Joachim Krausse, Claude Lichtenstein (eds.)

Your Private Sky
R. Buckminster Fuller

The Art of Design Science

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.

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.

Edited by Joachim Krausse, Claude Lichtenstein

Design: Integral Lars Müller

16,5 × 24 cm, 6 ½ × 9 ½ in

528 pages, 600 illustrations

Paperback

2017, 978-3-03778-524-9, English
CHF 40.00

Claude Lichtenstein

Claude Lichtenstein (*1949) is a Swiss architect and an expert on design history. From 1985-2001, he was responsible for exhibitions on architecture and design at the Museum für Gestaltung Zürich in the function of curator. He is lecturer for design history and design science at various Swiss universities of applied sciences (ZHdK, FHNW, HSLU, ZHAW) and publishes widely on these subjects.

R. Buckminster Fuller

Richard Buckminster Fuller was born on July 12, 1895, in Milton, Massachusetts. After spending most of his youth in Massachusetts and on Bear Island in Maine, he fell out of Harvard and into the US Navy during World War I. He married Anne Hewlett, the daughter of a prominent New York architect, in 1917 and spent around five years working with his father-in-law on new techniques of housing construction after leaving the navy. From 1927 on he became independent and committed himself to completely rethinking the question of shelter—relentlessly challenging every assumption about structure, function, materials, technology, aesthetics, services, distribution, mobility, communication, collaboration, information, recycling, politics, property, and social norms. He started from first principles to develop a radical philosophy of doing “vastly more with vastly and invisibly less.” The constant goal was a much more efficient and equitable distribution of planetary resources to enable the survival and ongoing evolution of the human species. His work paralleled, radicalized, and critiqued the mainstreams of modern architecture and still defies categorization today. He was a nonstop teacher and communicator around the globe in every possible medium—becoming probably the single most exposed designer and design theorist of the twentieth century. He died on July 1, 1983, in Los Angeles at the bedside of his wife, who died thirty-six hours later.