Radical Curiosity: In the Orbit of Buckminster Fuller

Radical Curiosity: In the Orbit of Buckminster Fuller
22 January 2022

The first exhibition to open at ArtScience Museum in 2022 is Radical Curiosity: In the Orbit of Buckminster Fuller (22 January 2022 –10 July 2022). This exhibition showcases the work of one of the 20th century’s great visionaries: Buckminster Fuller.

Buckminster Fuller changed the way we think about cities, information, the environment, and indeed – the planet we live on. He was an architect, a systems thinker, a writer, an inventor, and a futurist. Best known for his invention of the geodesic dome, he embodied the meeting of creative and scientific disciplines, and is therefore a more perfect figure for ArtScience Museum.

This show is a co-production between Fundación Telefónica, Madrid and ArtScience Museum, and is curated by my good friends, Rosa Pera and José Luis de Vicente, with some additional material contributed by our team.

Extending across nine galleries, Radical Curiosity focuses on Fuller’s greatest inventions and ideas in areas such as such shelter, transport, education and sustainability. The show introduces some of Bucky’s iconic concepts – like the geodesic dome, the Dymaxion House, and tensegrity – through 170 artworks and artefacts, including original archival materials on loan from the Buckminster Fuller Collection at Stanford Libraries, models, blueprints and films.

It also features contemporary artworks and installations that illustrate how Bucky continues to influence a new generation of designers, architects, scientists, and artists, including and Neri Oxman and our own architect, Moshe Safdie, plus architects here in Singapore – a place Fuller visited many times in the 1960s and 1970s.

Working towards a more sustainable future was one of Buckminster Fuller’s passions. He was one of the first thinkers to describe the modern world as an ecosystem that must be reconciled with nature. Back in the 1960s, long before the sustainability movement took hold, Fuller was speaking urgently about energy, fossil fuels, food systems, and pollution. In the 1960s, he wrote, “we are all astronauts on a little spaceship called Earth.” At a time where we are living through the consequences of climate change and other planetary crises, visionary ideas like these have never felt more essential.

Buckminster Fuller and Moshe Safdie

One of the themes we have teased out in our iteration of the show is the personal and conceptual connection between Buckminster Fuller and our architect, Moshe Safdie. Both created iconic structures for the World Expo in Montreal in 1967 – the Montreal Biosphere and Habitat ’67. Radical Curiosity explores Fuller’s influence on architects like Safdie. We have included a selection of Safdie’s works and a video of him discussing Fuller’s inspiration. Safdie noted in the opening press conference, which he attended, that the design of the ArtScience Museum embodies Fuller’s principles of synergy and sustainability.

Fuller’s multidisciplinary approach, combining art, science, architecture, and design, resonates perfectly with the ArtScience Museum’s mission. His concept of “synergy,” emphasizing the interconnectedness and efficiency of design systems, has overlaps with Safdie’s architectural philosophy. The museum’s design and its integration with the surrounding environment, echoes Fuller’s vision of creating structures that are harmonious with nature.

The exhibition celebrates Fuller’s architectural achievements, and also showed how his ideas continue to influence contemporary architects and designers, thus enabling a dialogue between past and present, with the museum itself serving as a testament to the enduring relevance of Fuller’s visionary ideas.