Your Private Sky: R Buckminster Fuller: Discourse

This book complements the volume R. Buckminster Fuller, Your Private Sky: Design Art Science and gives an authentic insight into the development of Fuller's architectonic, technical and anthropological concepts. This poet of technology was a poet as engineer, a thinker as designer, an artist as researcher who left an immense testament of writings - including texts of visionary importance, great consistency, penetrating linguistic force and not least of urgent topicality. The book documents various aspects of his widely ramified publications. Fuller spoke to the whole world, indeed to Spaceship Earth, the metaphor that he coined in 1950.

He did this as one of the greatest and incomparably original individuals of our time in a genuinely American sense. Some of the texts are published here for the first time, such as his first programmatic manuscript Lightful Houses (1928), an informative lecture text on Dymaxion House (1929), his Letter to Einstein (1944) and the convolute Noah's ArkII (1951) as a commented facsimile. Photographs from Fuller's estate complement the texts.

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.
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