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Art Book Reviews

The collections at Loggia explore select areas of study in art and art history, architecture and design, the decorative arts, industrial design, and classical studies such as Greek, Roman, and Celtic mythology.

Gardner's Art Through the Ages

This book is the classic reference for the study of art. It features a history of artists and their works, as well as lucid and engaging descriptions of the styles and periods of art history. Highly recommended for both students and scholars.

 

 

The Dymaxion Ideal | an exploration of the life and works of R. Buckminster Fuller... engineer, architect, inventor, and philosopher.

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Featured Article
There is a certain faith fundamental to Fuller's designs, 'synergy' as he liked to describe it. It is the behavior of a complete system, not predictable by knowledge of its individual parts or subassemblies. Rather it is the cohesive collection of the total whole. Fuller always approached structures in this manner, for they were merely manifestations of a society that operated similarly. This faith in the individual parts is poignantly illustrated about a man sorting mail on an express train... Fuller's 'Epic Poem'.

"with unuttered faith that the engineer is competent that the switchmen are not asleep that the track walkers are doing their job that the technologists who designed the train and rails knew their stuff that the thousands of others whom he may never know by face or name are collecting tariffs paying for repairs and so handling assets that he will be paid a week from today and again a week after that and that all the time his family is safe and in well being without his personal protection"

Mutual trust of interdependent parts... the trust that sustains the mail sorter, the airline passenger, the pedestrian, and the machine. Fuller saw society itself as essentially just a machine - a set of seemingly independent components working together, both consciously as well as inadvertently, for the benefit of the whole - Fuller's Synergy.

One of the first projects to test the principles developed by R. Buckminster Fuller was the 1927 4D House. The house integrated Fuller's concepts of efficiency, economy, portability, and compatibility of parts. Ultimately intended for mass production, the house was marketed for roughly the same price as an automobile. Hexagonal in plan, it was neatly suspended via tension cables from a central mast. The house also alluded to features, which at the time, had not yet been invented; television, photoelectric cells, dishwashers, and doors with electric eyes. As part of an exhibition at the Marshall-Fields Department Store in 1929, the house was coined as the 'Dymaxion House'. A synthesis of dynamic, maximum, and ion, the phrase became a symbol of Fuller's later works.

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Buckminster Fuller's Universe: His Life and Work

This wonderful book traces the life and creations of this most unique and brilliant mind. A great introduction to Fuller's works, the book reveals the events that not only shaped his life, but his many inventions and architectural innovations as well.