Exhibition at Palazzo Collicola
18 December 2021 – 13 February 2022
Presentation Saturday 18 December at 12,00 am
Throughout his life, American architect and designer Richard Buckminster Fuller (1895-1983) has always been imagining the future, as can be seen in his treatise Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth written in 1969. Themes such as sustainability, ecologism, energy problems and renewable sources are the basis of his thinking and his architectural structures, from the Dymaxion House to the Paperboard Domes and vehicles such as the Dymaxion car.
The most distinctive feature of his poetics, however, is undoubtedly the conception and creation of geodesic domes (for which Fuller holds the patent), extremely light and easy-to-construct buildings that he began designing in 1957 all over the world and which even inspired the name of a complex chemical molecule, the “fullerene“. So successful was he that the US Army commissioned him hundreds such structures for military installations.
Geodesic domes are structures made up of triangular, tubular and modular elements, which are joined at specific points to form polygons and can be covered with synthetic materials or lightweight roofing, This was the case of the so-called Spoletosfera (Fuller’s only geodesic dome in Italy), which was installed in 1967 on the occasion of the 10th Spoleto Festival of Two Worlds to a design by Fuller and Shoji Sadao (his Japanese architect collaborator) and built with the help of students from eight countries and local architects, the supervision of Giovanni Carandente and the contribution of the Southern Illinois University, the USA International Council of the Arts and the Alluminium Company of America. The inauguration was a great success in the presence of Fuller and with the performance of a real happening (two years later, Mario Ceroli and Claudio Cintoli would also perform happenings entitled Io and Rimbalzare).
Following an agreement between the City of Spoleto and the ‘Pietro Vannucci’ Academy of Fine Arts in Perugia (the two institutions already collaborated on the occasion of several exhibitions at Palazzo Collicola) and under the supervision of model-making professor Giuseppe Fioroni, a group of students reproduced, after surveys and measurements taken in situ, a 1:20 scale model of the Spoletosphere using carbon, glass and aluminium fibres, highlighting the construction principle based on interlocking and alternating hexagons and pentagons and the use of three different sizes of connecting rods. The work will be donated to the Palazzo Collicola museum after the end of the exhibition (a short video presentation by Vincenzo Alessandria was also made for the occasion).
In addition, a series of archive documents conserved at the Carandente Library are on display to the public for the first time. These include original design sketches with Fuller’s autograph technical indications, articles and magazines dedicated to him, photographs of the assembly and inauguration phases or models of other structures designed by the architect, as well as part of the correspondence between him and the Festival Of Two Worlds.