“Making the world’s available resources serve one hundred percent of an exploding population can only be accomplished by a boldly accelerated design revolution.”

There are few men who can justly claim to have revolutionized their discipline. R. Buckminster Fuller revolutionized many. “Bucky,” as he was known to most, was a designer, architect, poet, educator, engineer, philosopher, environmentalist, and, above all, humanitarian. Driven by the belief that humanity’s major problems were hunger and homelessness he dedicated his life to solving those problems through inexpensive and efficient design.

The grandnephew of the American Transcendentalist Margaret Fuller, Bucky was born on July 12, 1895 in Milton, Massachusetts. He was twice expelled from Harvard. Later, Bucky married Anne Hewlett in 1917 and went into the construction business with her father. A decade later he witnessed the first of many business failures, when, due to economic difficulties, he was forced out of the company. Despondent over these failures and family problems, he resolved to focus his energies on a search for socially responsible answers to the major design problems of his time.

Recognizing the inefficiency of the automobile, Bucky spent the late twenties designing a car that would incorporate the engineering advances of the airplane. In 1933, he presented the first prototype of the Dymaxion car. The Dymaxion car could hold twelve passengers, go 120 miles per hour and used half the gas of the standard car, utilizing aerodynamics construction and only three wheels. While demonstrating the car to investors, it crashed, taking one life. Though the crash was later determined not to be the fault of the car, he was never able to find adequate funding.

As World War II ended and housing crises in America became more acute, he turned his sights to what would remain his life-long dream. Using airplane construction methods and materials, Bucky set out to create a pre-fabricated house that could be easily delivered to any location. It would be fireproof and inexpensive and constructed out of light weight materials. In 1945 however, with thousands of orders in place for his new Dymaxion House, Fuller once again ran into difficulties with investors and had to end the project.

Unsure of his next step and without a job, Bucky accepted a position at a small college in North Carolina, Black Mountain College. There, with the support of an amazing group of professors and students, he began work on the project that was to make him famous and revolutionize the field of engineering. Using lightweight plastics in the simple form of a tetrahedron (a triangular pyramid) he created a small dome. As his work continued it became clear that he had made the first building that could sustain its own weight with no practical limits. The U.S. government recognized the importance of the discovery and employed him to make small domes for the army. Within a few years there were thousands of these domes around the world.

Having finally received recognition for his endeavors, Buckminster Fuller spent the final fifteen years of his life traveling around the world lecturing on ways to better use the world’s resources. A favorite of the radical youth of the late 60’s and 70’s, Fuller worked to expand social activism to an international scope. Among his most famous books were NO MORE SECONDHAND GOD(1963) OPERATING MANUAL FOR THE SPACESHIP EARTH (1969), and EARTH, INC. (1973) in which he writes “In reality, the Sun, the Earth, and the Moon are nothing else than a most fantastically well-designed and space-programmed team of vehicles. All of us are, always have been, and so long as we exist, always will be–nothing else but–astronauts.”

Isamu Noguchi was a sculptor, designer, architect, and craftsman. Throughout his life he struggled to see, alter, and recreate his natural surroundings. His gardens and fountains were transformations meant to bring out the beauty their locations had always possessed. His large abstract stone sculptures were both majestic and personal. He believed that through sculpture and architecture, one could better understand the struggle with nature. It is that search for understanding which brings together his many and varied works.

Isamu Noguchi was born Isamu Gilmour in Los Angeles in 1904 to Leonie Gilmour, an Irish-American teacher and editor, and Yone Noguchi, a Japanese poet. It is the cultural divide between his parents, between East and West, between two distinct histories of art and thought, that would engage him his entire life. In 1906, Noguchi’s mother took him to Japan, where he attended Japanese and Jesuit schools. While in Japan, Noguchi gained an appreciation for its landscape, architecture and craftsmanship. Later his mother sent him to Indiana to attend a progressive boarding school she had read about in a magazine.

After high school Noguchi enrolled in Columbia University to study medicine, while at the same time taking sculpture classes on the Lower East Side. It wasn’t long before he realized that art, not medicine, was his true calling. He left school and found a studio where he could sculpt full-time. While in Manhattan he became acquainted with the work of the Surrealists and with contemporary abstract sculpture. These interests led him to Paris on a Guggenheim Fellowship, where he met and worked with the great modernist sculptor, Constantin Brancusi. Brancusi’s engagement with the abstract and his belief in understanding the pre-disposed forms of his materials made a strong impression on Noguchi. While in Paris he also met the sculptors Alexander Calder and Alberto Giacometti.

Returning to New York in 1929, Noguchi found little acceptance for his abstract sculptures. His sculpted portraits, however, earned him not only a new degree of recognition, but a living as well (among his early patrons was the composer George Gershwin). While these commissions increased his popularity, the work seemed stifling, and in the thirties he moved to Mexico City to work on a large three-dimensional mural with the painter Diego Rivera. While not his own work, the mural was closer in scale to the large pieces he longed to create. His work in Mexico City eventually won him the opportunity to create the entrance to the Associated Press building in New York. With this, Noguchi was able to work on a large scale project of his own.

After World War II, Noguchi returned to Japan and found a community of young artists eager to take part in the optimism of his new ideas. He continued to make individual sculptures, but was also given the opportunity to work on larger site-specific pieces. Among these were gardens and fountains which combined his interests in sculpture and architecture. Finally, this return was both a personal and political bridge bringing together two countries who had recently been at war. While his proposal for the Hiroshima Monument was not accepted, his involvement in the cultural exchange between Japan and America was important. For Noguchi, Japan was both his past and his future, providing him with a history of craftsmanship as well as aesthetic inspiration. He would return there constantly throughout his life to work, study, and live.

Despite his constant relocation and private temperament, Noguchi found a place among the pioneering generation of modern artists. He was inspired by and collaborated with many of the inventive American architects, choreographers, and painters of his time. With his long-time friend, Buckminster Fuller, he constructed models, planned outdoor projects, and investigated the ways in which people live and thrive in their environments. By creating sets for the choreographers Martha Graham, Merce Cunningham, and George Ballenchine, he continued this investigation. He was well respected by many artists, including Frida Kahlo, Arshille Gorky, and Willem de Kooning, but never belonged to any movement or school.

Noguchi died in December of 1988 at the age of 84, but his influence continues to spread. His classic designs — notably his Akari lamps and his free-form coffee table — have never been more popular. In New York, weary urbanites take tranquil refuge in the delicate light and shadow of the Isamu Noguchi Garden Museum. On the other side of the world, his work site in Japan is a lovingly preserved record of his creative process. He has gardens in Paris, Jerusalem, and New York, and outdoor sculptures and environments in seventeen American cities. In these beautiful, spiritual, and finely constructed works Isamu Noguchi has created a dynamic testament to the ties between East and West.