Becoming Bucky Fuller

“Becoming Bucky Fuller is an intellectual experiment singular enough to have pleased the prodigious polymath himself. By refusing the biographical conventions Fuller forged into his own life story, Loretta Lorance demonstrates how in the late 1920s he formulated not only the Dymaxion House, but his own public persona as well. Based on close readings of deep archival research, Becoming Bucky Fuller makes clear that one more item must be added to the long list of Fuller’s inventions: himself.”n—Sandy Isenstadt, History of Art, Yale Universitynn”Everything in this book is illuminating. As Loretta Lorance reveals, long before Bucky Fuller became a ‘visionary,’ his life struggles in the hard-knocks business world of the 1920s shaped both his autobiography and his brilliant contributions to American modernism.”n—Carol Willis, Director, The Skyscraper Museumnn”Historians of architecture and material culture have never quite known what to do with the figure of Buckminster Fuller. In her careful new study, Lorance takes on his first successful invention—Bucky himself. Becoming Bucky Fuller offers important insights into the formation of this compelling persona: an American hero of mid-twentieth-century counter-culture.”n—Andrew Leach, School of Geography, Planning, and Architecture, University of Queensland, Australia, and author of Tafuri: Choosing History