Buckminster Fuller and the Dymaxion World

In 1927 a construction business in which Richard Buckminster Fuller had invested his hopes collapsed. According to the Buckminster Fuller Institute, he considered taking his own life, and instead resolved to spend what remained of it working for the benefit of humanity. He then withdrew for the best part of two years to think. What came out of that seclusion was a vocabulary of objects, nearly all of them stamped with a single invented word: Dymaxion.

A New England start

Fuller was born on 12 July 1895 in Milton, Massachusetts. The finding aid to his papers at Stanford traces his family to New England Nonconformists and counts the transcendentalist Margaret Fuller as a great-aunt. Harvard did not suit him. He entered in 1913 and was expelled for socialising too much and missing exams; he returned in the autumn of 1915 and was dismissed again.

The navy gave him his first engineering problems. He served from 1917 to 1919 and devised a winch for rescue boats. In 1917 he married Anne Hewlett, daughter of the architect and muralist James Monroe Hewlett, and in 1926 father-in-law and son-in-law took out Fuller’s first patent together, for a method of reinforced concrete construction. The business built on it was the one that failed the following year.

The house on a mast

The first Dymaxion design was a house. Fuller originally called it the 4D House, and the Institute describes it as an inexpensive, mass-produced dwelling light enough to be delivered by air. Its structure was as radical as its distribution plan: the whole dwelling was supported by a single central column, which also carried all the services.

The idea waited nearly two decades for a factory. In Wichita, Kansas, the Beech Aircraft company was to build the house in quantity, with a target, according to the Twentieth Century Society, of 60,000 units a year. The prototype, completed in 1946, was a mostly freestanding shell of lightweight aluminium around that central mast. Wind turbines were to provide power and drive natural heating and cooling, cisterns collected and recycled water, a downdraft system filtered the air, and shelves rotated to bring stored things to hand. Stanford Magazine gives the weight of the house as 3,000 pounds.

Beech stopped after assembling the first. William Graham, an original investor in Fuller Houses Inc., bought the two prototypes and, as The Henry Ford records, his family lived in a hybrid version from 1948 into the 1970s. Ted Graham, of the same family, later remembered the metal creaking as the temperature changed. The house fell derelict and was dismantled in 1992. It now stands in the Henry Ford Museum of American Innovation in Michigan, rebuilt largely from parts salvaged from the only two ever made, and has been on view there since 2001.

The car

The Dymaxion car followed in the 1930s. It ran on three wheels and, according to the Stanford finding aid, three prototypes were built. The body was streamlined, and Stanford Magazine credits it with 30 miles to the gallon and a top speed of 90 miles an hour. The Institute singles out its manoeuvrability: the three wheel layout gave it an unusual ability to turn.

Fuller was also editing and publishing. In the early 1930s he produced a magazine called Shelter, and over his life he wrote nearly thirty books. He taught at Harvard, MIT, the University of Pennsylvania and, from the late 1950s, Southern Illinois University.

The map

The Dymaxion world map shows how Fuller’s attention moved from the single building to the planet. Patented in the 1940s, it was, in the Institute’s description, a flat picture of the entire globe without distortion. The Stanford finding aid ties it to his research into world industrialisation, the question of how the planet’s industry was distributed. The map was a working tool for a designer who wanted to plan at the scale of the whole earth.

The dome

The geodesic dome made him famous. The Stanford finding aid describes these structures as light and strong, needing no interior supports, and notes that their first prominent use, in the early 1950s, was as shelters for radar. Fuller applied for a patent in 1951 and received it in 1954. The first commercial dome, in 1953, was built for the Ford Motor Company. The Institute claims that more than 300,000 geodesic domes now stand around the world.

For Expo 67 in Montreal, Fuller designed a dome in partnership with Shoji Sadao. A much smaller example, the 26 foot Fly’s Eye Dome, is held at Stanford.

A man as a record

Fuller kept everything. The core of his papers is the Dymaxion Chronofile, a running record of his life and work that Stanford Magazine measures at about 270 linear feet. Stanford bought the full collection in 1999. The finding aid gives its extent as 1,200 linear feet, together with some 2,000 hours of audio and video recordings, and Stanford Magazine counts more than a thousand sketches for hundreds of designs.

That habit of documentation suited a man who thought of himself as a process. “I seem to be a verb,” runs a line that Stanford Magazine quotes at length. He held 25 patents, according to the Institute. In 1961 Harvard, the university that had twice sent him away, appointed him to the Charles Eliot Norton Professorship of Poetry.

He received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1983, shortly before his death in Los Angeles on 1 July of that year. A carbon molecule, buckminsterfullerene, was later named after him: a chemist’s acknowledgement that the man expelled twice from Harvard had left his mark on science as well as on building.