dreaming of a dymaxion house of the future

Buckminster Fuller’s first Dymaxion House, sketched out in 1927, was a hexagonal design suspended from a central mast.

By 1945, when Fuller entered into an agreement with Beech Aircraft Corporation to mass produce the house, its plan was circular. Asked later about the Dymaxion House’s unusual form, Fuller said that functional rather than aesthetic considerations determined his choice. “We did nothing arbitrary,” he emphasized. “We were not trying to make a cute house. Its shape is due to the solution of our problems of space, weight and mass production.”

buckminster fuller, the dymaxion house, and the world

“We are living in a spheroidal universe. A round spheroidal world—not a cubicle sugar lump world.”

— Buckminster Fuller, in 1929, presenting an early model of the Dymaxion House.

this phenomenon of american ingenuity

News of Buckminster Fuller’s circular aluminum house, complete with artist’s rendering, in the Pittsburgh Press, on April 12, 1946 –

 

 

a house as modern as a plane

INT, exhibition hall, men and women stand around a low display table showing a scale model of a circular home. R. Buckminster Fuller is interviewed by a man in a suit.

Man: “Mr. Fuller, why a . . . a round house???”

Fuller: “Why not? The only reason that houses have been rectangular all these years is that, that is all we could do with the materials we had. Now with modern materials and technology, we can apply to houses the same efficiency of engineering that we apply to suspension bridges and airplanes . . . . The whole thing is as modern as a streamlined plane.“

a new kind of house