We do not live by bread alone

I came across a very large tent peg impaled in the pavement just off Fifth Avenue in Manhattan. A rope stretched from the top of the peg to a very elegant mansion and a sign above the door identified the building as the Cooper Hewitt Design Museum and announced a show inside that looked promising. I was an architectural neophyte and, while I vaguely knew the names Hans Hollein, Oswald Ungers, Ettore Sottsass, Arata Isozaki and Richard Meier, it was Buckminster Fuller’s name that had me bounding up the steps. It was his name that had fanned the embers of my earlier interest in studying architecture. It was, too, his geodesic constructions that stretched my understanding of the possibilities of building, beyond those of Christchurch’s colonial