Your Private Sky: R Buckminster Fuller: Discourse [Hardcover]

Joachim Krausse (Editor), Claude Lichtenstein (Editor)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 3907044940 | ISBN-13: 978-3907044940 | Publication Date: February 12, 2001 | Edition: 1

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.

Editorial Reviews

From Library Journal

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. --This text refers to an alternate Hardcover edition.

Review

Fantastic, a must for designers, architects, engineers as well as artists, cartographers, mathematicians, and scientists... a superb introduction. -- Choice, June 2000

The result is an engaging, visually stunning, and highly informative. -- Library Journal, 5/1/00

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 --This text refers to an alternate Hardcover edition.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 528 pages
• Publisher: Lars Müller Publishers; 1 edition (February 12, 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 3907044940
• ISBN-13: 978-3907044940
• Product Dimensions: 9.5 x 6.8 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,799,463 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

22 of 22 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Superb - organization, production, and editing, July 26, 2000

By 

J. E. Nugent (Illinois United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Your Private Sky: R. Buckminster Fuller (Hardcover)

"Your Private Sky" is a must-have book for Bucky fans. In addition to presenting a wealth of new material from Fuller's archives it also arranges and presents Bucky's life and works in an innovative format that emphasizes the larger view of his work and the natural progression of his thoughts. The authors have taken the time to do the re-search which allowed them to see the larger picture. This book about Bucky's life and inventions goes from the whole to the particular.

One example of the thoroughness of "Your Private Sky," compared to earlier books, is in it's handling of the Dymaxion house. This is the first book, I've seen, that includes drawings and photos of the initial square or rectangular 4D home. The authors have done a great job of ransacking Fuller's archives to find just the right images and words to convey the flow or progression of Bucky's designs. This was the first time I grasped how the work on the Dymaxion home designs was related to the latter invention of the Geodesic dome.

Most of the never-before-published photos, drawings and writings in "Your Private Sky" were found in Bucky's Chronofile, the 300-foot long series of personal history files that Bucky started collecting in 1915. Except for the short introduction and chronology at the beginning of the book, all the material in this 522 page book consists of items selected from Bucky's Chronofile. The words are selections from Bucky's writings.

The graphic design, printing and binding of "Your Private Sky" compliment the quality of its contents. The superior binding permits the pages to lie flat so you can view the hundreds of full bleed photographs including many two page spreads. The book's visual organization is excellent especially considering the variety of items and styles that had to be accommodated. My minor criticisms are that I would have liked to see more indexing and source information and a few less spelling and translation errors in this book.

A superb book; it's well organized, packed with never before seen photos and drawings, thoughtfully arranged and edited, and printed and bound using first class materials and methods.

19 of 20 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Exploring Buckys Archive is always a treat., October 1, 2000

By 

Lloyd Sieden "Bucky disciple" (Bellevue, WA USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Your Private Sky: R. Buckminster Fuller (Hardcover)

Because Bucky did his best to get his message out to as many people as possible, at a cost of $65 I am sure that this is not the type of book he would wanted to see produced. It seems like the book could have been printed in a less costly form and many of the graphics which were clearly just taken from video eliminated so that the material could be made available to more people at a lower price.

That said, I thoroughly enjoyed the glorious visual aspect of this book. In my years spent researching my book "Buckminster Fuller's Universe" and working on other Fuller writing, I had not seen some of the photographs and illustrations displayed here. This is a must have for any Bucky fan.

I don't recommend it as an introduction to the ideas and wisdom of Fuller because, as is true with almost all of Fuller's writing, the ideas need to be studied not read over once, and this book does not provide a complete enough picture to be a good study guide. Look to the writing of others for your introduction to Bucky, and look to this book to add to your understanding of a man who is recognized as one of the great thinkers, geniuses and Renaissance men of modern times.

15 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Your Private Sky, May 27, 2000

By 

A.Yamamoto (Tokyo, Japan) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Your Private Sky: R. Buckminster Fuller (Hardcover)

I was looking forward to receivinging this book .........The newly published book was just what I expected. It contains Bucky's whole life history and his various ideas that arised during his life such as the famous geodesic dome, dymaxion products, tensegrity, world game and so on. Many are what I have not obtained so far in detail from other literatures already published. So they are extremely usefull and fun to me. The most important thing that I could get from the book is that I could feel strong power to live the daily life again with fresh dreams.