Pete Simoneaux's "Pineapple Pilot for Spaceship Earth" recipe, with an illustration of a pineapple in black and white.
Courtesy Lars Müller Publishers/The Buckminster Fuller Institute

Architecture-Themed Recipes to Cook, from Buckminster Fuller and his Friends

A cookbook, compiled by Buckminster Fuller’s friends, honors the late architect’s legacy and his love of food.
By Aileen Kwun
August 22, 2020
1 minute read

The 20th-century futurist, theorist, inventor, and architect R. Buckminster Fuller was a tireless visionary and radical thinker who wrote dozens of books and proposed theoretical designs advocating for a holistic rethinking of the built environment. He was, it turns out, also a giant foodie. To commemorate his 125th birthday this year, the Swiss publisher Lars Müller released a limited-edition reprint of Synergetic Stew: Explorations in Dymaxion Dining, a collection of recipes and anecdotes originally compiled by Fuller’s friends as a surprise gift for his 86th birthday. Dishes such as Amy Edmondson’s “Allspace-Filling Whole Wheat Bread,” Peter Simoneaux’s “Pineapple Pilot for Spaceship Earth,” and Shirley Sharkey’s “GEODESICANDY” serve as cheeky, affectionate odes to their dear friend’s well-known works. Fuller’s own specialties, including a tomato ice cream, are also present. Short bios on each of the cookbook’s contributors, added for the limited-edition run, paint a picture of Fuller’s lively orbit of artists, friends, and colleagues—John Cage, John Denver, and Isamu Noguchi among them—and the kind of legendary dinner parties at which we’d happily be flies on the wall.