Buckminster Fuller: The story of an architect, philosopher and visionary designer
Only when he had hit rock bottom did he decide to save the world: until the age of 32, Buckminster Fuller's biography was one long disaster. Expelled from the elite university Harvard for partying too much. Assembly-line jobs in Chicago's textile and packaging factories. Then nothing at all. A slide into unemployment. And in 1922, at just 27, life dealt him its hardest blow: his four-year-old daughter Alexandra suddenly fell ill with polio and died. Now, five years later, his life lay in ruins: he was bankrupt and a drunk. At only 32, his life seemed to have failed. What was the point of living if you were so helplessly at the mercy of fate?
He began his project to save the world by designing a new house that was to be energy-saving, environmentally friendly and affordable for everyone. The result was a UFO-like structure made of steel with a huge aluminium mast in the middle. The entire building, whose shape had been inspired by grain silos, hung from steel cables at the top of the mast. Because the whole structure was made of steel (Fuller considered concrete houses an architectural dead end), the house was light enough to be transported on a truck. If you moved, you simply took your home with you. That, at least, was Fuller's plan, because so far only a small model existed.
Fuller now wanted to exhibit it in a branch of the Marshall Field's department store chain in Chicago - but for that he needed a memorable name. So he hired a copywriter and tried to explain his ideas to him: for two whole days Fuller talked at the man with great enthusiasm - until in the end the copywriter only noted down scraps of the typical Fuller words that kept raining down on him in the endless lecture - and in 1929 created a new word from them, one that would accompany Fuller for the rest of his life: "Dymaxion", a combination of "dynamic", "maximum" and "tension". His client was absolutely thrilled.
Even though the three prototypes of the Dymaxion car, built in 1933, had no wings, parts of the car did lift off, as design historian Russell Flinchum recalled in the "New York Times" on 15 June 2008: "Apparently, the rear wheel lost contact with the ground when the car reached 145 kilometres per hour. Unfortunately, it then began to swerve uncontrollably." Nevertheless, for a few months the futuristic vehicle was the talk of the town: the writer H. G. Wells posed with it for photos, star conductor Leopold Stokowski bought one of the prototypes, and the painter Diego Rivera is also said to have shown interest. But during a demonstration drive with two interested investors in July 1933, one of the prototypes overturned. The driver died. Within a short time, the daring vision of a car had vanished from the scene again.
But the stubborn inventor would not be deterred from his plan to change the world - and so he simply reinvented it: on 1 March 1943, he presented his Dymaxion world map in "Life" magazine, which resembled nothing previously seen in atlases. To avoid the distortion of conventional world maps, he drew the continents on a kind of cut-out sheet that could be folded into a polyhedron, a many-sided geometric solid, to approximate the spherical shape of the Earth. The whole thing looked like a jumbled puzzle, but it was nothing less than a social critique of the prevailing world order: Fuller argued that there is no up or down in the universe. The widespread depiction of the North as "up" and the South as "down", he said, stems solely from the cultural prejudice that the North is superior and the South inferior. On the Dymaxion map, by contrast, there was no longer any up or down.
