Tobias Putrih, “Holism and Entropy”
• Leire Asensio Villoria, “Transformations”
• Monica Ponce de Leon, “Fabrications”

Session III: 3:30-5pm

• Stephanie Smith, “Green Entrepreneurship”
• David Erdman, “Jitterbug”
• Michael Meredith, “Natural Growth Algorithms”

Panel discussion: 5-6pm

• Moderated by Ingeborg Rocker

For more information, please see http://www.gsd.harvard.edu/events. This symposium is sponsored by the Department of Architecture.