BUCKYVERSE

We Are All Astronauts

We Are All Astronauts: The Universe of Richard Buckminster Fuller as Reflected by Contemporary Art is an exhibition catalog (German: Wir sind alle Astronauten) published by Kerber and authored by Joachim Krausse, Dana Miller, and Roland Nachtigäller. Produced for an exhibition at the Marta Herford museum, curated by the Marta Herford team together with Markus Richter, it examines how contemporary artists freely reinterpret rather than literally quote Fuller's forms and ideas. The book combines historical essays on Fuller's work with a catalog of recent art that "plays loosely" with his legacy.

Overview

The book is a bilingual (German/English) catalog accompanying the exhibition We Are All Astronauts at the Marta Herford museum. Its title echoes Fuller's "Spaceship Earth" framing — the notion that every human is effectively an astronaut aboard a single planetary vessel. In his preface, museum director Roland Nachtigäller frames the project as an attempt at "rescuing the utopian in the 21st century," noting a fascination with Fuller that re-emerged in a "disillusioned and sober epoch" whose catastrophe scenarios "suddenly seem less like pleasantly scary science fiction, and more like real signs." He stresses that the exhibition is not about quotation, explicit reference, or re-enactment, but about "a loose playfulness with early ideas and works, and their continuation and projection onto one's own work."

The catalog's central thesis, articulated across its essays, is that what most interests contemporary artists is not Fuller's literal forms but "a fundamental fascination with his systematically open thought process and his more artistic than technologically fixated view of the world" — including the "yes, but…" generated by his many failed projects.

Contents and structure

The book is organized around three scholarly essays followed by an artist-by-artist catalog section:

The reproduced source also appends a back-of-book index drawn from Fuller's own writing on Spaceship Earth (entries such as "Great Pirates," "energy slaves," synergy, and Spaceship Earth themes), reinforcing the title's connection to Fuller's planetary worldview.

Krausse: the Lightful Houses and design philosophy

Krausse's essay reconstructs the genesis of Fuller's design thinking from archival documents he identified at the Buckminster Fuller Archive (then in Santa Barbara, now the R. Buckminster Fuller Collection at Stanford). He argues that although Fuller consistently dated his turning point to a mystical experience in 1927, the actual design work on his "house on a mast" belongs to January–April 1928, in a previously unknown group of materials Fuller labeled Lightful, Lightful Houses, and Lightful Products — the basis for the 4D / 4D Time Lock book and ultimately the Dymaxion House.

Key threads of the essay include:

Miller: Fuller as scientist-artist

Miller's essay documents Fuller's deep, sustained involvement with artists, which he considered essential because artists "had resisted specialization and maintained their inherent ability to think independently, intuitively, and comprehensively." For Fuller the highest compliment was to call someone a "scientist-artist." The essay traces episodes including:

Miller concludes that Fuller — who called himself "Guinea Pig B" and whose adult life she frames as "a single performative experiment" — was "unquestionably a scientist-artist of the highest order," anticipating forms in nature later confirmed, such as the C60 carbon molecule.

Richter: Jitterbug variations in contemporary art

Richter's essay uses the Jitterbug transformation — Fuller's discovery that the cuboctahedron can be transformed step-by-step through icosahedron, octahedron, and tetrahedron — as a metaphor for the ongoing transformation of Fuller's ideas in art. He notes that contemporary works are often "interpretations of interpretations," mediated by Stewart Brand's Whole Earth Catalog, the geodesic domes and zomes of hippie communes (Drop City, Libre, Red Rockers), and successor architecture groups (Archigram, Ant Farm, raumlaborberlin, N55).

He then surveys the exhibition's artists and the tendencies they embody, including:

Other catalog artists include Björn Dahlén, Simon Dybbroe Møller, David Maljković, Hermann Maier Neustadt, Riccardo Previdi, and Silke Riechert.

Key themes

Significance

The catalog is a substantive scholarly and curatorial document rather than a promotional pamphlet. Krausse's essay contributes original archival research on the Lightful materials and the formation of Fuller's key concepts; Miller's essay collects and argues for the under-recognized depth of Fuller's exchange with the 20th-century art world (which she notes "goes unnoted in most recent art historical accounts"); and Richter's essay maps nearly sixty years of artistic reception. Together they frame Fuller less as an engineer-architect and more as a systems thinker and "scientist-artist" whose influence continues to mutate through contemporary practice — and they make the case that themes like Spaceship Earth, sustainability, and responsible resource use are now the most resonant parts of his legacy.

See Also

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