Lionized as a cultural hero and written off as a dreamer, Buckminster Fuller is ripe for reappraisal. In You Belong to the Universe, philosopher Jonathon Keats finds a brilliant fraud, a self-mythologizing huckster of fascinating ideas. Many of Fuller’s concepts had one foot on the ground and the other in the air, literally in the case of plans for prefabricated houses of lightweight plastic to be hung from masts by zeppelins. Convinced that technology could better peoples’ lives, he chased impossible chimeras but, as Keats insists, Fuller has influenced 21st-century environmental architects and designers with his call for a worldwide solar energy grid and his insistence on doing the most with the least.
