quality:corruption, structural:summarization
World stage

International recognition began with the success of huge geodesic domes during the 1950s. Fuller lectured at North Carolina State University in Raleigh in 1949, where he met James Fitzgibbon, who would become a close friend and colleague. Fitzgibbon was director of Geodesics, Inc. and Synergetics, Inc. the first licensees to design geodesic domes. Thomas C. Howard was lead designer, architect, and engineer for both companies. Richard Lewontin, a new faculty member in population genetics at North Carolina State University, provided Fuller with computer calculations for the lengths of the domes' edges.

Fuller began working with architect Shoji Sadao in 1954, together designing a hypothetical Dome over Manhattan in 1960, and in 1964 they co-founded the architectural firm Fuller & Sadao Inc., whose first project was to design the large geodesic dome for the U.S. Pavilion at Expo 67 in Montreal. This building is now the " Montreal Biosphère ".In 1962, the artist and searcher John McHale wrote the first monograph on Fuller, published by George Braziller in New York.

After employing several Southern Illinois University Carbondale (SIU) graduate students to rebuild his models following an apartment fire in the summer of 1959, Fuller was recruited by longtime friend Harold Cohen to serve as a research professor of "design science exploration" at the institution's School of Art and Design. According to SIU architecture professor Jon Davey, the position was "unlike most faculty appointments... more a celebrity role than a teaching job" in which Fuller offered few courses and was only stipulated to spend two months per year on campus. Nevertheless, his time in Carbondale was "extremely productive", and Fuller was promoted to university professor in 1968 and distinguished university professor in 1972.

Working as a designer, scientist, developer, and writer, he continued to lecture for many years around the world. He collaborated at SIU with John McHale. In 1965, they inaugurated the World Design Science Decade (1965 to 1975) at the meeting of the International Union of Architects in Paris, which was, in Fuller's own words, devoted to "applying the principles of science to solving the problems of humanity."

From 1972 until retiring as university professor emeritus in 1975, Fuller held a joint appointment at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville, where he had designed the dome for the campus Religious Center in 1971. During this period, he also held a joint fellowship at a consortium of Philadelphia -area institutions, including the University of Pennsylvania, Bryn Mawr College, Haverford College, Swarthmore College, and the University City Science Center; as a result of this affiliation, the University of Pennsylvania appointed him university professor emeritus in 1975.

Fuller believed human societies would soon rely mainly on renewable sources of energy, such as solar- and wind-derived electricity. He hoped for an age of "omni-successful education and sustenance of all humanity". Fuller referred to himself as "the property of universe" and during one radio interview he gave later in life, declared himself and his work "the property of all humanity". For his lifetime of work, the American Humanist Association named him the 1969 Humanist of the Year.

In 1976, Fuller was a key participant at UN Habitat I, the first UN forum on human settlements.