Donation to the Peruchet Museum of 2 puppets designed by Buckminster Fuller for Bil Baird.

Donation to the Peruchet International Museum of Puppetry (Brussels) of two puppets designed by the architect and theoretician Richard Buckminster Fuller (1895-1983) for the puppeteer Bil Baird (1904-1987).?

These object theatre accessories join the 2.000 string puppets of this Brussels collection, which includes the Atomium puppet made in 1958 by the puppeteer Frans Jageneau (1927-2010). Baird and Jageneau met that same year at the Universal Exhibition.?

A few years earlier, Bucky had built what the New York Times called "?an abstraction […] two metal frames that dance enchantingly?" (Atkinson, Brooks: Bairds' Marionettes, The New York Times, 27 December 1955, p. 29. New York, NY USA). One of these was a cuboctahedron performing what the architect called the Jitterbug transformation (a name used for a swing dancer). These puppets were later used in 1958 for the educational television program Adventures in Number + Space (a Westinghouse Broadcasting Company program that taught mathematics through puppetry).?

Baird’s company puppets were dispersed in 1967, including the Bucky's one.?

I built early prototypes of similar models during the winter of 1988, after a conversation with Henry Strub. I was one of his collaborators on a project for a 2-button, 4-trigger joystick to?transcribe submarine commands. Former director of Alcan and a patron of the arts, Henry had been behind the development of design in Canada in the 1960s. He was close to Buckminster Fuller and Max Bill, whom he had invited to Montreal for Expo 67. Henry spoke to me about Bucky and the Great North, Thule, the Biodome and Max Bill's "Tower of the Winds".?

I lived in an annex of his residence in Vermont. It was a chalet designed by Bucky. Unlike the geodesic constructions for which he was renowned, this one looked like a small house drawn by a child. It was held together by two steel cables equipped with tensioners. On each side of the concrete slab of the single room were fixed two rectangular panels connected by the two cables at ceiling height. The gable walls were held vertical by the two tensioned walls, and the roof locked the assembly with the pressure of its weight.

In the early 1980s, encouraged by my professor Frank Popper, I had started working at the Atelier de Recherche en Techniques Avancées (A.R.T.A.) of the Centre de Création Industrielle (C.C.I.) of the Centre Pompidou, where I worked on geometric structures. In 1983, the Musée d’Art Moderne de la ville de Paris allowed me to exhibit one of my bionic structures. A few years later, it was thanks to Henry that I discovered the puppets of Bucky and Baird. On this link, it is possible to see some of these assemblages including an animation inspired by a photo from a book by Baird (“The Art of the Puppet”, Bonanza Books: New York, 1965). The two puppets that I am donating to the Museum today have been reconstructed in stainless steel based on new documents that provide more detailed evidence of the existence and handling of these objects.?