On the morning September 2, 1945, delegates from the victorious Allied powers and the defeated Empire of Japan gathered aboard the battleship USS Missouri, anchored in Tokyo Bay, to sign Japan’s official instrument of surrender. By 9:23, the ceremony was over; after 6 brutal years and over 75 million deaths, the Second World War was finally over. The world breathed a collective sigh of relief, and millions of troops prepared to return home. But, there was a problem: where to house them all? Six years of war had resulted in the destruction of millions of homes, the diversion of nearly every available resource into weapons production, and a massive shortage of building materials. The world faced a housing crisis on an unprecedented scale. Into this looming crisis stepped an eccentric visionary with an invention that turned every convention of home architecture squarely on its head: a sleek, futuristic aluminium house that could be mass-produced like an airplane, shipped and assembled anywhere like IKEA furniture, and consume a minimum of water, electricity, and other utilities – and all for the price of a high-end automobile. This is the fascinating story of R. Buckminster Fuller and the Dymaxion House.

Born on July 12, 1895 in Milton, Massachusetts, Richard Buckminster Fuller came from a long line of non-conformists – most notably his great aunt Margaret Fuller, a feminist pioneer and social reformer who became the first female war correspondent and professional book reviewer, the first woman permitted to study at Harvard University’s library, and a founding member of the Transcendentalist movement. Following family tradition, Buckminster-Fuller – or “Bucky”, as his family called him – enrolled in engineering at Harvard in 1913, but was soon expelled for skipping his mid-term exams to party with a vaudeville troupe in New York and charging the resulting bill to his family’s account – as you do. Following his expulsion, he was sent to work at a cotton mill in Quebec, where he gained enough proficiency with machinery and engineering to be re-admitted to Harvard. But he was soon expelled a second time for showing insufficient interest in the curriculum and declaring himself a “non-conforming misfit” a bit too loudly and often.

Undaunted, Buckminster-Fuller worked a variety of odd jobs including as a labourer at a meat-packing and the commander of a crash rescue boat during the First World War. The practical experience gained in these occupations would lay the groundwork for one of the most uniquely eclectic and influential careers in modern American history. Though mainly remembered today as an architect and inventor, Buckminster-Fuller refused to be pigeonholed, and, styling himself as a “comprehensive anticipatory design scientist” pursued dozens of different roles in the course of his eventful career including businessman, scholar, teacher, poet, and futurist. A holistic, forward-looking thinker, Buckminster-Fuller saw individual problems as part of larger, complex interconnected systems, and therefore approached such problems from multiple angles in order to achieve optimal results. For example. Buckminster-Fuller believed that global poverty and other development issues were caused not by a lack of natural resources but rather the unequal distribution and inefficient use thereof. He therefore advocated for a utopian world order he called the “Design Science Revolution” in which petty national rivalries would be abandoned and scientists, engineers, designers, and other experts around the world would cooperate to bring about the optimal use of the world’s resources and foster peace and prosperity for all:

“War is obsolete… What makes so difficult the task of informing humanity of its newborn option to realize success for all is the fact that all major religions and politics thrive only on the for-all-ages-held, ignorantly adopted premise of the existence of an eternal inadequacy of life support inherent in the design of our planet Earth. All books on economics have only one basic tenet the fundamental scarcity of life support. The supreme political and economic powers as yet assume that it has to be either you or me. Not enough for both. That is why those in financial advantage fortify themselves even further, reasoning that unselfishness is suicidal…

…[but] there is now plenty for all. This design science revolution would use the highest aeronautical and engineering facilities of the world and redirect them from weaponry to livingry production; all humanity would thereby have the option of becoming enduringly successful.”

To encapsulate his philosophy, Buckminster-Fuller coined the metaphor of Spaceship Earth, likening the planet to a giant vehicles whose scattered systems and resources – chiefly energy and information – must be effectively interconnected in order to support the lives of its crew. Ever the wordsmith – he penned over 30 books over his lifetime – Buckminster-Fuller coined a number of colourful neologisms, including that corporate boardroom favourite, synergy; tensegrity, a property of load-bearing structures with both tensile and compressive elements; and ephemeralization, defined as the ability of technological advancement to do “more and more with less and less until eventually you can do everything with nothing.” This was, in a nutshell, Buckminster-Fuller’s core philosophy, making him one of the early pioneers of the now-ubiquitous sustainability mindset. Buckminster-Fuller applied the ephemeralization principle to everything from architecture to his own personal lifestyle. In the quest for maximum productivity, he adopted an unusually polyphasic sleep schedule, sleeping only for a half-hour every six hours. He also attempted to document every single day of his life from 1917 to his death in 1983, creating a gigantic personal archive totalling 140,000 pieces of paper, 64,000 feet of film, and 1,500 hours of audio and making Buckminster-Fuller’s life among the most thoroughly-documented of any person in history. Like we said, he was an eccentric fellow…

Buckminster Fuller’s first encounter with architecture – the profession that would make his name – came in 1917 shortly after his marriage to Anne Hewlett, daughter of architect and muralist James Monroe Hewlett. Hewlett had invented a modular construction system composed of hollow blocks of compressed wood fibre which could be quickly and cheaply stacked together and filled with concrete. Hewlett and Buckminster-Fuller went into business together and over the following decade erected hundreds of modular houses across the country. But not all was well in Buckminster-Fuller’s life. In 1922, his first daughter, Alexandra, died of spinal meningitis at the age of three – a death Buckminster-Fuller blamed on the damp environment of the family home. Worse still, in 1927 Hewlett’s company ran into financial difficulties and Buckminster-Fuller, a minority shareholder, was forced out. Suddenly unemployed and unable to provide for his wife and newborn daughter Allegra, Buckminster-Fuller fell into a deep depression. In the autumn of that year, he even contemplated drowning himself in Lake Michigan so his family could collect the insurance payout. Suddenly, however, he experienced a powerful revelation. He felt as though he was suspended in the air, enclosed in a sphere of white light, while a disembodied voice spoke to him:

“From now on you need never await temporal attestation to your thought. You think the truth. You do not have the right to eliminate yourself. You do not belong to you. You belong to the Universe. Your significance will remain forever obscure to you, but you may assume that you are fulfilling your role if you apply yourself to converting your experiences to the highest advantage of others.”

This profound experience prompted Buckminster-Fuller to re-examine his life, and in that moment he vowed to embark on:

“…an experiment, to find what a single individual could contribute to changing the world and benefiting all humanity”.

His first goal in this grand experiment was to revolutionize housing, which in its traditional form he considered grossly inefficient, overpriced, and incapable of meeting humanity’s needs. Drawing on Swiss-French architect Le Corbusier’s notion that a house is a “machine for living”, Buckminster-Fuller determined that the ideal house should be designed more like a car or an aeroplane than a traditional building, being cheaply mass-producible in large numbers in a factory and capable of being transported and assembled almost anywhere with a minimum of labour. Furthermore, it should be able to stand up to all kinds of weather – even tornadoes – and be as self-sufficient as possible, consuming a minimum of water, electricity, and other utilities.

By 19328, Buckminster-Fuller unveiled his design for the inexpensive, self-sufficient home of the future, which he called the 4-Dimensional or 4D House. Inspired by the design of metal grain bins, the 4D House eschewed traditional building materials like wood, brick, and tile in favour of strong and lightweight aluminium sheets. Instead of sitting on a concrete foundation, the 15-metre wide, 12-metre tall hexagonal living space was suspended from a central 7-metre-tall steel-truss tower, the structure’s rigidity deriving from a network of tensioned steel struts and cables – rather like a giant metal umbrella. Altogether, the assembly weighed only 1,360 kilograms and could be disassembled and packed into a 1 x 5 metre metal tube for shipping. Once delivered, the house could be assembled in only a day. And, as this was the 1920s, Buckminster-Fuller also envisioned that fully-assembled units could be air-dropped into place by zeppelin.

The interior – accessed through a small elevator in the central mast – was lined with panels made of casein – a type of plastic made from milk – and divided into 5 wedge-shaped spaces: two bedrooms, each with its own en-suite bathroom; a kitchen, a living room, and a rooftop recreation deck. However, as all the utilities hardware was concentrated in the central mast, these spaces could easily be expanded or rearranged to suit the owners’ particular needs.

In order to minimize utility consumption, electricity was supplied by a diesel generator at the base of the central mast, a grey water system of gutters and channels in the roof and walls collected rainwater and condensation for use in washing, and a highly-efficient climate control system kept the interior temperature stable by raising and lowering the roof to control airflow. This, in turn, made it unnecessary to open the house’s plexiglas windows. Later plans called for the installation of windmills on the roof to provide even cheaper power. And if that weren’t enough, the 4D House came loaded with all the latest mod-cons – as well as a few not seen before. There was a central vacuum system, a kitchen incinerator, revolving clothes closets and dish racks, and “ovolving” shelves mounted on vertical conveyor belts that moved at the touch of a button.

Later, in 1936, Buckminster-Fuller would patent perhaps the cleverest and most celebrated aspect of the 4D design: its bathroom. Recognizing that traditional bathrooms with their tiled floors and porcelain fixtures were overly expensive and difficult to clean, he designed a futuristic, modular unit reminiscent of a modern airplane bathroom, composed of four stamped sheets of tin-plated copper integrating a molded-in bathtub, shower, toilet, sink, and two drains. A marvel of well thought-out design, no part of the bathroom had a radius less than 10 centimetres in order to simplify cleaning, the bathtub was placed at the perfect height to bathe children without stooping, and the ventilator fan was placed under the mirror to prevent it from fogging. Other unique features included a “fogger” shower that used compressed air to blast the user with tiny droplets and only consumed a cup of water per use, and a “packaging” toilet that used no water and sealed waste in plastic bags that could be used as garden compost – though the latter was quickly replaced with a conventional septic system as the technology could not be made to work properly.

The prototype house was due to be unveiled at the Marshall Field’s department store in Chicago, but the store management decided that it needed a catchier name than “4D”. So, working with Public Relations specialist Waldo Warren, Buckminster-Fuller combined three of his favourite words – Dynamic, Maximum, and Tension – to form Dymaxion, a word which would largely replace ephemeralization to encapsulate Buckminster-Fuller’s philosophy of accomplishing more with less and which he would apply to a variety of projects going forward. For example, his detailed personal archive was dubbed the Dymaxion Chronofile and his unique minimum-distortion projection of the earth’s surface the Dymaxion Map.

The Dymaxion House made its debut at Marshall Field’s in 1929 as part of an exhibition on modernist furniture. And while the futuristic home attracted plenty of press attention, it was roundly rejected by the American Institute of Architects and failed to attract any buyers. The public simply wasn’t ready for such a radical departure from traditional conceptions of home architecture.

Undeterred, Buckminster-Fuller next tried his hand at revolutionizing the world of transportation, teaming up with naval architect Starling Burgess to create an ultra-efficient 11-seat vehicle he dubbed – what else? – the Dymaxion Car. The sleek, futuristic-looking vehicle was built mainly of wood covered in aluminium panels, creating a strong but lightweight structure which, combined with a rear-mounted V8 engine, allowed it to reach speeds of up to 190 kilometres per hour. Driven by its two front wheels but steered by its third rear wheel, the car was impressively maneuverable, capable of driving itself in place in a tight circle. In keeping with Buckminster-Fuller’s holistic approach to all problems, the Dymaxion Car was not merely intended to be a ground vehicle, but rather the prototype “ground-taxiing phase” of a future “Omni-Medium Transport” that would also be able to fly.

The Dymaxion Car made its debut at the 1933 Century of Progress World’s Fair in Chicago, and while the vehicle, like most of Buckminster-Fuller’s creations, was a media sensation, the design soon proved dangerously flawed. The rear-wheel steering system, combined with the unusual aerodynamics of the body, made the car highly unstable at all but the slowest speeds. Shortly after its public unveiling in October 1933, the prototype crashed during a demonstration, killing one of the three passengers aboard. Though Buckminster-Fuller conceded that the Dymaxion Car “was an invention that could not be made available to the general public without considerable improvements,” he nonetheless used his inheritance to form the Dymaxion Corporation and finance the construction of two more prototypes. Yet despite his best efforts, no automotive companies could be convinced to manufacture the vehicle, so Buckminster-Fuller sold off the prototypes and dissolved his company.

As his next venture, Buckminster-Fuller attempted to market the most well-received feature of his Dymaxion House design: the innovative unitized bathroom. Unlike the house, there was significant demand for the Dymaxion Bathroom, and Buckminster-Fuller signed a deal with the Phelps Dodge Corporation to mass produce the units both in the original copper and in plastic. Unfortunately, the Dymaxion Bathroom encountered stiff resistance from plumbers’ unions, who feared that the newfangled product would put their members out of work and refused to install them. As a result, the venture fizzled out after only a few years.

But while Buckminster-Fuller’s innovative home designs failed to attract any interest in the 1920s, the outbreak of the Second World War suddenly made his ideas very attractive. In 1942, Buckminster-Fuller was contracted by the British War Relief Organization to develop a small, lightweight, mass-producible shelter to house those rendered homeless by German bombing raids. The result was the Dymaxion Deployment Unit or DDU, a yurt-like structure made of corrugated steel measuring six metres in diameter. Unlike the earlier Dymaxion House, the structure was not suspended from a central mast but rather rested on a conventional concrete pad. It also sported a curved roof with a specially-designed cupola-like ventilator designed to create a natural heat-driven vortex and draw cool air down into the structure. Around 200 DDUs were produced by the Butler Manufacturing Company before wartime steel shortages forced manufacturing to end. Being insufficient to meet Britain’s wartime housing demands, the shelters were instead shipped to the Persian Gulf and used to house members of the U.S. Army Signal Corps.

As the war drew to a close and the United States prepared to receive millions of demobilized troops, the nation faced a looming housing crisis. Nearly all available construction workers were tied up in wartime production, while said production had created shortages in lumber, brick, concrete, tile, and other common building materials. However, there was one material in abundant supply: aircraft-grade aluminium. Furthermore, the country was dotted with aircraft factories capable of working with this materials – factories that would be struggling to find work once the war ended. The time had come at last for the Dymaxion House.

In 1944, Buckminster-Fuller joined forces with the Beech Aircraft Corporation of Wichita, Kansas to form Dymaxion Dwelling Machines, Inc. – later Fuller Houses, Inc. – and manufacture an updated version of the 1929 Dymaxion House. Renamed the Fuller House – insert San Fransisco-set sitcom jokes here – or the new design was round instead of hexagonal and measured 11 metres in diameter, providing 94 square metres of living space. Building off his experience with the Dymaxion Deployment Units, Buckminster-Fuller also added a rotating rooftop ventilator that followed the prevailing wind and changed the entire volume of air inside the house every six minutes. This system was also cleverly designed to force dust down and through the baseboards where it was trapped by special filters, greatly reducing the amount of vacuuming the occupants had to perform. The diesel generator and rooftop wind turbines were eliminated, but many resource-conserving features like the rainwater collection system and fogging shower were retained. But Buckminster-Fuller was not able to integrate every innovation he would have liked. Though he originally intended to fill the house with custom-designed inflatable furniture, the Beech Aircraft management insisted on more conventional furnishings in to appeal to traditional middle-class sensibilities.

In 1945, Beech built two prototype Fuller Houses: one for indoor display called the “Barwise” and one for outdoor display called the “Danbury.” The houses went on public display in early 1946 and attracted considerable attention, with the April 1, 1946 issue of Aviation News magazine announcing that:

“Beech Aircraft Corp. expected to build 200 of these houses a day soon after the start of 1947, according to Herman Wolf, president of Fuller Homes, Inc., which will market the dwelling designed by R. Buckminster Fuller…The houses will be subcontracted to construction firms which will combine aircraft technology and auto mass production methods. Wolf and Fuller see the new dwellings, which will sell for $6,500 erected, as the answer to the veterans housing problem. City building codes are the big imponderable in forecasting the success of this dwelling.”

Meanwhile, Fortune magazine hailed the Fuller House as “a product that would have more significant social consequences than the introduction of the automobile” and which had a “better than even chance of upsetting the building industry.”

Yet despite such optimistic predictions and the receipt of more than 3,500 advance orders – including one from science fiction writer Robert A. Heinlein – by 1948 the Fuller Houses Inc. venture was effectively dead, and no further houses were built. Several factors conspired to kill the Dymaxion House a second time. For one thing, despite Buckminster-Fuller’s extensive cost-saving measures, a Fuller House still cost $6,500 ($104,000 today) – around the price of a brand-new Cadillac and out of reach for many middle-class families. Also, as with the standalone Dymaxion Bathroom, the house drew the ire of builders’, electricians,’ and plumbers’ unions, who refused to install or connect houses built in factories by members of other unions.

Yet the greatest factor in the Fuller House’s demise was probably Buckminster-Fuller himself. An incorrigible perfectionist, Buckminster-Fuller was never satisfied with the design of the house, and refused to sign off on a production version until he had ironed out all the kinks. As is refinement process dragged on, investors grew impatient, and one by one they pulled out of the project. Beech Aircraft was unable to raise the capital to begin mass-production, and the whole venture eventually collapsed. No Dymaxion House fulfilling Buckminster-Fuller’s specifications was ever built or lived in, though in 1948 a Kansas-based investor named William Graham purchased the Danbury display prototype and installed on his lakefront property. Known as “Wichita House”, the structure had most of its autonomous features like the rooftop ventilator and rain-collection system disabled and was eventually turned into an annex for a much larger, conventionally-built house. Nonetheless, the Dymaxion House proved just as durable as Buckminster-Fuller had intended, emerging unscathed when a tornado passed just a few hundred metres away in 1964. The Grahams lived in Wichita House until the 1970s, the structure laying abandoned until 1990 when the family donated it to the Henry Ford Museum of American Innovation in Dearborn, Michigan. Following a 10-year, $1 million restoration effort in which components of both the Danbury and Barwise were combined together into a single structure, the Dymaxion House re-opened to the public in 2001 – the only surviving example of this unusual architectural landmark anywhere in the world.

Though economic and political factors were largely responsible for the Dymaxion House’s demise, it is doubtful whether the design would have succeeded even if Beech Aircraft had managed to get its production line up and running. As demonstrated by the failure of later mass-produced, transportable “living machines” like Finnish architect Matti Suuronen’s UFO-shaped Futuro Pod, the average homebuyer is very conservative in their tastes, much preferring to live in a traditional house with a picket fence than something that looks like it just descended from the mothership – price and efficiency be damned. Furthermore, being self-contained, mass-produced structures, such houses did not blend well into older neighbourhoods and were difficult to expand or otherwise customize to the owner’s tastes. In other words, they were collectivist, one-size-fits-all products – a non-starter in the hyper-individualistic world of post-war America.

Yet despite these setbacks, Buckminster-Fuller continued to pursue efficient solutions to architectural problems, and in 1949 came up with the invention most closely associated with his name: the geodesic dome. First developed in the 1910s by German engineer Walther Bauersfeld but perfected and popularized by Buckminster-Fuller, geodesic domes are spherical thin-shell structures constructed from triangular lattice elements. Inherently stable, geodesic domes can be constructed to nearly any scale without losing structural integrity and, being spherical, enclose the largest volume for the least structural weight – properties which greatly appealed to Buckminster-Fuller’s sensibilities. Thanks to his tireless promotion of the concept, geodesic domes experienced a surge of popularity in the 1950s, 60s, and 70s, notable examples including the American Pavilion at the 1967 Montreal World’s Fair – today the Montreal Biosphere – the dome at Amundsen-Scott Station at the South Pole, and Spaceship Earth at Disney’s EPCOT Centre. Buckminster-Fuller himself and his wife Anne even lived in a geodesic dome house in Carbondale, Illinois from 1960 to 1971 – a classic example of the inventor fulling integrating his life and work.

However, just like the Dymaxion House, geodesic domes had many unforeseen disadvantages which made them unpopular as personal dwellings. Being made of triangular sections, geodesic domes are largely incompatible with traditional square homebuilding hardware and require expensive custom-built windows, doors, and other components. Making such structures compatible with municipal building codes is also challenging, further adding to the cost. In terms of simple livability, the curved walls of a geodesic dome make internal partitioning and furniture placement inefficient compared to a rectangular floor plan and limit the total space the occupants can use due to the lack of headroom near the edges. Finally, moisture tends to accumulate inside the dome walls, accelerating the degradation of the structure, while the unusual acoustics cause voices to carry throughout the dome interior, making privacy difficult to maintain. Thus, like most of Buckminster-Fuller’s ideas, the geodesic dome was a brilliant technical innovation which sadly ran afoul of the messy and often contradictory realities of everyday life. Yet despite its real-world shortcomings, the geodesic dome and the utopian ideals it represents will forever be associated with the name of the man who perfected and popularized it. Indeed, in 1996, Harold Kroto, Richard Smalley and Robert Curl were awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for their discovery of the C-60 molecule – a hollow, soccer ball-like shell composed of 60 carbon atoms. As this structure resembled a geodesic dome, the team named the C60 molecule Buckminsterfullerine – AKA the “buckyball.”

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