Nicholas Grimshaw’s Eden Project in Cornwall, England, featured on this month’s cover, both startles and instructs. The human form appears diminished above the 35-foot geometry of the geodesic dome, here covered in the air-filled, gossamerlike skin of ETFE, a space-age foil that was actually invented decades ago. The geodesic dome’s inventor, Buckminster Fuller, whose prodigiously fertile mind was devoted to architectural research, would not be surprised to see this marriage of materials by a British architect, transforming his structural ideas into light-as-air bubbles at the lunar scale.

Bucky was the tip (quite a tip!) of a tsunami. For the post–World War II generation, for whom Ronald Reagan (the spokesperson for General Electric) declared “Progress is our most important product,” research promised an ever-brighter future; space, our national challenge, lent a cosmic impetus to scientific pursuits. Tarnished, even perverted, by subsequent events such as the war in Vietnam, our national hunger for continually unfolding newness waned, as architects took up formal exploration, historicism, or theory: We left the heavy lifting, and the role of invention, to others.