He actually wanted people to live in geodesic domes.
There are some cool images here
http://www.buckminster.info/Ideas/00-SelectedIdeas-TOC.htmFor his life
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buckminster_Fuller Throughout his life, Fuller was concerned with the question of whether humanity has a chance to survive lastingly and successfully on planet Earth, and if so, how? Considering himself an average individual without special monetary means or academic degree, he chose to devote his life to this question, trying to find out what an individual like him could do to improve humanity's condition that large organizations, governments, or private enterprises inherently could not do.
Pursuing this lifelong experiment, Fuller wrote twenty-eight books, coining and popularizing terms such as "spaceship earth", ephemeralization, and synergetics. He also boasts numerous inventions chiefly in the fields of design and architecture, the best known of which is the geodesic dome.
Late in his life, after working on his concepts for several decades, Fuller had achieved considerable public visibility. He traveled the world giving lectures, and received numerous honorary doctorates. Most of his inventions, however, never made it into production, and he was strongly criticized in most of the fields that he tried to influence (such as architecture), or simply dismissed as a hopeless utopian. Fuller's proponents, on the other hand, claim that his work has not yet received the attention that it deserves.
A little on the history of naming the molecule
The cached website I found didn't translate, but this is from
The Chemical Intelligencer, July, 1995 (Vol. 1, No. 3), edited by Istvan Hargittai (Institute of General and Analytical Chemistry, Budapest Technical University) and published by Springer-Verlag New York Inc.
Some years later, on March 21, 1991, on a visit to Houston, I had the opportunity to call on Professor Smalley in his laboratory at Rice University and pay him homage, specifically on behalf of the Fuller family and the BFI - expressing our gratification in the luster that he and Professor Kroto had added to Fuller's name. He greeted me with a hospitality, a sympathy, and an enthusiasm matching the cordiality of the correspondence I had initiated with Professor Kroto at the University of Sussex in Brighton. A sense of destiny permeates his large, comfortable office; he told me I was sitting on the very couch where he and Kroto christened the new molecule on September 9, 1985. He told me about how he and his colleagues had sat up all night making models out of Gummy Bear jelly beans and paper cutouts of pentagons and hexagons. I recalled that Fuller as a child had made models out of toothpicks and dried peas, and he had always felt that geometry should be taught as a hands-on laboratory discipline. Smalley said that he had overcome any initial reservations he might have had to Kroto's proposal to name C60 buckminsterfullerene. For one thing, the standard IUPAC name for the molecule was impossibly awkward and difficult to read, much less speak. When I asked him why he found the name so appropriate, he said that it was because it conveys in a single word so much information about the shape of the molecule, and he found a happy congruence in the fact that its 20 letters match the 20 faces of the icosahedron - a letter for each facet. All even-number carbon cluster-cage molecules are now termed fullerenes. The root name Fuller lent itself to generic applications with the various other conventional suffixes, producing not just fullerenes, but fulleranes, fullerenium, fullerides, fullerites, fulleroids, fulleronium, metallofullerenes, and so forth. Colloquially - even affectionately - they are subsumed as buckyballs.
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