R. Buckminster Fuller: World Man (The Kassler Lectures)
R. Buckminster Fuller: World Man is this month’s featured product on our online store.
World Man documents Fuller’s never-before-published 1966 Kassler lecture at Princeton University School of Architecture. Delivered at the height of his career (Fuller had appeared on the cover of Time magazine in 1964), he used the lecture to reflect on and synthesize his most significant concepts. In addition to a faithful facsimile of the lecture’s typewritten transcript, the book includes an introductory essay on Fuller’s work, a glossary of key terms and phrases, and an interview with Robert Geddes, the dean responsible for bringing Fuller to teach and lecture at the school.
This recently released book presents the original typescript of the previously unreleased Kenneth Stone Kassler Memorial Lecture, representing his radical thinking a year before his masterwork took shape at Expo ’67 in Montreal. In a rallying cry to architects, he calls for them to shape their universe by responding to its underlying principles. And it seems just as relevant today as it did at the time.
The paperback book consists of 134 pages, color photographs, detailed diagrams and annotations.
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About the Author: Daniel Lopez-Perez is an Assistant Professor in Architecture whose practice moves across academic and professional research in search of ways to expand the discipline of architecture in unprecedented ways. As a Ph.D. Candidate of History and Theory in the Department of Architecture at Princeton University, Lopez-Perez is interested in historiography, focusing particularly on the theme of the skyscraper as an artifact that triggers the writing and rewriting of many histories. During the 1970s, this discourse, “skyscraperology”, appeared in a period of unprecedented transformation of the skyscraper in professional practice. The dissertation traces the theoretical and historiographical writings on the skyscraper, as well as its technical and aesthetic innovations, speculating that both are structurally linked. In professional practice, Lopez-Perez has been project architect in a number of large scale commissions and international competitions for David Chipperfield Architects in London, some of which were awarded first prizes such as the extension to the San Michele Cemetery in Venice. In New York, Lopez-Perez was project architect for Foreign Office Architects, developing the design of The Bundle Tower TM and project architect for FOA within the United Architects Team, for the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation’s World Trade Center Ideas Competition. Currently, Lopez-Perez is building a number of residential projects along the coast of Baja California.