Your Private Sky: R. Buckminster Fuller: The Art of Design Science (1999)
Filed under book | Tags: · architecture, design, design research, earth, engineering, invention, science, technology
“‘Bucky’ was one of the most revolutionary technological visionaries of this century. As an architect, engineer, entrepreneur, 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 (“more with less”) and anticipated the globalization of our planet (“think global – act local”).
This visual reader documents and examines Fuller’s theories, ideas, designs, and projects. It also takes an analytical look at his ideology of technology as the panacea. With numerous illustrations, many published here for the first time, as well as texts by Fuller and the editors.
The publication presents Buckminster Fuller’s creations as a dazzling expression of this unconditionally optimistic technocrat whose vision of driverless Spaceship Earth led him to examine the principles of maximizing effects in the most diverse sectors of design and construction.”
Edited by Joachim Krausse and Claude Lichtenstein
Translated by Steven Lindberg and Julia Thorson
Publisher Lars Müller, Baden, 1999
ISBN 3907044886, 9783907044889
528 pages
via ExP
Review: John Martinson (Geographical Review 2001).
PDF (no OCR, 68 MB)
Comment (0)L. Moholy-Nagy: Vision in Motion (1947)
Filed under book | Tags: · abstraction, architecture, art, art education, bauhaus, biology, design, film, image, industrial design, life, light, literature, machine, motion, painting, perception, photography, poetry, sculpture, technology, visual communication, visual poetry
“This book is written for the artist and the layman, for everyone interested in his relationship to our existing civilization. It is an extension of my previous book, The New Vision. But while The New Vision gave mainly particulars about the educational methods of the old Bauhaus, Vision in Motion concentrates on the work of the Institute of Design, Chicago, and presents a broader, more general view of the interrelatedness of art and life.” (from the author’s foreword)
Publisher Paul Theobald, Chicago, 1947
371 pages
PDF (114 MB, no OCR)
Comments (2)Julia Vaingurt: Wonderlands of the Avant-Garde: Technology and the Arts in Russia of the 1920s (2013)
Filed under book | Tags: · 1920s, aesthetics, architecture, art, art history, avant-garde, biomechanics, body, cinema, communism, constructivism, design, literature, machine, politics, russia, science fiction, sexuality, socialism, soviet union, technē, technology, theatre
“In postrevolutionary Russia, as the Soviet government was initiating a program of rapid industrialization, avant-garde artists declared their intent to serve the nascent state and to transform life in accordance with their aesthetic designs. In spite of their professed utilitarianism, however, most avant-gardists created works that can hardly be regarded as practical instruments of societal transformation. Exploring this paradox, Vaingurt claims that the artists’ investment of technology with aesthetics prevented their creations from being fully conscripted into the arsenal of political hegemony. The purposes of avant-garde technologies, she contends, are contemplative rather than constructive. Looking at Meyerhold’s theater, Tatlin’s and Khlebnikov’s architectural designs, Mayakovsky’s writings, and other works from the period, Vaingurt offers an innovative reading of an exceptionally complex moment in the formation of Soviet culture.”
Publisher Northwestern University Press, 2013
SRLT series
ISBN 0810128942, 9780810128941
322 pages
via Sorin
Review: Boris Dralyuk (NEP, 2013), Tim Harte (Slavic Review, 2014).
PDF (updated on 2022-11-12)
See also the science-fiction film Aelita, Queen of Mars, dir. Yakov Protazanov, 1924, 111 min, based on Tolstoy’s novel.
Comments (2)