Better living through geometry: that’s inventor-visionary-crackpot Buckminster Fuller, in a geodesic nutshell. The man was bursting with ideas, most predicated on the idea that geometric symmetry is a form of perfection and, specifically, that the tetrahedron was “the most fundamental, structurally sound form found in nature.” The shape appears in most of his designs, including his best known, the geodesic sphere or dome, readily recognizable as Walt Disney World’s Spaceship Earth within Epcot Center; Wikipedia alleges the sphere’s shape and name were inspired, uncredited, by Fuller.
He believed in low-cost, easy-to-assemble structures that could be mass produced. Sensing kindred spirits in the folks at the Butler Manufacturing Co., mass-producer of grain bins (my grandfather had two such “Butler Buildings” on his farm in Delphos, Ohio), he partnered with the firm to develop squat silo-like housing for the military during World War II. The government approved Fuller’s design and the Army put a few hundred to use as operating rooms and houses, but steel rationing killed the project.
After the war, his thoughts turned to all that aluminum that was no longer needed for planes and developed Dymaxion Dwelling Machines, housing for the new suburban masses. On view at the Whitney Museum of American Art within a scale model of an idyllic cul-de-sac, the shiny aluminum spheroids are banded with florescent light. They resemble glowing alien hamburgers. Two people could assemble one in two days; only one was ever produced.
Most of Fuller’s projects unfolded this way: a passionate process of brainstorming and sketches, models and patents, resulting in little practicality. That didn’t stop him, though, and it didn’t stop the seeds of his ideas from sprouting later. I see a connection between Fuller’s Butler and Dwelling Machine plans and the suggestion today to use surplus steel shipping containers as affordable housing.
A black-and-white video of Fuller, standing stiff and blinking in a three-piece suit, shows him discussing the features of his large 4D House, which was suspended from the ground and shaped like a child’s toy top. On tape he doesn’t appear to be the wacky-inventor personality I thought he’d be, but professorial, monotonic and dry. Although that makes for unintentional entertainment when he rattles off selling points, such as how children, should they fall in a 4D House, would literally bounce back from the “pneumatic floors.” They could also, Fuller added, play baseball inside; the tetrahedral windows of the domed enclosure were constructed of certain materials connected so solidly that they could withstand tornadoes and an airplane crash. (Fuller doesn’t mention the impact playing baseball inside his domed home would have on the residents’ furniture, presumably not constructed with roughhouse-resistant geometry.)
Fuller wasn’t all spheres and symmetry: unsatisfied with the distortion in the Mercator projection world map, he developed the Dymaxion Air-Ocean World Map, which resembles an unfolded piece of complicated origami. And parked in the Whitney’s lobby is an energy-efficient, three-wheeled Dymaxion car, looking very like a whale and, as evidenced on video, moving very like an agitated fish.
The exhibit features little evidence on the popular reception of Fuller and his ideas (nor popular architectural trends concurrent with his timeline, which would have been useful for purposes of comparison) although I enjoyed the clever acrostic written by avant-garde composer John Cage for Fuller’s 85th birthday. How did those two men connect: Cage, master of chaos, and Fuller, master of order?
Spotted serendipitously on the subway afterwards, a quote from Galileo served as the sum of Fuller’s philosophy:
The book of nature is written in the language of mathematics. Its symbols are triangles, circles, and other geometric figures, without which it is impossible to understand a single word; without which there is only a vain wandering through a dark labyrinth.