Paris, France
Mission Title: Buckyballs - About Buckminster Fuller at the Palais de Tokyo
Mission Date: 22-04-2008
SCRIPT
- Go to the Palais de Tokyo and listen to the conversations between the two scholars.
- Interview Hays and/or Picon about Fuller’s influence on contemporary art and design.
- After the interview, visit one of the largest geodesic domes in the world at the Parc de la Villete in Paris. (http://www.paris.org/Musees/Cite/)
- Document the inside and the outside of the building, respond to it either directly or creatively given your conversation with Hays or Picon. How is the building utopian? How does it feel? How is it reacting to its environment?
TRAVEL BAG
What is the space for utopian vision?
From the geodesic dome to his grand theoretical push for sustainability, the work of R. Buckminster Fuller attempted to create living environments that minimized consumption of the earth’s limited resources while maximizing connections and communication within global systems of information and transportation. And he did this roughly forty years before anyone even thought that sustainability, while oil was plentiful and the hole in the ozone was merely a twinkle in a climatologist's eye.
And when you put it that way, the word “visionary” seems almost coined for him. Despite being spurned in his own time by many of the communities he attempted to change (including architecture), Fuller’s profound, often prophetic contributions not only created the seed for the modern environmentally-friendly science and technology movement, but also had a profound influence on contemporary art practice. Though his ideas are oft cited, how much of Buckminster Fuller’s ideas been put into practice? How far have we come in living in a sustainable environment?
Harvard professor Antoine Picon and curator Michael Hays ("Buckminster Fuller: Starting the Universe", opening in June 2008 at the Whitney Museum in New York) will be meeting at the "Cellar Door" exhibition by Loris Gréaud at the Palais de Tokyo. Hays and Picon’s dialogue about the most influential utopian architect forms a confrontation and conversation between the exhibition structure and the space utopias have in architecture today.
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