The "Dymaxion Dwelling Machine" was Buckminister Fuller’s solution to affordable, environmentally efficient mass housing in light of technological advances that occurred in the early 20th century. The 1920s saw a world housing problem, which was becoming increasingly problematic due to the recent end of WWI and subsequent decline of the building industry. Fuller believed the only way to meet the demand for the sheer volume of production necessary was through aircraft and wartime technology. He began his designs in 1927 and by 1929 had come up with the minimal single-family dwelling known as the “Dymaxion House”. Its purpose was to foster “the largest dividend of human advantage from the least investment of energy and materials …achieved by the over-all employment of scientific and technical means."
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Times Magazine Cover (1964)
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These developments in technology had the potential to afford people with the means for geographic and social mobility, decreasing the population’s need to deploy itself freely without having to worry about sanitation, power and water. Thus, the Dymaxion House was to provide mobile living quarters, capable of offering suitable living conditions in any environment. The construction of the dwelling itself was meant to be completed in less than 24hrs and assembled by a sole individual, reducing the time, labor and economically costly process of building the average single family dwelling at the time.
Buckminster Fuller sings his original song "Rome Home to a Dome"
Returning soldiers from the war were beginning new family lives, leading to the well known ‘baby boom’ that resulted in a radical birthrate increase. New parents wanted their own home, and so the demand of housing grew in proportion. Life expectancy had also increased, thanks to improved living conditions and ameliorated medical care.
The demand for new housing was also a result of easily affordable mortgages given to all those returning from the war.Both of these factors (the baby boom and mortgage release), allowed more Americans to join the middle class and invest in their own homes.
However, due to the manufacturing industry’s occupation with producing wartime supplies, people now had money to spend but nothing to buy. The production of luxury items, appliances, cars, and houses was in extreme high demand. By creating a housing unit that was quickly built and assembled using wartime technology, Buckminster Fuller was able to meet these cultural needs.
The demand for new housing was also a result of easily affordable mortgages given to all those returning from the war.Both of these factors (the baby boom and mortgage release), allowed more Americans to join the middle class and invest in their own homes.
However, due to the manufacturing industry’s occupation with producing wartime supplies, people now had money to spend but nothing to buy. The production of luxury items, appliances, cars, and houses was in extreme high demand. By creating a housing unit that was quickly built and assembled using wartime technology, Buckminster Fuller was able to meet these cultural needs.
Over the course of WWII, Fuller was employed by the British War Relief Organization to invent lightweight, low-cost, easily assembled bombing shelters for British cities. He was commissioned to accommodate soldiers and protect British citizens from harm. Editions of Fuller’s Deployment Units were also used as wartime hospitals, radar stations, and dormitories, which came fully furnished and were fabricated at a high speed and local cost, ideally fitting the current needs of dwelling production. Furthermore, Fuller worked to further improve the process by designing aircrafts and transportation devices, under the name of Dymaxion Transportation, that could be used to transport his products in the most time and energy efficient manner possible (i.e. the hoverable, and the auto-airplane).
The ongoing war prompted Fuller’s desire to invent, as he “became preoccupied with the discrepancy between society’s ability to plan and utilize the full potential of an advanced technology for war and emergency purposes and the fractional, haphazard application of this capacity to the requirements of ordinary living.” He decided to work with the present culture and world, and became “applied immediately to areas of prior human need, like housing, [he] would seek to obviate present chaos and misery by taking advantage of all relevant, scientifically evolved principles in comprehensible design solutions to be fully implemented by the most advanced technological means available."
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| Fuller's sketches of the 4D Tower (1928) |
1930's commercial of Bucky's Standard of Living Package; a "Funny Circular Home"
In retrospect, some people believe that the Dymaxion Housing project failed not because of financial problems, but because of its lack of any homely characteristics. It is said that the design was too unusual and cold for people to want to accept and live in, and the space maximizing design made people hesitant to sacrifice this luxury in the name of sustainability. While Fuller’s design was ahead of his time, he did not consider comfort as significantly as he should have, not giving people enough of the things they associated with the houses they knew to make the Dymaxion House desirable and comforting.
It is also claimed that with the unusually grand amount of money people had at their disposal at the time, their income would be better spent elsewhere than a prefabricated house owned by many.
Although Buckminster Fuller’s Dymaxion House project was never fully developed and widespread to the extend he envisioned, the ideals of modernity it presented made a huge impact on the idea of mass production and modern housing, influencing the developements of other current architects and inventors.
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Bucky's Greater Vision
As an inventor, Buckminster saw his contributions on a global scale. His inventions seemed to have a universal application to any environment, and shared characteristics of adaptability and movability that displayed his desire to have them used all around the world. Although the majority of his inventions were meant to directly benefit the individual, he saw this as portions of a larger project he was working on, which always reached a universal, global scale, in which every person was an active citizen of a much greater society, “I live on Earth at present, and I don’t know what I am. I know that I am not a category. I am not a thing — a noun. I seem to be a verb, an evolutionary process – an integral function of the universe.” He saw himself as “a passenger on the Spaceship Earth”, always envisioning his contributions on a monumental scale. Specifically to the practice of architecture, he aired that “Architects, if they are really to be comprehensive, must assume the enormous task of thinking in terms always disciplined to the scale of the total world pattern of needs, its resource flows, its recirculatory and regenerative processes.”
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Bucky on his inventions
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He was described by others as “one of the few men in history who have systematically put in order the data of their experience, who have set out to see the world whole and see it constantly, and of these few he is singular in having available the technology of quanta, nucleonics, and computers. His work thus reflects an extraordinary gain in techno-economic leverage”, establishing his position as an inventor on the global scale, with goals of the mass production and dispersement of efficient and technologically advanced products.
One of his concepts that embodied this vision of a global community was the World Game, which he introduced in the 1960’s. It was a system meant to solve the world’s greater problems. It was an approach through which he wanted to deal with the whole world as a whole, and tackle global issues as opposed to the local that had only been touched upon to this time. For this he used the earlier invented Dymaxion map, in order to plot and analyze resources, trends, as well as social and governance scenarios.He envisioned that the project would be spread through the congregation of nations in seminars and the communication of free press. His main goal was to ultimately unify the objectives and visions of all world leaders through the shared act of common problem solving and discussion, creating a linked, global community. The first World Game Seminar was held in July, 1969.
In his construction of the Dymaxion House, Fuller also had a greater vision of an entire world populated with these structures. Fuller wanted to create a state in which the “Essence of the world’s working will be to make every man able to become a world citizen and able to enjoy the whole earth, going wherever he wants at any time, able to take care of all the needs of all his forward days without any interference with any other man and never at the cost of another man’s equal freedom and advantage.”
In his construction of the Dymaxion House, Fuller also had a greater vision of an entire world populated with these structures. Fuller wanted to create a state in which the “Essence of the world’s working will be to make every man able to become a world citizen and able to enjoy the whole earth, going wherever he wants at any time, able to take care of all the needs of all his forward days without any interference with any other man and never at the cost of another man’s equal freedom and advantage.”
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Dymaxion Global Village
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When creating the Dymaxion House, Fuller’s vision seemed to be to create a new city on earth, with identical homes populating the entire globe and connecting humanity as never before. In this, he carried on the structural principles of synergetics onto a global, social level, in which the world was the system that could only function once all its parts – meaning countries and people – were assembled and acted in joined behaviour.
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DY·MAX·ION
In 1929, The Marshall Field department store was preparing to sell a new futuristic line of furniture, and approached Fuller's 4D house as a way to justify the new line. Waldo Warren, Marshall Field's public relations manager, felt that "4D" was not dynamic enough a name, and hired a wordsmith to work with Fuller to create a new title, a new idea at the time. Fuller described the philosophy behind his house. The wordsmith wrote down key sentences. From the sentences the wordsmith extracted key words, and then he found expressive syllables from those words. Fuller then eliminated all the words he did not like, leaving 'dy', 'max', and 'ion, from 'dynamic', 'maximum', and 'tension'.
Later "Dymaxion" became synonymous with the idea of efficiency, doing less with more. This became the theme for a series of Fuller's subsequent inventions: the Dymaxion car, map and bathroom.
Authored by: Terry Huang, Justyna Maleszyk and Isabel Ochoa
Edited by: Isabel Ochoa