In the end of the 1980’s, the current hegemonic discourse about the environmental crisis settled the notion of “sustainability”. This notion was formulated in the Brundtland report, which argued that innovation in technology would overcome the impasses of environmental exploitation, in a way that could even result in social development. We choose a specific case, of the projects and writings of Richard Buckminster Fuller, to investigate how a similar position was produced in the architecture, there pointing not only an unexpected link between low and high tech tendencies, but also how his work has been appropriated in different ways according to the historical moment. After analyzing the ambigous relation between Fuller and the industrial technique, and also its employment in his contemporaries, we will elaborate how it is still present in the architecture of the 2000’s, taking the work of Foster+Partners as an example.