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 … The importance of Becoming Bucky Fuller lies in the precision and detail with which Lorance’s “parallel history” debunks this myth through tracing extensive archival documentation of the minutiae of his daily life and work. Indeed, it is a rather curious and pleasurable book to read, not only on account of the intriguing twists it adds to a well-known story, but for its peculiar deployment of archival evidence (which at times reads almost like raw documentary material).

The book also garnered this review from technology historian Howard P. Segal in the October 2010 issue of Technology and Culture:

Loretta Lorance’s Becoming Bucky Fuller (2009) is a highly original, often fascinating investigation of how Fuller laid the groundwork for his later fame and fortune after a series of early setbacks. More thoroughly than any prior scholar, Lorance uncovers crucial differences between Fuller’s and his admirers’ portraits of his younger days as the alleged victim of both personal and professional setbacks and what actually happened. It is now evident that Fuller’s greatest invention was himself.

Cisterns whose construction was sponsored by Kanuni Sultan Süleyman (Suleiman the Magnificent) to supply water for his army on a military campaign against Rhodes in 1520 are today trying to survive the destructive effects of time. Although these 490-year-old works were built by Mimar Sinan, they are unfortunately not referenced in history or art books … Professor Nam?k Aç?kgöz from Mu?la University … is conducting research on the cisterns … The cisterns are not only important in historical or architectural terms but are also an invaluable aid from a geographical perspective as they help identify old transportation routes. Unfortunately, they suffer from efforts to give them a uniform appearance via plastering and painting. Today, many of the cisterns are out of use. However, those standing atop mountains sing a heart-rending song of loneliness to shepherds, animals, insects and plants. Their loneliness is made worse by the fact that art historians seem to have forgotten all about them.

Avc? has also written “Mu?la’s historic doorknockers struggle against technology,” “300-year-old silk weaving tradition continues in Mu?la,” and “Camel wrestling contest attracts thousands of spectators.” (Check out the textiles on those camels.)

You are rehabilitating glamour — I like that!

It’s less directed than that. I am a historian. My goal was to link a group of disparate architectural works and explain why they looked the way they did, and in the process reveal the complexity in the definition of modern architecture. It’s not just rational problem-solving and engineering-based. It’s much more about stories, pleasure and mystery.

Read an excerpt of Friedman’s book, the chapter on Eero Saarinen, whom she does proclaim rehabilitated:

From the early 1960s until the current revival of popular appreciation and scholarly interest in Saarinen’s architecture, his reputation, and the fate of many of his most significant projects, hung in the balance with little hope of recognition or respect … His glamorous American modernism, his accommodations of capitalism and its goals, his wife Aline and her commitment to “public relations” — to say nothing of his uncanny success at winning competitions — all of these were held against him … The “trouble with Eero,” [Reyner] Banham concluded, is “he’s such a damned good architect.” With the passage of nearly a half-century since his death, and the brilliant restoration of many of his most extraordinary buildings, it is now clear that most observers, if not yet all, are inclined to agree.

The publisher of The Architecture of the Italian Renaissance describes it as “a landmark survey and analysis of Italian Renaissance architecture by an internationally renowned expert in the field.” The claims are true … He channels into the volume a lifetime of in-depth studies of Italian Renaissance architecture, and presents an account that is stunning in its amassment of fact and fact-based interpretations and proposed solutions … The volume provides a much-awaited bridge between continental and European or Europe-based research on the inner principles and particular dynamics producing the variegated forms of Italian Renaissance edifices … Frommel’s work is impressive, stunning, overwhelming, yes, but also non-definitive, limited, and technical in the sense of being less than open to the evidence of the exchanges between architecture and other arts and artists working alongside architects in Early Modern Italy. This avoidance is deliberate. For Frommel does not mince his words; his is a full-frontal attack on the architectural historians who have focused on historical and cultural contexts in their approaches … According to Frommel, “architecture does not narrate”

Professor John Burland has spent the last two decades striving to save – and understand – the Leaning Tower of Pisa. After defying gravity, Italian bureaucracy and accusations of corruption, it seems he’s finally cracked the case … By a quirk of local geography, Pisa’s water-table rose higher on the tower’s north side, often reaching within one foot in rainy season, and this gave the tower an annual ratchet southward. Armed with this vital information, in 2003, Burland introduced a new drainage system beneath the piazza’s north side, one that lowered and stabilised the water-table, so there’s no kick in either direction. Problem solved. The inclination continues to be monitored daily by the OPP and new figures reveal that the tower didn’t move at all between 2003 and 2009. ‘It’s stopped leaning completely …’ says Burland with a mixture of pride and relief. The Pisans, though, are a hard people to please. Some accuse Burland et al of sterilising their tower – for, part of its old mystique had been the possibility it might collapse at any moment, the frisson that a voyeuristic visitor might witness such a fall. ‘You can’t please all of the people all of the time,’ Burland shrugs … ‘It’s amazing that the Tower of Pisa should remain so fashionable, even at 800 years old,’ Burland smiles. Not bad for a building that was never meant to lean to begin with.

Peter Blundell Jones obituary in The Guardian, Anna Winston at BDOnline, Thorsten Dörting (Spiegel), and in German, W. J. Stock (SZ), Dieter Bartetzko (FAZ), Corinne Elsesser (NZZ).

Wikipedia commemorates the “Baumeister der Demokratie” only in English and German (by comparison, Jean Nouvel has entries in 30 languages, Sverre Fehn has 22, and Thom Mayne 19; even Snøhetta has six), and in fact, remarkably few of the projects listed on his page were completed outside North America or Germany.

Teachers of art history survey courses will be familiar with Behnisch’s 1987 Hysolar Institute at the University of Stuttgart, chosen to illustrate “Deconstructivism” on page 1011 of Gardner’s Art Through the Ages: A Global History (2009; Google Books; Flickr).

I had wondered about the choice of this particular building to represent Behnisch for first-year undergraduates. Although the obituaries uniformly mentioned Munich and his Bonn parliament as his greatest achievements, the Hysolar Institute is undoubtedly a better example of “Deconstructivism.”  This is far from the only case in which the best monument to represent a key concept is not necessarily the peak of a particular artist’s achievement.

The Colosseum, more than any other building from ancient Rome, is routinely the subject of both scholarly and popular texts. While it seems that important studies are published on this structure every year, rarely does any attain the status of definitive text. Katherine Welch’s The Roman Amphitheatre: From Its Origins to the Colosseum is such a book. Welch’s splendid volume is a culmination of her amphitheatre studies and provides a much-needed examination of the building type’s origins in Republican Rome and its development up to and including the Colosseum.

In the spring of 2009, Critical Inquiry received an article from [UCLA English and comparative literature professor] Saree Makdisi critiquing the Simon Wiesenthal Foundation’s proposed Museum of Tolerance in Jerusalem. Designed by Frank Gehry, the proposed museum has been the subject of controversy since it was first proposed. The chosen site was on one of the oldest Arab cemeteries in the Middle East … [We] accepted the article for publication with the idea of soliciting responses that would fairly represent the major positions on the issues. We began by inviting Frank Gehry himself to respond, which he agreed to do. At the same time, however, he requested that Critical Inquiry provide space for a response from a team of Israeli scholars that Gehry regarded as more conversant with the complex legal issues … [We also invited responses from] Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe, who has written extensively on Gehry, [and from] Daniel Monk, an Israeli architect and the head of Peace and Conflict Studies at Colgate University … The whole dossier is gathered here [together with Makdisi's response to the responses] … We should mention one event that occurred in the early fall of 2009, just as this dossier was nearing completion. Frank Gehry announced his decision to withdraw from the [museum] project, but not, he hastened to assure us, because of Makdisi’s essay.

In his essay, Gehry states, “Although the court-imposed delays have now passed, for scheduling reasons I have withdrawn from the project and am no longer involved with it or the project owner, the Simon Wiesenthal Center.”

It seems impossible for me to summarize or quote from the issue’s many lengthy essays in a fair and representative fashion. That said, here first is a portion of Makdisi’s:

… The redefinition of tolerance as an exclusive claim and the usurpation of universality enacted by the Museum of Tolerance must be read in this context as well – as a profoundly ironic gesture, though one for which the irony must be seen as unavailable to the project’s backers, even when it is stated as baldly as in The Independent’s headline reporting the story, “Israel Plans to Build ‘Museum of Tolerance’ on Muslim Graves.” (Or for that matter when it is considered in terms of the fact that this museum so unrelentingly hostile to the other in the name of tolerance is being designed by an architect who has only recently publicly embraced his Jewishness but who, in an age of actual intolerance in America in the 1950s had felt compelled to change his name from Goldberg to Gehry and to suppress his Jewish identity in order better to fit in with a mainstream from which he felt he might be excluded as other) …

What is at work here, then, is not a first-order kind of denial and erasure, but rather a second-order kind. This form of Zionist subjectivity is premised on the act of denying that there has been a denial, erasing the fact that an erasure has taken place. Rather than denying the rights of the Palestinians, it denies that their rights have been denied …

This second-order denial is exactly what the Museum of Tolerance in Jerusalem is all about … And it is perfectly fitting, then, not simply that such a museum should be built on top of an ethnically cleansed graveyard but that those who will eventually gather to celebrate its opening – and those who will visit it in the years afterwards—will have no idea of the profundity of the historical, material, and psychical layers of denial on which they stand.

And here is some more of Gehry’s essay:

When I was eight years old I lived in a town in northern Ontario – Timmins – and there were only thirty Jewish families. It was a mining town of thirty thousand people. My family name is Goldberg. I was the only Jew at the elementary school I attended. I was beaten up regularly on the way home from school for killing Christ. This went on for a couple of years; I would come home bloody. There were unfair numbers against me. At some point I gathered up the strength to fight back and prevail … At the end, the last year I was in Timmins, I became friends with my enemies. So this experience ingrained in me a model of how to deal with anti-Semitism at a very young age …

Now many years later I have outgrown any religious involvement. I am married to a Catholic. My sons have been baptized, and I’m generally liberal about what people believe in and don’t have a need for formal religious involvement. Of course, there are residual cultural gratifications like bagels and lox and matzo ball soup. My name was changed to Gehry to please my former wife, who was pregnant and worried about bringing a child into a world that showed its anti-Semitism even in my college days at the University of Southern California in the early 1950s …

Why would I read in a so-called scholarly treatise on the Israeli-Palestinian issue a critical word about my hiding my Jewishness by changing my name? The Hitler period proved that it did not matter whether you were religious or had a Jewish name; as long as you were considered Jewish even marginally you were put in the ovens … [Makdisi] further undermines his credibility by choosing to enter the field of architectural criticism — a field in which he is obviously illiterate. He discusses the symbolism of walls from model pictures when he does not have any clue what they really are and how they look in real time and at real scale.

When the morning sun reaches across the Arno and hits the varied ochre tones, the whole bridge glows as one in the hazeless Florentine light. Visually, distinct elements weave together like immutable strands— genius, commerce and tyranny, to name three big ones—of the Florentine character.