New York will have a “back to the future” feel starting next week, thanks to the opening of the Whitney Museum’s eagerly awaited exhibition, “Buckminster Fuller: Starting with the Universe.”

As if to keep company with this extraordinary, off-the-wall design theorist and inventor, two venues in SoHo have shows that celebrate lesser-known, though exemplary, mid-20th-century aesthetic theorists with a penchant for the fusion of art and science.

These men, both scions of the Austro-Hungarian empire who emigrated to America, are Frederick Kiesler and György Kepes, showing, respectively, at the Drawing Center and, a couple of blocks away, at the Hungarian Cultural Center.

Both men had polymathic tendencies that qualify them, in Fuller’s term for himself, as “comprehensive, anticipatory design scientists,” or “comprehensivists” for short. Kiesler was trained as an architect, though he held the accolade — extended by Philip Johnson — of being “the best-known non-building architect of our time.” His milieu was the art world, and his name lives on, thanks primarily to his groundbreaking work in exhibition design, most famously for Peggy Guggenheim’s Art of This Century gallery.

Kepes also embraced interdisciplinary work with aplomb. Initially, photography was his primary medium of choice, and he worked closely with fellow Hungarian László Moholy-Nagy in Berlin, and through him was associated with the Bauhaus in its last manifestation, in Chicago. But, as he belligerently put it, he was “not a photographer but an artist working with light.” He was a pioneer of installation art, an abstract painter, a commercial designer, and a photographer of images of perceptual double entendre such as the classic “Juliette, Roma” (1938), in which a peacock feather is draped over the right eye of a woman’s face to arresting effect.

Another thing Kiesler and Kepes had in common, in keeping with their plurality of interests, was the missionary zeal to head up learning centers of their own initiative that brought together diverse minds to help bridge the gap between art and science, the applied and the speculative. Kiesler was the director of the Laboratory for Design Correlation at Columbia. Kepes, meanwhile, founded the legendary Center for Advanced Visual Studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1967. He edited a seminal set of books, his “Vision + Value” series, with contributions from artists, scientists, and psychologists who considered such subjects as the nature of motion and sign, image and symbol. Among the great minds brought together was, indeed, Buckminster Fuller, writing on the conceptuality of fundamental structures in the volume entitled “Structure in Art and Science” (1965).

Though not on the same order of originality and sheer entertainment value as “Bucky” Fuller, Kiesler and Kepes were nonetheless extraordinary men. But to convey the vision and value of theorists and experimenters for whom productivity in the static exhibition format was of secondary concern is a challenge calling for out-of-the-box solutions such as these men themselves pioneered. The Drawing Center and the Hungarian Cultural Center pull this off with varying degrees of success.

Both shows draw primarily from archives of their respective subjects back in the old countries. The Drawing Center, true to its mission, focuses on Kiesler’s own graphic works as the medium for conveying his unrealized ideas. Kiesler was deeply influenced by Dada and Surrealism, closely associating with the exiles of those movements who had congregated in New York during the war, many of whom were patronized by Peggy Guggenheim. His revolutionary designs for her 57th Street premises were inspired by the movement’s assaults upon rational ordering and perception, providing an expressionistic, imaginative play space of curved walls and organically shaped furniture. His seating for the gallery has been reconstructed in the foyer of the Drawing Center, where the sole surviving television recording of Kiesler, discussing his utopian modular housing proposal, his Endless House, is being screened.

Kiesler’s drawings are a kind of fusion of Surrealist automatic handwriting and Leonardo’s notebooks (which were surreal enough in themselves, it could be argued). His Endless House sketches are biomorphic shapes brought to life in frenetic scribble. Other drawings, like his “Study of human perception” from the late 1930s, fuse Le Corbusier’s modular man with a hand redolent of the psychosexual doodling of André Masson. The show, curated by João Ribas and Kiesler expert Dieter Bogner, is divided into sections that consider exhibition design, the Endless House, perception (a fascination Kiesler shared with Kepes), and his notion of interdisciplinarity, which he called “Correalism.”

But Kiesler was not a graphic artist with ideas but a thinker who drew, and this makes for a less than riveting museum-going experience. What you see were probably intended as sketches to demonstrate an idea in the course of conversation, or to elaborate an idea that needed to find concrete articulation. The drawings are ghosts of ideas whose verbal corollary is sadly absent. The designers of the exhibition, nARCHITECTS, pay homage to Kiesler with a striking, handsome display solution for the presentation of his drawings, a white steel, waist-high display case that wends a serpentine course around the center of the gallery, and which viewed in plan would look like a suitably Kieslerian amoeba form.

It is a beautiful piece of furniture, suggestive and restrained in equal measure. But through no fault of the designers, it is the star of the exhibition, which can never be a good sign. However extreme and intrusive Kiesler’s own exhibition designs, the likes of Dalí, Mondrian, and the young Americans Pollock, Rothko, and Motherwell held their own; Kiesler, here, does not.

The Hungarian Cultural Center cannot be accused of overdesign in their showcasing of Kepes. The center occupies the entire top floor of a sprawling Broadway loft. Where the Drawing Center eschews the walls, the HCC hugs them in a way that is unhealthy for a pioneer of total design environments. But still, although clearly a budget presentation, there is rich material on offer: Kepes’s exquisite early black-and-white experimental photographs; his richly enigmatic paintings, to which he returned after a career in rebellion against the medium in which he first trained at the Hungarian Academy of Fine Arts in Budapest; abstract works whose rusty-looking surfaces mix sand and paint; posters and advertisements signaling his publishing and educational projects, and, by way of a video projection, a record of a light and mirror installation, “Flame Orchard” (1971).

There is enough in each show to indicate that great minds had been at work. The philosophical compensation, if the shows are visual letdowns, is that as thinkers, educators, and impresarios, Kiesler and Kepes did their job, and their ideas are out in the world.

Kiesler until July 24 (35 Wooster St., between Broome and Spring streets, 212-219-2166).

Kepes until September 19 (447 Broadway, between Grand and Howard streets, 212-750-4450).