Review: Becoming Bucky Fuller by Loretta Lorance

Becoming Bucky Fuller tells the story of Richard Buckminster Fuller's (1895––1983) earliest forays into industrial mass housing, from being recruited in 1922 by his father-in-law, James Monroe Hewlett, to work with Stockade Buildings Systems, Inc., to his launching of the Dymaxion House and ongoing promotion of this project in the late 1920s and'30s. More specifically, and more provocatively, Loretta Lorance re-tells this story, diligently reconstructing the evidence of an alternative to the now-legendary tale of Fuller's 1927 epiphany while contemplating suicide on the shore of Lake Michigan. Having recently been ousted from his position as president of Stockade's Midwest Corporation, and beset by financial pressures arising from the birth of a second daughter, Fuller, so the story goes, experienced something of a spiritual awakening: he came to understand that his life belonged to the universe and had great significance——that even as...