Fuller Houses

Richard Buckminster Fuller and the Dymaxion House – the names are as inseparable as Siamese twins. Starting with the last Dymaxion version of 1946 these residential machines, icons of utopian 'dynamic-maximum-ion' experimentation, legendary models and prototypes, are regarded as the products of an epoch which saw fast-moving changes in terms of living quality and needs, transport and communications, technology and design. In contrast to conventional monographs, each of the six chapters deals with different aspects as often hybrid characteristics. A rich source of materials for this is the Dymaxion Chronofile, the personal archive of this dogged and interdisciplinary experimenter.

The 'Flying Fish' chapter takes as its subject the mobility of these techno-modern developments, including the amphibious Dymaxion Car.

'Aerodynamic Corset' and 'Collector’s Piece' show the failure of all attempts to launch commercial mass production. Parts of the story sound whimsical and misguided, for example the unsuccessful sales attempt to hide the technical nature of the house under an extra internal layer of plush and decoration. In 1946 the Samuel Goldwin Productions movie studio even enquired in all seriousness if they could use the model of the Dymaxion house as a fold-open hat in a Danny Kaye film.

'Weightless Body', 'Control Tower' and 'Industrial Dance' deal with design principles, capsules and the principle of folding, in other words a multiple organic form in a single body. These often derided single-cell works by Buckminster Fuller and his contemporaries Frederick Kiesler, John Lautner and Peter Nelson make an astonishingly modern impression and make the blobs and Möbius strips produced by Zaha Hadid, Ben van Berkel and company look a little tired.

When Buckminster Fuller died in 1983 he had, among other things, been awarded a staggering 47 honorary doctorates. The prototype for the Dymaxion House, the 'House of the future', is now a museum exhibit and can be seen, fully restored, at the Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn, Michigan.

Facts:
Federico Neder
239 pages, 185 illustrations,
16,5 x 24 cm, soft cover,
Lars Müller Publishers, Baden/Switzerland 2008
Publisher's recommended price: 31.99 EUR,
English text
ISBN 978-3-03778-141-8