Photo, Buckminster Fuller’s students demonstrate the lightness of the dome at the 1949 Summer Institute

Josef Albers invited architect Buckminster Fuller to the Summer Institute in 1948. Fuller constructed the first large scale geodesic dome that year, although it failed to rise. He returned the following summer and erected with students and colleagues the prototype "Autonomous Dwelling Facility with a Geodesic Structure." Josef and Anni had departed in the spring of 1949.

Courtesy of Western Regional Archives, a branch of the North Carolina State Archives