Word: dymaxion
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...life thereafter, one of Fuller's abiding preoccupations was how to mass-produce housing the way Ford made cars. He came up with the fully portable Dymaxion House, a metal dwelling suspended by cables from a central mast that held all the plumbing and wiring. He also produced a three-wheel Dymaxion Vehicle--the Whitney has borrowed the last surviving one--and even a Dymaxion Bathroom, which could be manufactured and shipped as a single modular unit. None of those worked out as manufacturing ideas in his lifetime, but they left behind proposals, plausible ones, for the future to work...
...Ideally, we should abandon the idea of continents altogether, turning from the familiar, but distorted, Mercator projection to a Dymaxion map. The commonly used Mercator projection developed in 1568 maps the globe on a rectangular, flat surface which stretches vertical distances. Conversely, the Dymaxion map, developed by former Harvard poetry professor and visionary, R. Buckminster Fuller, projects Earth’s surface onto a polyhedron, minimizing distortion. Not only do Dymaxion maps more accurately represent geography, they also avoid placing countries in accordance with the north-is-good, south-is-bad formula implicit in the tendentious original Mercator. In fact...
...20th century architecture, though they approached the question with their usual indifference to public taste. The pioneer modernist Le Corbusier wrote a famous essay in praise of "Mass Production Houses." He just never got around to producing one. Geodesic-dome inventor Buckminster Fuller spent years tinkering with his Dymaxion House. But he insisted on making it circular and steel walled. Americans weren't ready for a house that looked like a flying saucer...
...inspection of these plans reveals a myriad of details: built in closets for Anne Brown’s hats, a soda-fountain in the children’s playroom and a sound-proof music room. In addition, the home had its own meteorological equipment and state-of-the-art Dymaxion bathrooms—fancy one-piece copper bathrooms...
Then began his years of high creativity. He designed the Dymaxion House, an easily transported structure with roofs hung from a central mast and with outer walls of glass. He sought to give the design to the American Institute of Architects, which haughtily rejected all such "peas-in-the-pod-like reproducible designs." Years later the institute gave Fuller, who never formally studied architecture, a gold medal for his contributions to the field. In the early 1930s he produced the three-wheeled Dymaxion automobile, which attained 120-m.p.h. speeds using a standard 90-h.p. engine. The car was never manufactured...