Buckminster Fuller Designed More Housing Why Can’t We?
The visionaries could have been the rock stars of imagineering. Instead we look at fame as entertainment rather than going beyond human boundaries. To problem solve is far more exciting than to stimulate the body. This is to stimulate the future possibility. This is where the fun begins.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/jonathonkeats/2016/08/26/heres-how-one-outsider-designed-more-housing-than-every-starchitect-in-the-known-universe/#727f66da6c45
Buckminster Fuller Designed More Housing Than Any Architect In The World
Frank Gehry. Norman Foster. Renzo Piano. These are some of the names that immediately come to mind at the mention of architecture, yet none of these architects can top the volume of shelter built on the designs of Buckminster Fuller.
Technically, Fuller was no architect. Never certified to practice architecture, he had to have his blueprints countersigned by licensed professionals, but it didn’t really matter. As he told Time Magazine in the 1930s, his structures were “no more architecture than a piano is music.” The next Mozart or Beethoven could merely create a new style; a new Bartolomeo Cristofori – ingenious 18th-century inventor of the pianoforte – could change the way music was made.
Living quarters inside the geodesic dome at the South Pole station. (AP Photo/Eric Baker)
When Time talked to Fuller, he was hawking a hexagonal plastic house that hung from a mast on piano wire. His suspension-based Dymaxion had changed in almost every detail since 1928 when he’d made his first drawings depicting great stacks of hoop-shaped apartments dangling from poles. His housing would change as radically over the following decade-and-a-half, as he reconceived his dwellings as riveted aluminum drums fabricated in airplane factories and slung on omnifunctional “utility chassis”. All that remained constant was the principle of suspension: his emphasis on the superior tensile strength of new materials that could give more structural support per pound than the compressive heft of traditional walls of stone.
Of course, tensile strength had always been built into houses. (Consider the straw fibers binding primitive mud bricks.) But the tension and compression were most always mixed. Fuller’s explicit separation of compressive and tensile forces into mast and enclosure provided the foundation for all of his architecturally disparate plans, and potentially for many others. The suspended building was the architectural equivalent of a new kind of instrument.
Nobody was willing to play it. So Fuller made another architectural instrument, as novel as the theremin.
The geodesic dome was based on his naval training in cartography, which taught that the shortest distance between two positions at sea is a geodesic: the largest circle that can be inscribed on a globe connecting both points. Fuller reasoned that by inscribing many geodesics on a sphere he would get a network of triangles, and since triangles are rigid – meaning that they cannot be skewed like squares – the network would be rigid as well, and would evenly distribute stress across the entire global structure. Since spheres enclose more volume with less surface area than any other shape, a hemispheric dome made with triangulated geodesic struts would be the most efficient shelter that could be built.
There was already interest from industry. In 1953, Henry Ford II decided to cover the courtyard of his company’s trademark visitor center. The gear-shaped Ford Rotunda was fragile, originally designed as a temporary pavilion for the 1933 World’s Fair, and could not support the added burden of a conventional 160-ton skylight. Invited to Dearborn, Michigan, Fuller calculated that he could cover the space with a 93-foot aluminum-frame dome of approximately 1/200th the weight.
“Bucky Fuller Finds A Client,” ran a sardonic headline in Architectural Forum, yet more commissions swiftly followed. Between 1954 and 1957, Fuller worked with Western Electric to build thousands of rugged fiberglass “radomes” – transportable by air – to protect the U.S. military’s Distant Early Warning Line of radar north of the Arctic Circle. In 1958, Fuller engineered a 384-foot welded-steel dome, the largest clear-span structure in the world, as a maintenance plant for the Union Tank Car Company in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. In 1959, he collaborated with Kaiser Aluminum on a gold-anodized aluminum dome to contain the American National Exhibition in Moscow, site of the famous Kitchen Debate between Richard Nixon and Nikita Khrushchev. While Khrushchev was unimpressed by the model American kitchen exhibited within – informing Nixon that “your capitalistic attitude toward women does not occur under Communism” – the dome was a propagandistic triumph: Newsweek reported Khrushchev saying that “J. Buckingham Fuller should come here to lecture to our engineers.”
Buckminster Fuller sits in his geodesic dome home in Carbondale, Illinois, United States, on Feb. 15, 1971. (AP Photo)
Instead, as he continued building for the government, military, and industry, Fuller became a guru of the American commune. Drop City was the archetype, a hippie homestead in southern Colorado on which geodesic dwellings were improvised from scavenged sheet metal, tarpaper, and plywood. “Soon domed cities will spread across the world,” predicted Drop City’s resident polemicist Peter Rabbit in his 1971 memoir, and do-it-yourself manuals such as Steve Baer’s Dome Cookbook of 1968 and Lloyd Kahn’s Domebooks of 1970 and 1971 made that possible, if not quite inevitable.
By the time of Fuller’s death in 1983, an estimated 300,000 geodesic domes covered the planet. Some of these structures, like an inflatable “pillow dome”, extended the range of materials and geometries with Fuller’s enthusiastic support. Others took on artsy oblong forms that the functionalist Fuller abhorred. But even with his patents – a whole portfolio by the ’70s – he couldn’t control the proliferation of architectural music on his geodesic instrument. He couldn’t even predict it, any more than Cristofori could anticipate the prepared piano Sonatas and Interludes that Fuller’s colleague John Cage premiered at Black Mountain.
No more music than a dome is architecture, Cristofori’s pianoforte had more sounds built in than the inventor could possibly discover. However, you can hear Cristofori in Cage if you’re attentive. Likewise, you can see Fuller in structures ranging from the Eden Project Biomes to playground jungle gyms: geodesic symphonies and sonatas that survive him.
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