Becoming Bucky Fuller

Loretta Lawrence tries to revise Buckminster Fuller’s reputation in her new book, "Becoming Bucky Fuller," reports Michael J. Lewis in a Wall Street Journal review (5/5/09). By Lorretta’s account, Bucky should be remembered as a "failed entrepreneur" rather than a "bold visionary." She bases her premise on Bucky’s failure to realize his vision of Dymaxion House, a six-sided living platform impaled on a central mast and hoisted into the air." Bucky’s vision was that this house could be mass-produced like the Model A, but that didn’t work out.

His attempt at a three-wheeled Dymaxion Car was also a bust, as was the Dymaxion Bathroom. Yet, as Michael J. Lewis points out, in these failures, Bucky created "exhilarating emblems of possibility, teaching young architects and designers that formal conventions were nothing more than imaginary lines to be crossed at will." That’s not what Loretta Lawrence sees, though, and she digs into "the core mythology of Fuller’s long guru status." She does so by scrutinizing the "exhaustive scrapbooks" Bucky kept, which has since "served as the basis of all later scholarship."

She suggests that these scrapbooks were "something of a fiction, contrived by Fuller to conceal discreditable episodes and polish his credentials as a visionary." Michael thinks Loretta’s approach is flawed because readers don’t have access to the scrapbooks, and that in any case Bucky’s autobiographical airbrushing was rather minor. Lorretta’s portrait, says Michael, ultimately is "not terribly different from the one we have always had before us — a vivid example of the inventor/salesman/messiah type that America seems to produce every generation or so."