Lorance's “revisionist” book zooms in on the crucial late 1920s and early '30s when Buckminster Fuller worked on a project for industrially produced housing that eventually came to be known as the Dymaxion House. Lorance, an architectural historian at New York's School of Visual Arts, has studied the many volumes of Fuller's famously unreadable diary, the Chronofile,
along with his wife's diary, and both Fuller's own business records and those of his previous employers. Fuller's houses were designed as hexagonal structures, clad in glass and metal and held in tension by piano wire. As Lorance shrewdly shows, Fuller was an early master of the art of “spin,” and Lorance illustrates his frequent manipulation of early biographers in ways that insured his struggles were viewed as those of a misunderstood underdog. In fact, says Lorance, much of his technology was not considered original enough to earn patent protection, and the American Institute of Architects never endorsed the project. Once Fuller realized the house would not be built, he took the advice of the publicity director at Marshal Fields and renamed it the Dymaxion House, the House of the Future. Fuller's career as visionary had begun. 66 illus. (May)
