The New Haven, Marseille, 2013.

When the San Francisco-based artist (and avid surfer) Jay Nelson wanted a car he could sleep in for his frequent trips to the coast, he didn’t need an RV—just a new way of looking at a sedan. Nelson had acquired a rusting 1986 Honda Civic, and with the addition some plywood, fiberglass, and a set of porthole windows, he built himself a barn-style bedroom over the trunk. If Buckminster Fuller had been a beach bum, he might have arrived at a motor-pod like this. Sleeping in cars never looked so good!

Since that first rusted Honda, Nelson has unleashed his woodworking skills on a string of consumer vehicles: He’s hitched his faceted plywood domes to cars, boats and, once, a scooter. No two rigs are ever alike, but they all have a rack for a surfboard.

Now, as a newly minted artist in residence at Facebook, Nelson is working on a design for Silicon Valley’s youngest architecture snob, Mark Zuckerberg. Read more!

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Montreal 1967 World’s Fair, “Man and His World,” Buckminster Fuller’s geodesic dome with solar experimental house.

If CAD software had existed in the 19th and early 20th centuries, would the Grand Palais, the Eiffel Tower, and the Palais de Tokyo have been built? All three grew out of the giant collective experiment of the World’s Fair, which, beginning in 1851, mounted futuristic exhibitions that invited crowds to glimpse the society of tomorrow—and allowed architects to prototype tomorrow’s building concepts and engineering strategies without having to design usable spaces for today’s irate client.

Like the speculative renderings many architecture offices put out today, most of the World’s Fair structures and pavilions weren’t intended to actually stand on Earth for the better part of a century. Even when they were commissioned from top architects (Louis Sullivan, Mies van der Rohe, and McKim, Mead & White, to name a few), the expo buildings were the equivalent of jumbo pop-up shops or a sparkly CAD experiment brought to life. If the Eiffel Tower hadn’t proved so useful transmitting radio signals from its top, it might have been torn down long ago. Read more!

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By Danielle Rago

New York’s Madison Square Park has hosted all sorts of funky art installations, from Roxy Paine’s fighting stainless steel trees to Charles Long’s brightly colored, blob-shaped “sound sculptures.” But its latest display, by New York City-based artist Leo Villareal, is its trippiest yet.

The “Buckyball,” named after the American architect, engineer, designer, and inventor Buckminster Fuller (natch), is a 30-foot, three-dimensional, neon-lit geodesic sculpture set atop a metal plinth. Designed as part of the Madison Square Park Art program, the glow-in-the-dark statue is on view through February 1, 2013. Read more!

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Photo via Buckminster Fuller Institute’s facebook page

Happy 117th birthday to Buckminster Fuller! The canonical engineer/”homme de calcul”/ inventor made his mark on the 20th century for his refusal to confine his many talents to any one field. Instead, Fuller moved effortlessly from the fields of architecture, science, and ecology, applying principles of each towards “solving” some of the most pressing problems such as mass housing and energy production that faced the pre- and post-war worlds. It would be a terrible mistake, then, to reduce Fuller’s work to his most famous structure, the geodesic dome–which has seen over 300,000 different iterations since its introduction–an error that would wilfully overlook several facets of his prolific career, including his collaborative efforts with the U.S. military or his tutelage of the budding ecological movement, not to mention his more fanciful (and politically naive) visions for the future of civilization. Fuller also (wrongly) prophesied the end of manual work, saying that, “The industrial equation will bring about a condition where, within a century, the word ‘worker’ will have no current meaning”–outlining a ludic utopia where existence would be geared towards play and recreation. Cheers, Bucky!

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The countercultural appropriation of Buckminster Fuller’s geodesic dome saw in it both a paragon of pragmatism and minimalist dwelling and a harbinger of a new idealist conception of life, whereby normal social, political, and environmental codes were overturned, replaced by a desire for adaptive, nomadic, and collective experiences. From its first usage as such, when it was championed by the Whole Earth Catalog in 1968 as ideologically and spatially compatible with the concerns of the rising hippie movement, to its eventual discontinuation in the early-to-mid seventies, Fuller’s dome spawned a period of home-grown experimentation and wide-scale engagement with temporary architectures that remains unique. Fuller’s iconic structure never really disappeared, of course–it survived, and survives to this day, but at the cost of its founding dogmatic framework.

The dome is making a comeback this summer at The Loveland Farm, but, like all things revenant, it makes its return in commodified form. Operated by designer Jeff and Kate Griffin, the “farm” is better described as a campsite catered to “self-sufficient”,”nature” types that promises to deliver the “eco-camping experience”. Given the history of the erstwhile cohorts, it’s easy to cast the geodesic dome in this light.

Rebranded as “pods”, the domes can be rented and come outfitted with all the modern amenities visitors have come to expect from their would be “self-sustainable” accommodations. There’s a kitcheonette, a bathroom with shower, hardwood floors, a king size bed, plus a retro wood burning stove and even a wi-fi connection. A large cut-out window opens the room up to the idyllic countryside just outside. Sound appealing? The proprietors advise visitors to book their pod long in advance as they’re proving to be a hit.

[via PSFK]

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Manhattan Memorious from Reiser + Umemoto on Vimeo.

“You may be amused,” intones the narrator of Reiser + Umemoto‘s new short film ‘Manhattan Memorious’, “that yesterday’s wonders, worlds of tomorrow, have been delivered, have become our everyday.” The wonders to which the film refers are the ghosts, here reconstituted, of Manhattan’s past speculative futures, those of the daringly polemic (or conversely, as the narrator suggests, silly) masterplans and megastructures that would have cut through the weathered urban fabric with a sublimity and terror that embody the polarizing conditions of the city itself.

The film, Reiser + Umemoto’s contribution to the Hong Kong & Shenzhen Bi-City Biennale, recasts post-war Manhattan as the site of massive building boom and urban renewal. In the hands of Robert Moses, who is seen speaking at the beginning, New York was submitted to unprecedented change, which, when backed by legislative clout and funding, proved capable of implementing the radical visions that would pave the way for the city’s future. Of course, not all–many, in fact–of these proposals ever made it off the drafting board.Yet, here is Midtown under the shroud of Buckminster Fuller’s colossal geodesic dome; there, the bottom quarter of the island’s tenement housing encaged by Paul Rudolph’s hulking LOMEX. Koolhaas’s City of the Captive Globe finds the grid it was always looking for, while the architects quietly sneak in more contemporary, less ideological offerings like Morphosis’ West Side Yard complex and their own Easter River Corridor plans. In the duo’s own words, this is a “phantasmagorical Manhattan where the visionary meets the everyday – the absurd and the sublime. The island as we know it is but a pale reflection of a city designed by visionaries – a city of mad, incongruous utopias.”

The Empire State Building under Bucky Fuller’s Geodesic Dome

Paul Rudolph’s LOMEX

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While office design is moving increasingly away from the high-walled cubicle and more towards shared open spaces, sometimes, you just need that private space. Design studio kawamura-ganjavian has come up with a punchy solution for those sudden mid-workday bouts of I-can’t-take-it-anymore: OSTRICH is a pocket pillow that “offers a micro environment in which to take a warm and comfortable power nap at ease…Its soothing cave-like interior shelters and isolates our head and hands (mind, senses and body) for a few minutes, without needing to leave our desk.”

We were reminded of Forrest Jessee’s ‘Sleep Suit,’ a pleated cushion that wraps around the entire body, designed to facilitate the strategic 30-minute naps of Buckminster Fuller’s Dymaxion Sleep concept. OSTRICH similarly embraces the sharing of space by proposing new ways to balance the ratio of public and private. After all, not all of us can afford to get a Tetra-Shed.

[All images courtesy the designers]

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‘Tis the season for pop-up architecture, as more and more retailers are riding on novelty spaces to woo holiday gift buyers. But London’s Southbank may be home to one of the hottest pop-ups yet, and quite literally so. The “Corona Extra Summer” beer garden is set to pop up on December 15^th along the Riverside Walkway in London, offering consumers a geodesic dome that promises artificial sunshine and enough incubated heat to make you gun for those lime wedges. The inverted snow globe invites Londoners to experience “the sights, scents, sounds, tastes and feel of the perfect summer” in the middle of the winter. Granted this sounds like an environmentalist’s nightmare, the pop-up will only last for three days, and we can’t deny that a heated geodesic bar is a pretty cool idea. Find out more at the Corona Extra Summer facebook.

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Photo © Scott Pease

Russell Township, Ohio may not sound like much of an architectural destination. But this semi-rural town 25 miles east of Cleveland is actually home to architect and futurist Buckminster Fuller’s largest geodesic dome. The vast dome, allegedly one of Bucky’s favorites, was built in 1959 to surmount a low, crescent-shaped modernist office pavilion designed by architect John Terence Kelly. The hexagonal steel latticework also hovers weightlessly over a lush, circular garden in the center.

As Metropolis Magazine reports, this strikingly futuristic headquarters for the materials research clearinghouse ASM International rocked Ohio for generations, landing along Route 87 like “a cross between a spaceship and an exhibition pavilion that could have been airlifted from a world’s fair.” But the complex makes headlines today as a victory for the historic preservation of mid-century modern buildings. More after the jump.

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The reality of airborne environments, suspended loftily above, amid clouds, has always inhabited our dreams but always exceeded the scope of present technologies, until the twentieth century. Then, several theoretical propositions and experiments were devised, which either failed to get off the ground or came crashing back to it in a ball of fire. But the prospect of taking up residence in the skies may now not only be possible (which it is), but a legitimate ambition, as architect and designer Tiago Barros suggests in his project Passing Cloud, a floating assemblage of zeppelin-like spheres on which passengers stroll for the duration of their travel. More after the break!

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