After earning her undergraduate degree in engineering and design from Harvard, she went to work for Buckminster Fuller.

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To skeptics, Attia's Roundhouse evokes Buckminster Fuller's Dymaxion House of the 1940s.

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Lanier was technologically precocious, as well as artistically minded, a mixture of traits that his father tried to nurture by giving him books about Buckminster Fuller.

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The recent winner of the prestigious Buckminster Fuller Prize, Savory developed the Holistic Management grazing technique during his time as a researcher and farmer in Southern Africa in the 1980s.

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The suburbs would be on the someday list -- the Detroit Zoo and its newly born river otters, the glassblowers and re-enactors at Greenfield Village and Buckminster Fuller's geodesic Dymaxion House at the Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn.

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