New Bucky Book!

I finally got my own copy of Michael John Gorman's Buckminster Fuller: Designing for Mobility from Amazon.com this morning. I'd previewed it at Trevor's (mostly looking at pictures), but today was my first in depth read.

Per opening credits and acknowledgments, I wasn't in the loop on this one, although I know many of the people Gorman interviewed for this work. Maybe I'd have influenced him to focus more on the whole numbered volumes business, the so-called concentric hierarchy, which is how Synergetics fits so many standard polyhedra into the isomatrix or IVM (octet truss), which Gorman does discuss.

Russ Chu's toothpick IVM is depicted on page 92 -- I opened straight too it upon extracting the book from its packaging (Derek is my witness).

But hey, no one book needs to cover every angle, and I think this book has a lot going for it minus whatever complementary material it leaves out. The writing is engaging, the story well told, and I've picked up several tidbits (about the DDUs & DDMs, the radomes, the teardrop car). Lots of great pictures.

Best of all, Gorman proves there's still lots of relevant unrealized potential packed into these Fuller projects. That keeps me hoping we'll get some more interesting Reality TV in the not too distant future, provided our networks show some courage and imagination (they've shown these before, so I'm not too worried about our prospects).