Your Private Sky: R. Buckminster Fuller: the Art of Design Science

This is an exuberant portrait of R. Buckminster Fuller, the visionary who exhorted us to "think global, act local" and devised the geodesic dome and the concept of Spaceship Earth. –House & Garden

In light of the reawakening interest in R. Buckminster Fuller’s works and thoughts, and of their growing importance for our technological world, it is time for a reedition of this comprehensive and legendary publication from 1999. The visual reader Your Private Sky examines and documents Fuller’s theories, ideas and projects, and critically deals with his ideology of “rescue through technology.” This book provides a highly multifaceted insight into Fuller’s world, also showing many of its less known sides.

Buckminster Fuller (1895–1983) was one of the most revolutionary technological visionaries of the 20th century. He established new standards that can be seen as decisive for future-capable design. “How to make the world work” – to this task he dedicated his unflagging attention. Convinced that specialists usually create more problems than they solve, he developed his concept for a vision of the whole.
As an architect, engineer, entrepreneur and poet, he was a quintessentially American self-made man. But he was also an outsider: a technologist with a poet’s imagination who already developed theories of environmental control in the thirties and who anticipated the globalization of our planet. Catchphrases of our time, like “Spaceship Earth”, “synergetic”, or “think global, act local” – can directly or indirectly be traced back to Bucky.

Buckminster Fuller's talents bridged architecture, engineering, and industrial design, and his interest in prefabricated units, constructed from industrial materials, marked his designs as among the most inventive of the 20th century. In their economy and conservation of energy, his works far exceeded anything envisioned by International Style architects of his time. This volume, the result of an exhibition held at five European design museums, consists primarily of archival documentation from the Buckminster Fuller Institute. Each chapter examines a design, beginning with a brief descriptive paragraph and including substantial excerpts from Fuller's lectures, manuscripts, and publications in addition to sketches, photographs, patent application drawings, and engineering drawings. The result is engaging, visually stunning, and highly informative if at times also confusing, overwrought, and breathless. Regrettably, there is some ambiguity as to which caption describes which illustration. Nevertheless, this book well complements Inventions: The Patented Works of R. Buckminster Fuller (St. Martin's, 1983). For architecture and design collections.
-Paul Glassman, New York Sch. of Interior Design Lib.
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.