Buckminster Fuller. Building Construction/Geodesic Dome. United States Patent no. 2.682.235, filed December 12, 1951. Screen-print, white ink on transparent film over sheet of blue paper, 1981. Richard Buckminster Fuller (July 12, 1895 - July 1, 1983) was an American systems theorist, architect, engineer, author, designer, inventor, and futurist. He began studying at Harvard University, but was expelled twice: first for spending all his money partying with a vaudeville troupe, and then for his irresponsibility and lack of interest. By his own appraisal, he was a non-conforming misfit in the fraternity environment. He is best known for his design of the geodesic dome. A geodesic dome is a spherical or partial-spherical shell structure or lattice shell based on a network of great circles (geodesics) on the surface of a sphere. The geodesics intersect to form triangular elements that have local triangular rigidity and also distribute the stress across the structure. When completed to form a complete sphere, it is a geodesic sphere. In 1983 he suffered a heart attack while visiting his wife in a Los Angeles hospital, who was dying of cancer. He died an hour later, at the of age 87 and his wife of 66 years died 36 hours later.