Becoming Bucky Fuller

Buckminster Fuller´s fame reached its peak in the 1960s and 1970s, when his visionary experiments struck a chord with the counterculture and his charismatic personality provided the media with a good story - that of a genius who could play the role of artist, scientist, and entrepreneur all at once. In Becoming Bucky Fuller , Loretta Lorance shows that Fuller´s career did not begin with the lofty goals hailed by his admirers, and that, in fact, Fuller´s image as guru and prophet was as carefully constructed as a geodesic dome. Fuller (1895-1983) determined early on how the story of his life in the 1920s and 1930s should be portrayed. But, drawing on a close reading of Fuller´s personal papers (in particular, the multivolume scrapbook, Chronofile), Lorance looks at Fuller´s first independent project, the Dymaxion House, and finds that what really happened differs from the authorized version. According to Fuller himself and most secondary sources, after a series of personal crises in the 1920s - including the death of his young daughter, thoughts of suicide, and a ´year of silence´ during which he pondered his purpose in life - Fuller resolved to devote himself to the betterment of society by offering the public economical, efficient, modern manufactured housing. But the private papers tell a different story; one of his initial motivations for designing the Dymaxion House was simply to make money from its manufacture. When that didn´t work, Fuller began to emphasize its possibilities rather than its practicalities. By the mid-1930s, Lorance shows, Fuller the public figure had gone from being an entrepreneur with a product to being a visionary with an idea. He had become Bucky Fuller.