Of R. Buckminster Fuller's twenty-nine patented inventions, the one that saw the most widespread use was his geodesic dome, which he designed in 1947 and patented in 1954. Like many inventions, the entire idea was not original to Fuller, as Walther Bauersfeld had built a similar structure in 1922 while working for the Carl Zeiss optical company to house a planetarium. Fuller refined and popularized the idea to the extent that he is known today as the "father of the geodesic dome." Prototypes were constructed by Fuller and his students at Black Mountain College in North Carolina during the summer sessions he taught there in the late 1940's. The first practical application of his concept was completed in 1953 for the Ford Motor Company at its River Rouge headquarters. The successes there led to contracts in 1954 for family-sized geodesic domes for the Marine Corps that were delivered by helicopter and featured on the front page of The New York Times.

Over time, as the geodesic dome gained acceptance, the design began to appear all over the world. A variation of the design was used by the U.S. military to protect its radar units in the Arctic in 1955. A100-foot-diameter dome was flown to Kabul, Afghanistan, for the International Trade Fair in 1956, and Fuller designed and supervised the construction of the 384-foot-diameter geodesic dome for the Union Tank Car Company in 1957. It was the largest clear span structural enclosure in the world at that time. By 1961, more than one hundred companies were licensed to build the domes and more than two thousand were produced in that year. Most of the domes were delivered by air to forty countries around the world, as well as the north and south polar regions.

Fuller's interest in the geodesic dome stemmed in part from his lifelong fascination with nature's coordinate system. The structural beauty of the dome is its reliance on "tensegrity" (tensional integrity), a term coined by Fuller for artist Kenneth Snelson and his 18-meter-high Needle Tower (1968). Tensegrity describes a system that is in balance between tension and compression. Fuller's domes were composed of sections of spheres interconnected in a complex way so as to be both strong and light. Although the domes have some drawbacks for residential structures, they are unsurpassed for their strength-per-weight ratio, and as a sphere encloses the greatest volume with the least surface area, they are efficient for heating and cooling.

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