Dear Mr. Fuller

“Everything you’ve learned in school as ‘obvious’ becomes less and less obvious as you begin to study the universe.” – Buckminster Fuller

Vision-ary. If you climbed on a dome shaped jungle gym when you were a kid…and can still do it today, thank Mr. Buckminster Fuller whose radical design can contain greater area with a structure of greater strength than had ever existed before. But by the time you were crawling on that play structure, Fuller had faded a bit from public consciousness. This is a man who developed solutions for industrial production of housing…housing that could be provided to the poor all over the world, who developed the three-wheeled Dymaxion car, who coined the phrase “spaceship earth” and presaged the entire sustainability movement. Fuller—engineer, designer, poet, and philosopher—spent time at Black Mountain College with John Cage, Merce Cunningham, and Charles Olson. Fuller was design for the other 90% before there was such a phrase. He was a utopian maverick, problem solver, practical dreamer, and preacher…giving hours-long lectures to college students asking them to think about the world in ways they’d never been asked to before.

Portland Center Stage presents the one-man show, R Buckminster Fuller: The History and Mystery of the Universe that “blends videos, lectures, poetry and a healthy dash of humanist humor” for those of us who weren’t fortunate enough to see him when he was alive.