Buckminster Fuller

Richard Buckminster Fuller (12 July 1895 to 1 July 1983) was an American architect, inventor, systems theorist and futurist best known for developing and popularizing the geodesic dome, a lightweight spherical structure of interlocking triangles that spreads structural stress across its whole surface. A German engineer, Walther Bauersfeld, had already built and patented an earlier geodesic dome in 1925 for the Zeiss planetarium in Jena; Fuller developed the form independently in the United States, was awarded his own patents on it, and did not erect a dome able to sustain its own weight with no practical size limit until 1949. In 1964 he co-founded the firm Fuller and Sadao, whose first project was the large geodesic dome built for the United States Pavilion at Expo 67 in Montreal, which still stands today as the Montreal Biosphere. Fuller received the American Institute of Architects Gold Medal in 1970 and the Presidential Medal of Freedom from President Ronald Reagan in February 1983, months before his death.