Producing Maximum Performance from Technology: The Dymaxion Man

Last summer, the U.S. Postal Service issued a stamp commemorating the life of R. Buckminster Fuller ’13. Foregrounded by platonic solids and a lozenge-shaped, three-wheeled automobile, Fuller’s giant head is perched atop a ball-and-socket truss amid gaping onlookers. Spidering across the great dome of his forehead are the signature lines of triangles and hexagons that constitute his geodesic geometry. In the background, more geodesic domes lie on the Euclidean plane punctuated by what appear to be oversized power transformers and a helicopter pulling yet another dome along the invisible vectors of optimum design. Not your typical somber portrait of an elder statesman or groundbreaking scientist, this millennial take on a ’50s sci-fi aesthetic is, despite its winks and overall mood of loopiness, telling of both Fuller’s life and reputation.

Born in Milton, Massachusetts, July 12, 1895, Buckminster Fuller attended Milton Academy from 1904 to 1913, where he later claimed to have learned all the engineering he needed to know from his high school physics class. He was expelled from Harvard twice before apprenticing as a machine fitter at Richards, Atkinson, an importer of cotton mill machinery in Boston. He then held various apprentice jobs at Armour, the industrial meatpacking and byproducts firm, interrupted by two years of service as an ensign in the U.S. Navy during World War 1. At the ripe age of 27, he became president of Stockade Building System, a construction firm poised to change the way homes were constructed before eliciting the ire of the building unions.

In 1927, after two years of lackluster dividends, the controlling interests of the company fired Fuller. Bankrupt and jobless at 32 with a wife and a newborn daughter to support, Fuller could only conclude that his family would be better off without him. He stood, desperate, on the icy shores of Lake Michigan in Chicago when he suddenly realized that his life did not belong to him, but rather to the whole universe. In the light of this revelation he had no right to take his own life; in fact, he was obliged to use his life in service of the cosmos. It was then that he began conducting “an experiment to discover what the little, penniless, unknown individual might be able to do effectively on behalf of humanity.” With his diverse education in mass production and industrial distribution networks, an intuitive feeling for structures and an infectious optimism, Fuller was uniquely positioned to offer a Dymaxion vision to the universe that had saved his life. Dymaxion (dynamism + maximum + ion) is one of the signature terms Fuller coined during his career, meaning that which produces maximum performance from available technology. The term itself suggests a sense of humor and showmanship that would serve him well in conducting his grand experiment.

Most people know of Fuller through the geodesic dome, examples of which can be found on almost any playground built in the late 1960s or ’70s. Ingenious for its simplicity and structural integrity, the geodesic dome is an elaboration of the truss principle in three dimensions. Pin three sticks together to form a triangle and you have a completely stable structure in which the angles of the triangle remain the same no matter how you attempt to deform it. Try the same thing with a rectangle and the joints at the corner will rotate with the slightest push. The geodesic dome simply extends the integrity of the triangle off the plane through repetition of the form.

Described as such, it seems perhaps more remarkable that no one had thought of such a structural system until Fuller. It turns out that Fuller wasn’t the first person to employ the efficiency of the space truss; thrilled by the structural strength of his tetrahedral kite, Alexander Graham Bell erected a five-story tower on his island in Nova Scotia in 1907 using a tetrahedral space truss. Fuller’s genius lay instead in knowing, contrary to commonly held assumptions among engineers, that the strength of the geodesic dome would increase with the magnitude of the overall structure.

In 1967, Fuller’s claims were put to the test at the Montreal Expo. Computer analysis had anticipated that his Expo bubble enveloping the U.S. Pavilion would burst at the equator from the outward thrust of the weight of the structural members. Fuller understood through years of experimentation, however, that the force of gravity would be easily resisted by the tensional integrity of the dome’s material and geometry.

To put Fuller’s achievement in a proper historical context, the largest dome of the ancient world was the Pantheon in Rome. Constructed in the 2nd century A.D., the Pantheon’s diameter measures 143 feet. It took roughly 1,300 years before that span was surpassed by Brunelleschi’s dome in Florence, which measures 153 feet in diameter. The Duomo stood as the largest dome in the world until 1967. Fuller’s dome measured a staggering 250 feet in diameter and stood 20 stories tall. Equally important, the 600-ton dome was a fraction of the weight of its Italian rivals, exponentially stronger and its construction time could be measured in months rather than years.

Although the U.S. Pavilion at the Montreal Expo would secure Fuller’s place in the history of architecture and engineering, the geodesic dome was, by Fuller’s own standards, a failure. By 1971, when the fundamental patent for the geodesic dome expired, just over 20,000 domes had been erected. Despite the U.S. Marine Corps hailing the geodesic dome as “the first basic improvement in mobile military shelter in 2,600 years,” Fuller had intended the geodesic dome to revolutionize the housing industry as Ford’s assembly line had done for the automobile industry. Convinced that a house should cost no more than a car, Fuller envisioned the geodesic dome as the means to mass-produced affordable housing. Because the individual members of a geodesic dome are small, a dome kit could be easily shipped and assembled quickly with no skilled labor. He had even anticipated a time when prefabricated domes could be delivered on site by helicopter. (Thus the curious image in the upper left-hand corner of the stamp.) While the domes achieved a quasi-mystical status among California hippies, 20,000 structures in 17 years hardly fulfills the dream of an America covered in mass-produced bubbles.

Fuller and many of his followers argued that the housing industry, with its disparate unions more closely resembling medieval guilds than modern assembly lines, was threatened by the obsolescence heralded by the dome industry. Instead of accepting the inevitable change, the housing industry used its deep political ties to destroy Fuller’s solution to the housing crisis. While there is undoubtedly some truth to such claims, Fuller’s enthusiasm for the efficiency of the dome had blinded him to a critical aspect of housing: the true function of a home is to provide both physical and metaphorical shelter from the inclement weather of living.

Domes as habitats have little precedent in the modern world and thus do not reflect the conventional image of domesticity. Perhaps this points to a nagging romanticism that limits the progress of an industrial world, but if efficiency were the sole criteria for housing, everyone would live in dense cities. Furthermore, everything from books to ovens to city streets is designed orthogonally, which makes it very difficult to fit a round house into a square world. Perhaps most importantly, the strength and efficiency of the geodesic dome make it appear insubstantial compared to the structurally inefficient but seemingly solid brick town home. Appearance matters in this case; people want the feeling of stability as much as the shelter a building provides. Geodesic domes project anything but the protective comforts of home.

The geodesic dome wasn’t Fuller’s only failure. Go down the list of his patents from the Dymaxion car to the Dymaxion bathroom and you will discover the same inability to reach the mass audience that he had intended. A visionary before his time? Perhaps, but we can never know with certainty because most of Fuller’s inventions were based on the technologies available at the time. His work and ideas should not, however, be relegated to the cultural ephemera of mid-century modernism as the stamp suggests with its kitschy interpretation of his life’s work. Freed from the constraint of commercial success, the inventions can be viewed as artifacts of a much larger effort to optimize humanity’s relationship to nature, the bizarre forays into poetry an attempt to succinctly articulate that relationship (check out his Untitled Epic Poem on the History of Industrialization with Henry Ford as Odyssean industrialist), and the tireless lecturing a measure of his enthusiasm for the project.

Although he rarely prepared notes for his speaking engagements, Fuller was fond of opening a discussion with the image of a knot. Just as the human body cannot be reduced to the food that nourishes it, so too the essence of a knot cannot be discerned in the nylon fibers that realize its form. Instead, the knot is a self-interfering pattern, an applied platonic form. It was Fuller’s ability to extend this metaphor into structural engineering and renewable energy that distinguishes him from merely a man of the times. Born of a commitment to service, Fuller’s ideas remain relevant to the problems that continue to plague us, including sustainability, housing and even hunger. Patterns, forms, dauntless initiative, marvel and enthusiasm for human discovery, an insistence that humanity with all its technological appendages is a part of nature, the life of service: these are the promise of Fuller’s lasting legacy.

Michael O’Leary
Michael O’Leary is a poet, publisher and engineer. He lives in Chicago.

 

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