A book excerpt from You Belong to the Universe by Jonathon Keats.
In 1914, the Swiss architect Le Corbusier attempted to design a house like a car chassis. Comprising horizontal slabs separated by pillars, the reinforced concrete structure of Maison Dom-ino was to be perfectly modular. Walls could be suspended anywhere, and Dom-ino units could be combined to make a house of any configuration and scale.
Not a single Dom-ino unit was built. Instead, Le Corbusier wrote a book asserting that all housing should follow his principle. "I look at things from the point of view of architecture, in the state of mind of the inventor of airplanes," he wrote in Toward an Architecture. "The lesson of the airplane is not so much in the forms created, and one must first of all learn not to see in an airplane a bird or a dragonfly, but a machine for flying; the lesson of the airplane is in the logic that governed the statement of the problem and that led to the success of its realization."
Housing, he claimed, should be approached with the same rigor. "A house is a machine for living in," he declared.
When Buckminster Fuller first read Le Corbusier in 1928, his only knowledge of architecture was from the construction business. Several years before, he'd founded Stockade Building Systems with his father-in-law, manufacturing lightweight wood-fiber blocks suitable for traditional American housing. Ignoring the cultivated European foundation of Le Corbusier's writing, he took up the premise with American abandon.
By Fuller's reckoning, the underlying problem of the house was mobility. Like an automobile, he believed, the ideal machine for living should be mass-produced in the controlled conditions of a factory. Unlike cars, he realized, there was no way to move finished houses off the factory floor. However if houses were designed to be airlifted by Zeppelin, then they could be delivered absolutely anywhere in their entirety: They could be as self-contained and quality-controlled as the new Ford Model A.
In order to be airlifted, houses would have to be light, constructed with as little material as possible. The strongest materials by weight were metals, and metals were strongest in tension. (By Fuller's calculations, the tensile strength of steel was twelve times the strength under compression.) So the optimal factory-built house wouldn't rest on the ground. It would be suspended from a mast.
Sketches from early 1928 show Zeppelins dropping bombs and lowering fully-furnished ten-story buildings into the craters they made. (A handwritten annotation helpfully explains that cables would stabilize the towers while the craters were filled with concrete "like setting [a] big gun in war time".)Drawn in a naive style befitting their architectural oddity, the skewered cylindrical highrises are shown in locations ranging from the North Pole to the Sahara.
A more grounded version of Fuller's idea was professionally drafted for the patent he filed in the spring of the same year. The patent application shows a conventional rectangular house pierced by a "utility chassis" that holds the house aloft and provides all the plumbing.
By the time the paperwork was done, Fuller had reconceived his home as a hexagon, which permitted much simpler suspension, and he'd started thinking more comprehensively about what a dwelling machine could accomplish. The patent application was abandoned, and Fuller went public with his invention at the May 1928 meeting of the American Institute of Architects.
A portmanteau of dynamic, maximum and tension, he dubbed it the Dymaxion.
His most fully-documented presentation of the Dymaxion House was at the New York Architectural League on July 9, 1929, where a stenographer transcribed his entire lecture. "Trying to find out what was wrong with the world and what I individually could do about it," he told the gathered architects, "I have come upon the thought that housing was responsible for practically all of our ills — this preconceived idea of doing things on a vanity basis rather than having things done on the basis of the clearest, most intelligent research test of science."
In his judgment, solving the problem of the house amounted to scientifically reengineering society.
The suspension system was no longer just a means of decreasing material usage and making cheap mass-produced shelter available to everyone everywhere. According to Fuller, the structure would allow inhabitants to "overcome all the elements."
The height of the house would prevent flooding, the triangulation of suspension cables would protect against earthquakes, and the octagonal symmetry would streamline the casein plastic shell so that it could withstand a tornado. Streamlining would also optimize the internal climate. Floor and roof vents would eliminate drafts caused by air turbulence, facilitating efficient heating in winter, providing natural air conditioning in summer, and vacuuming away dust throughout the year.
Temperate and clean, the Dymaxion would bolster physical health, while mental health would be ensured by "drudge-proofing" the home with automated appliances to replace manual labor – including an instantaneous dishwasher — freeing people to improve themselves by reading under artificial daylight or watching broadcast lectures on television.
And the energy bill to keep all this technology running? No problem. Fuel would be derived from human excrement via a waste packaging toilet. In fact, the house would be entirely self-sufficient, without any need to attach to municipal sewage and plumbing. (Showers would be taken with a pint of water sprayed through a "fog gun".) With air delivery, people could live anywhere, and move their whole household at will. Not only would this be the end of inner-city slums' disease and crime. It would also make real estate as meaningless as the ownership of the seas beneath a ship.
The goal was nothing less than "to lick materialism as the basis of progress in the universe," Fuller informed the New York Architectural League. Or as he explained it to Time Magazine in 1932, a house "is not a property to be owned, but a mechanical arrangement to be used."
According to Time, bankers were enthusiastic about his machine but not the economic function that Fuller considered integral to its performance. Nor did he help his cause when he responded to interest in building a prototype for the 1933 Chicago World's Fair by asked for $100 million in funds since Henry Ford had spent $43 million to make his Model A.
Probably these tactics were meant to protect his idea from the reality that most of the necessary technologies didn't yet exist: not only televisions to edify the masses and bioreactors to convert their waste into energy, but also basic materials like durable lightweight plastics for walls and high-tension alloys to hold the houses aloft. Through lectures and articles, the machine could continue to evolve as new technologies suggested engineering solutions — and those solutions suggested additional physical and socio-political problems to be solved by a more advanced Dymaxion.
World War II brought an end to Buckminster Fuller's fantasies, and the peace that followed afforded him an irresistible opportunity. While serving as an engineer for the Board of Economic Warfare, he'd designed a rudimentary shelter that could be made by modifying a cylindrical corrugated-steel grain bin. Several thousand of his Dymaxion Deployment Units were used by the Air Force, and their sturdiness suggested that his dwelling machines could likewise be fabricated from contoured sheetmetal.
That was the premise of Fortune's April 1946 article featuring Fuller, illustrated with pictures of him standing on the factory floor of Beech Aircraft in Wichita. Beech provided facilities and labor in exchange for an interest in his new company.
It all made sense. His Wichita House channeled the logic of his pre-War Dymaxion through the real-world experience of making Air Force shelters, situating his utopian vision in the context of an aircraft plant organized to produce large numbers of complex flying machines in high-strength aluminum alloys. Designed to be shipped in a tube and erected in a day, the mast-hung thirty-six foot circular aluminum dwelling was remarkably practical without surrendering many of the qualities that made Fuller housing unique.
In terms of aerodynamics, it was more advanced than anything Fuller had previously conceived. The curvature was refined in a wind tunnel, as was the shape of the eighteen-foot ventilator capping the domed structure. This rotating flue aligned with the breeze. In tandem with internal convection currents, it facilitated climate control and dust removal through filters embedded in the suspended trampoline floor.
The suspension was also superior to his pre-War system, balancing the house's weight with steel struts triangulated to provide structural rigidity. Walls were mere membrane, which meant they could be thin and light, and sliced through the middle with a 360-degree panoramic window. In total the weight of the house was three tons, less than a thirtieth the weight of a conventional one-family home, and the expected price was $6,500, the cost of a Cadillac (though fifty cents cheaper per pound).
Of course much was still missing: air delivery, automated housekeeping, autonomous power, television. However the fusion of external protection and internal efficiency in an affordable, portable factory-built system put Fuller's Wichita House at approximately the same technological level as contemporaneous cars and aircraft — somewhere between a biplane and an F-14 — and also plotted a direction of progress in terms of engineering.
There was nothing minimalist about his ambitions for the Wichita House. On the contrary, the ultimate machine for living would be fantastically complex because greater complexity would augment functionality relative to weight.
As Beech general manager John Gaty was telling the media that his plant could make 60,000 houses by 1947 – and that factories nationally could roll out two million units a year – Fuller was busy stamping completed blueprints "obsolete" and thinking up new improvements. The housing shortage became less acute. The cold war brought new business to aircraft factories. The outmoded Wichita prototypes were purchased at scrapmetal prices by an entrepreneur named William Graham, who installed one on his rural Kansas farm. When Fuller saw what Graham had done, he disowned the project, sniping that the architectural modifications "forever grounded this aeroplane."
He had some justification in saying so. Graham set the house on a conventional foundation, eliminating the mast and rotating ventilator. He also caulked the openings designed for air circulation. As a result, the house was extremely hot in summer, even with conventional air conditioning. The shiny aluminum shell became just another counterproductive Modernist decoration.
But the total functional failure of the only Dymaxion home ever inhabited also exposes a problem Fuller never confronted: His machines were completely unadaptable. Ever sensitive to peas-of-a-pod criticism, he claimed that future models of the Wichita House would be available in different sizes and colors. But that was just a diversionary tactic, typical of engineers confronting messy human psychology.
There is a crucial sense in which conventional machines are incompatible with housing, as becomes apparent when you consider that the most mechanistic dwelling is a maximum security prison. A machine for flying must be compatible with physics, and physical laws are predictable and unchanging. People are not air molecules. A true machine for living must be as individualistic as its inhabitants.
This passage is excerpted from You Belong to the Universe: Buckminster Fuller and the Future, to be published in April by Oxford University Press. The book examines Fuller's life and inventions as a basis for applying his world-changing ideas in the present. The book can be preordered on Amazon here.
