Buckminster Fuller Inc.: Architecture in the Age of Radio
The DeTnk Bookshelf
Bucky Inc. offers a deep exploration of Richard Buckminster Fuller’s work and thought to shed new light on the questions raised by our increasingly electronic world. It shows that Fuller’s entire career was a multi-dimensional refl ection on the architecture of radio.
He always insisted that the real site of architecture is the electromagnetic spectrum. His buildings were delicate mobile instruments for accessing the invisible universe of overlapping signals. Every detail was understood as a way of tuning into hidden waves.
Architecture was built in, with, for and as radio. Bucky Inc. rethinks the legacy of one of the key protagonists of the twentieth-century. It draws extensively on Fuller’s archive to follow his radical thinking from toilets to telepathy, plastic to prosthetics, and data to deep-space. It shows how the critical arguments and material techniques of arguably the single most exposed designer of the last century were overlooked at the time but have become urgently relevant today.
MARK WIGLEY is an architectural historian and theorist based at Columbia University. He is the author of The Architecture of Deconstruction: Derrida’s Haunt; White
Walls, Designer Dresses: The Fashioning of Modern Architecture; and Constant’s New Babylon: The Hyper-Architecture of Desire. He coedited The Activist Drawing:
Retracing Situationist Architectures from Constant’s New Babylon to Beyond and is the co-founder of the journal Volume. He has curated exhibitions at the MoMA in New York, the Witte de With in Rotterdam, The Drawing Center in New York, and
the CCA in Montreal.
