Your Private Sky

I was just reading about the Stendahl syndrome, a condition named after its discoverer, a writer who around 1820 noted that some people experienced tremors and overexcitement when in the presence of great art -- sometimes so much so that the art itself would seem to take on life, and begin to communicate with the afflicted.

This is the feeling I always get from the fearless art of R. Buckminster Fuller, who transcended categories of poet engineer artist designer inventor philosopher -- he was not a member of a group or movement or clique; he was a renegade to the end, and as a result his work has never been given adequate support by the establishment.

The art of design-science was exclusively Bucky's, and his massive cumulative life's work is still being gauged almost 20 years after his death; this book, Your Private Sky, is probably the best book on the subject of Fuller in as long. Hundreds of pages of exquisite photographs, many rare and never before published, they show the scope of Bucky's life -- from talking booze talk with Capone's gangsters in the 1920s to dancing with Merce Cunningham in the 1940s to the domes and tensegrity structures, the one-piece bathroom that cleaned without soap and erosion-stopping breakwaters, the elegant rowing needles, and world maps so much truer than the Mercator lies they teach you in school -- the amazing possibilities, the stories of what is now possible, and taking in the color plates and drawings and quotes in this book it's like you're a kid again, full of that naive amazement at the world, and he's like a lost grandfather, and it's as if he's speaking to you.