Fuller never finished a degree — Harvard expelled him twice — and never held an architecture licence, which makes him an outlier on any roster of architects and, by his own account, the point: he called himself a "comprehensive anticipatory design scientist" and worked from mathematics and materials efficiency rather than architectural training. A failed business and the death of a daughter brought him to the edge of suicide in 1927; he described what followed as a decision to treat his own life as an experiment in what one individual, stripped of inherited assumptions, could contribute. Working largely outside any single professional discipline, he patented the geodesic dome in 1954 — a structural principle, triangulating a sphere's surface so that stress is distributed across the whole shell rather than carried by any single member, that let a dome enclose enormous unsupported spans at a fraction of the material a conventional roof would need. He held twenty-eight US patents, wrote more than thirty books, and received the Presidential Medal of Freedom the year he died.
