Fuller’s 1946 case for industrialized, mass-produced housing
What the Work Is
Designing a New Industry is a book by the American architect, inventor, and systems theorist R. Buckminster Fuller, first published in 1946. Its catalogued subjects are architecture and dwellings, and it belongs to the same mid-1940s period in which Fuller was developing his energy-efficient, inexpensive Dymaxion house — a round, lightweight, metal-clad dwelling designed to be mass-produced using the factories, workers, and technologies that had produced World War II aircraft. The book’s concern is the industrialization of house-building: the proposition that housing could be manufactured like other modern goods rather than constructed piece by piece on site.
What the Book Is About
At its core, the work argues for treating the production of dwellings as an industry in its own right — one capable of applying factory methods, standardized production, and modern materials to the problem of shelter. This places it within Fuller’s lifelong preoccupation with practical, inexpensive shelter and transportation, and with the principle he called “ephemeralization,” defined by his disciple Stewart Brand as “doing more with less.” The Dymaxion house embodied that aim concretely: conceived nearly two decades before its mid-1940s development, it was designed to be lightweight, adapted to windy climates, cheap to produce, and easy to assemble. Because of its light weight and portability, it was intended as ideal housing for individuals and families who wanted the option of easy mobility. Designing a New Industry makes the case for the industrial system that would produce such dwellings.
Key Ideas and Themes
The book’s central theme is the transfer of wartime industrial capacity to the domestic problem of housing. The Dymaxion house was to be produced using factories, workers, and technologies that had produced World War II aircraft — an approach that treated the assembly line, rather than the building site, as the proper setting for making homes. The house itself was built of metal and sheathed in polished aluminum, and looked ultramodern at the time. According to Fuller biographer Steve Crooks, it was designed to be delivered in two cylindrical packages, with interior color panels available at local dealers. A circular structure at the top was designed to rotate around a central mast to use natural winds for cooling and air circulation. The basic model enclosed 90 square meters (970 square feet) of floor area.
The design also carried Fuller’s characteristic interest in efficiency and resource economy. Its innovative features included revolving dresser drawers and a fine-mist shower that reduces water consumption. The design included a “Go-Ahead-With-Life Room” stocked with maps, charts, and helpful tools for travel “through time and space” — an expression of the mobility the lightweight, portable house was meant to make possible.
These specifics connect to the broader principles Fuller was developing in the same years. He promoted “ephemeralization,” the idea that resources and waste from crude, inefficient products could be recycled into making more valuable products, increasing the efficiency of the entire process. He was also an early environmental activist, aware of Earth’s finite resources, and a pioneer in thinking globally about energy and material efficiency in architecture, engineering, and design. The Dymaxion house — and the industrial argument of Designing a New Industry — applied that outlook to the most basic of human needs.
Significance and Influence
The Dymaxion house garnered much interest, and due to publicity there were many orders during the early post-war years. However, the company that Fuller and others had formed to produce the houses failed due to management problems, and only two prototypes were ever produced. One of those prototypes is on display as a permanent exhibit at the Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn, Michigan. The gap between the enthusiasm the design attracted and the failure of the venture to deliver at scale is part of the context in which Designing a New Industry must be read: it is a book arguing for an industry that, in Fuller’s own lifetime, did not come to pass in the form he proposed.
Fuller was born on July 12, 1895, in Milton, Massachusetts, the son of Richard Buckminster Fuller, a prosperous leather and tea merchant, and Caroline Wolcott Andrews. He was a grand-nephew of Margaret Fuller, the American journalist, critic, and women’s rights advocate associated with the American transcendentalism movement. The middle name Buckminster was an ancestral family name. As a child he tried numerous variations of his name, signing it differently each year in the guest register of his family’s summer vacation home at Bear Island, Maine, before finally settling on R. Buckminster Fuller.
He spent much of his youth on Bear Island, in Penobscot Bay off the coast of Maine, and attended Froebelian Kindergarten. He was dissatisfied with the way geometry was taught in school, disagreeing with the notions that a chalk dot on the blackboard represented an “empty” mathematical point, or that a line could stretch off to infinity; to him these were illogical, and led to his work on synergetics. He often made items from materials he found in the woods, and sometimes made his own tools. He experimented with designing a new apparatus for human propulsion of small boats, and by age 12 had invented a ‘push pull’ system for propelling a rowboat by use of an inverted umbrella connected to the transom with a simple oar lock, which allowed the user to face forward to point the boat toward its destination. Later in life, Fuller took exception to the term “invention.” Years afterward, he decided that this sort of experience had provided him with not only an interest in design, but also a habit of being familiar with and knowledgeable about the materials his later projects would require. He earned a machinist’s certification, and knew how to use the press brake, stretch press, and other tools and equipment used in the sheet metal trade.
Fuller attended Milton Academy in Massachusetts, and after that began studying at Harvard University, where he was affiliated with Adams House. He was expelled from Harvard twice: first for spending all his money partying with a vaudeville troupe, and then, after having been readmitted, for his “irresponsibility and lack of interest.” By his own appraisal, he was a non-conforming misfit in the fraternity environment. Between his sessions at Harvard, he worked in Canada as a mechanic in a textile mill, and later as a laborer in the meat-packing industry. He also served in the U.S. Navy in World War I, as a shipboard radio operator, as an editor of a publication, and as commander of the crash rescue boat USS Inca. After discharge, he worked again in the meat-packing industry, acquiring management experience. In 1917, he married Anne Hewlett. During the early 1920s, he and his father-in-law developed the Stockade Building System for producing lightweight, weatherproof, and fireproof housing—although the company would ultimately fail in 1927.
The 1927 Turning Point
Fuller recalled 1927 as a pivotal year of his life. His daughter Alexandra had died in 1922 of complications from polio and spinal meningitis just before her fourth birthday. Barry Katz, a Stanford University scholar who wrote about Fuller, found signs that around this time Fuller had developed depression and anxiety. Fuller dwelled on his daughter’s death, suspecting that it was connected with the Fullers’ damp and drafty living conditions. This provided motivation for his involvement in Stockade Building Systems, a business which aimed to provide affordable, efficient housing. In 1927, at age 32, Fuller lost his job as president of Stockade. The Fuller family had no savings, and the birth of their daughter Allegra in 1927 added to the financial challenges. Fuller drank heavily and reflected upon the solution to his family’s struggles on long walks around Chicago. During the autumn of 1927, he contemplated suicide by drowning in Lake Michigan, so that his family could benefit from a life insurance payment.
Fuller said that he had experienced a profound incident which would provide direction and purpose for his life. He felt as though he was suspended several feet above the ground enclosed in a white sphere of light. A voice spoke directly to Fuller, and declared:
From now on you need never await temporal attestation to your thought. You think the truth. You do not have the right to eliminate yourself. You do not belong to you. You belong to the Universe. Your significance will remain forever obscure to you, but you may assume that you are fulfilling your role if you apply yourself to converting your experiences to the highest advantage of others.
Fuller stated that this experience led to a profound re-examination of his life. He ultimately chose to embark on “an experiment, to find what a single individual could contribute to changing the world and benefiting all humanity.” Speaking to audiences later in life, Fuller would frequently recount the story of his Lake Michigan experience and its transformative impact on his life.
Recovery and Early Collaborations
In 1927, Fuller resolved to think independently, which included a commitment to “the search for the principles governing the universe and [to] help advance the evolution of humanity in accordance with them … finding ways of doing more with less to the end that all people everywhere can have more and more.” By 1928, Fuller was living in Greenwich Village and spending much of his time at the popular café Romany Marie’s, where he had spent an evening in conversation with Marie and Eugene O’Neill several years earlier. Fuller accepted a job decorating the interior of the café in exchange for meals, giving informal lectures several times a week, and models of the Dymaxion house were exhibited at the café. Isamu Noguchi arrived during 1929—Constantin Brâncuși, an old friend of Marie’s, had directed him there—and Noguchi and Fuller were soon collaborating on several projects, including the modeling of the Dymaxion car based on recent work by Aurel Persu. It was the beginning of their lifelong friendship.
The Dymaxion Car
The Dymaxion car was a vehicle designed by Fuller, featured prominently at Chicago’s 1933-1934 Century of Progress World’s Fair. During the Great Depression, Fuller formed the Dymaxion Corporation and built three prototypes with noted naval architect Starling Burgess and a team of 27 workmen—using donated money as well as a family inheritance. Fuller associated the word Dymaxion, a blend of the words dynamic, maximum, and tension, to sum up the goal of his study, “maximum gain of advantage from minimal energy input.” The Dymaxion was not an automobile but rather the ‘ground-taxying mode’ of a vehicle that might one day be designed to fly, land and drive—an “Omni-Medium Transport” for air, land and water. Fuller focused on the landing and taxiing qualities, and noted severe limitations in its handling. The team made improvements and refinements to the platform, and Fuller noted the Dymaxion “was an invention that could not be made available to the general public without considerable improvements.” The bodywork was aerodynamically designed for increased fuel efficiency and its platform featured a lightweight cromoly-steel hinged chassis, rear-mounted V8 engine, front-drive, and three wheels. The vehicle was steered via the third wheel at the rear, capable of 90° steering lock. Able to steer in a tight circle, the Dymaxion often caused a sensation, bringing nearby traffic to a halt.
Shortly after launch, a prototype rolled over and crashed, killing the Dymaxion’s driver and seriously injuring its passengers. Fuller blamed the accident on a second car that collided with the Dymaxion. Eyewitnesses reported, however, that the other car hit the Dymaxion only after it had begun to roll over. Despite courting the interest of important figures from the auto industry, Fuller used his family inheritance to finish the second and third prototypes—eventually selling all three, dissolving Dymaxion Corporation and maintaining the Dymaxion was never intended as a commercial venture. One of the three original prototypes survives.
The Geodesic Dome
Fuller taught at Black Mountain College in North Carolina during the summers of 1948 and 1949, serving as its Summer Institute director in 1949. Fuller had been shy and withdrawn, but he was persuaded to participate in a theatrical performance of Erik Satie’s Le piège de Méduse produced by John Cage, who was also teaching at Black Mountain. During rehearsals, under the tutelage of Arthur Penn, then a student at Black Mountain, Fuller broke through his inhibitions to become confident as a performer and speaker. At Black Mountain, with the support of a group of professors and students, he began reinventing a project that would make him famous: the geodesic dome. Although the geodesic dome had been created, built and awarded a German patent on June 19, 1925, by Dr. Walther Bauersfeld, Fuller was awarded United States patents. Fuller’s patent application made no mention of Bauersfeld’s self-supporting dome built some 26 years prior. Although Fuller undoubtedly popularized this type of structure he is mistakenly given credit for its design.
One of his early models was first constructed in 1945 at Bennington College in Vermont, where he lectured often. Although Bauersfeld’s dome could support a full skin of concrete it was not until 1949 that Fuller erected a geodesic dome building that could sustain its own weight with no practical limits. It was 4.3 meters (14 feet) in diameter and constructed of aluminium aircraft tubing and a vinyl-plastic skin, in the form of an icosahedron. To prove his design, Fuller suspended from the structure’s framework several students who had helped him build it. The U.S. government recognized the importance of this work, and employed his firm Geodesics, Inc. in Raleigh, North Carolina, to make small domes for the Marines. Within a few years, there were thousands of such domes around the world. Fuller’s first “continuous tension – discontinuous compression” geodesic dome (full sphere in this case) was constructed at the University of Oregon Architecture School in 1959 with the help of students. These continuous tension – discontinuous compression structures featured single force compression members (no flexure or bending moments) that did not touch each other and were ‘suspended’ by the tensional members.
Fuller was most famous for his lattice shell structures—geodesic domes—which have been used as parts of military radar stations, civic buildings, environmental protest camps, and exhibition attractions. An examination of the geodesic design by Walther Bauersfeld for the Zeiss-Planetarium, built some 28 years prior to Fuller’s work, reveals that Fuller’s Geodesic Dome patent (U.S. 2,682,235; awarded in 1954) is the same design as Bauersfeld’s. Their construction is based on extending some basic principles to build simple “tensegrity” structures (tetrahedron, octahedron, and the closest packing of spheres), making them lightweight and stable. The geodesic dome was a result of Fuller’s exploration of nature’s constructing principles to find design solutions. The Fuller Dome is referenced in the Hugo Award-winning 1968 novel Stand on Zanzibar by John Brunner, in which a geodesic dome is said to cover the entire island of Manhattan, and it floats on air due to the hot-air balloon effect of the large air-mass under the dome (and perhaps its construction of lightweight materials).
Later Housing Projects
In 1967, Fuller developed a concept for an offshore floating city named Triton City and published a report on the design the following year. Models of the city aroused the interest of President Lyndon B. Johnson who, after leaving office, had them placed in the Lyndon Baines Johnson Library and Museum. In 1969, Fuller began the Otisco Project, named after its location in Otisco, New York. The project developed and demonstrated concrete spray with mesh-covered wireforms for producing large-scale, load-bearing spanning structures built on-site, without the use of pouring molds, other adjacent surfaces, or hoisting. The initial method used a circular concrete footing in which anchor posts were set. Tubes cut to length and with ends flattened were then bolted together to form a duodeca-rhombicahedron (22-sided hemisphere) geodesic structure with spans ranging to 60 feet (18 m). The form was then draped with layers of ¼-inch wire mesh attached by twist ties. Concrete was sprayed onto the structure, building up a solid layer which, when cured, would support additional concrete to be added by a variety of traditional means. Fuller referred to these buildings as monolithic ferroconcrete geodesic domes. However, the tubular frame form proved problematic for setting windows and doors. It was replaced by an iron rebar set vertically in the concrete footing and then bent inward and welded in place to create the dome’s wireform structure and performed satisfactorily. Domes up to three stories tall built with this method proved to be remarkably strong. Other shapes such as cones, pyramids, and arches proved equally adaptable. The project was enabled by a grant underwritten by Syracuse University and sponsored by U.S. Steel (rebar), the Johnson Wire Corp (mesh), and Portland Cement Company (concrete). The ability to build large complex load bearing concrete spanning structures in free space would open many possibilities in architecture, and is considered one of Fuller’s greatest contributions.
The Dymaxion Map and World Game
Fuller, along with co-cartographer Shoji Sadao, also designed an alternative projection map, called the Dymaxion map. This was designed to show Earth’s continents with minimum distortion when projected or printed on a flat surface. In the 1960s, Fuller developed the World Game, a collaborative simulation game played on a 70-by-35-foot Dymaxion map, in which players attempt to solve world problems. The object of the simulation game is, in Fuller’s words, to “make the world work, for 100% of humanity, in the shortest possible time, through spontaneous cooperation, without ecological offense or the disadvantage of anyone”.
Institutional and Academic Career
International recognition began with the success of huge geodesic domes during the 1950s. Fuller lectured at North Carolina State University in Raleigh in 1949, where he met James Fitzgibbon, who would become a close friend and colleague. Fitzgibbon was director of Geodesics, Inc. and Synergetics, Inc., the first licensees to design geodesic domes. Thomas C. Howard was lead designer, architect, and engineer for both companies. Richard Lewontin, a new faculty member in population genetics at North Carolina State University, provided Fuller with computer calculations for the lengths of the domes’ edges. Fuller began working with architect Shoji Sadao in 1954, together designing a hypothetical Dome over Manhattan in 1960, and in 1964 they co-founded the architectural firm Fuller & Sadao Inc., whose first project was to design the large geodesic dome for the U.S. Pavilion at Expo 67 in Montreal. This building is now the “Montreal Biosphère”. In 1962, the artist and searcher John McHale wrote the first monograph on Fuller, published by George Braziller in New York.
After employing several Southern Illinois University Carbondale (SIU) graduate students to rebuild his models following an apartment fire in the summer of 1959, Fuller was recruited by longtime friend Harold Cohen to serve as a research professor of “design science exploration” at the institution’s School of Art and Design. According to SIU architecture professor Jon Davey, the position was “unlike most faculty appointments … more a celebrity role than a teaching job” in which Fuller offered few courses and was only stipulated to spend two months per year on campus. Nevertheless, his time in Carbondale was “extremely productive”, and Fuller was promoted to university professor in 1968 and distinguished university professor in 1972. Working as a designer, scientist, developer, and writer, he continued to lecture for many years around the world. He collaborated at SIU with John McHale. In 1965, they inaugurated the World Design Science Decade (1965 to 1975) at the meeting of the International Union of Architects in Paris, which was, in Fuller’s own words, devoted to “applying the principles of science to solving the problems of humanity.”
From 1972 until retiring as university professor emeritus in 1975, Fuller held a joint appointment at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville, where he had designed the dome for the campus Religious Center in 1971. During this period, he also held a joint fellowship at a consortium of Philadelphia-area institutions, including the University of Pennsylvania, Bryn Mawr College, Haverford College, Swarthmore College, and the University City Science Center; as a result of this affiliation, the University of Pennsylvania appointed him university professor emeritus in 1975.
Philosophy and Beliefs
Buckminster Fuller was a Unitarian, and, like his grandfather Arthur Buckminster Fuller (brother of Margaret Fuller), a Unitarian minister. Fuller believed human societies would soon rely mainly on renewable sources of energy, such as solar- and wind-derived electricity. He hoped for an age of “omni-successful education and sustenance of all humanity.” Fuller referred to himself as “the property of universe” and during one radio interview he gave later in life, declared himself and his work “the property of all humanity.” For his lifetime of work, the American Humanist Association named him the 1969 Humanist of the Year. In 1976, Fuller was a key participant at UN Habitat I, the first UN forum on human settlements, held in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.
Fuller also coined the word synergetics, a catch-all term used broadly for communicating experiences using geometric concepts, and more specifically, the empirical study of systems in transformation; his focus was on total system behavior unpredicted by the behavior of any isolated components. In his book Critical Path (1981) he cited the opinion of François de Chadenèdes (1920–1999) that petroleum, from the standpoint of its replacement cost in our current energy “budget” (essentially, the net incoming solar flux), had cost nature “over a million dollars” per U.S. gallon ($300,000 per litre) to produce. From this point of view, its use as a transportation fuel by people commuting to work represents a huge net loss compared to their actual earnings. An encapsulation quotation of his views might best be summed up as: “There is no energy crisis, only a crisis of ignorance.”
Though Fuller was concerned about sustainability and human survival under the existing socioeconomic system, he remained optimistic about humanity’s future. Defining wealth in terms of knowledge as the “technological ability to protect, nurture, support, and accommodate all growth needs of life”, his analysis of the condition of “Spaceship Earth” caused him to conclude that at a certain time during the 1970s, humanity had attained an unprecedented state. He was convinced that the accumulation of relevant knowledge, combined with the quantities of major recyclable resources that had already been extracted from the earth, had attained a critical level, such that competition for necessities had become unnecessary. Cooperation had become the optimum survival strategy. He declared: “selfishness is unnecessary and hence-forth unrationalizable … War is obsolete.” He criticized previous utopian schemes as too exclusive and thought this was a major source of their failure. To work, he felt that a utopia needed to include everyone.
Fuller was influenced by Alfred Korzybski’s idea of general semantics. In the 1950s, Fuller attended seminars and workshops organized by the Institute of General Semantics, and he delivered the annual Alfred Korzybski Memorial Lecture in 1955. Korzybski is mentioned in the Introduction of his book Synergetics. The two shared a remarkable amount of similarity in their general semantics formulations. In his 1970 book, I Seem To Be a Verb, he wrote: “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.” Fuller wrote that the universe’s natural analytic geometry was based on tetrahedra arrays. He developed this in several ways, from the close-packing of spheres and the number of compressive or tensile members required to stabilize an object in space. One confirming result was that the strongest possible homogeneous truss is cyclically tetrahedral. He had become a guru of the design, architecture, and “alternative” communities, such as Drop City, the community of experimental artists to whom he awarded the 1966 “Dymaxion Award” for “poetically economic” domed living structures.
Awards and Recognition
Fuller was awarded 28 United States patents and many honorary doctorates. In 1960, he was awarded the Frank P. Brown Medal from the Franklin Institute. He was elected an honorary member of Phi Beta Kappa in 1967, on the occasion of the 50-year reunion of his Harvard class of 1917 (from which he had been expelled in his first year). He was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1968. The same year, he was elected into the National Academy of Design as an Associate member. He became a full Academician in 1970, and he received the Gold Medal award from the American Institute of Architects the same year. Also in 1970, Fuller received the title of Master Architect from Alpha Rho Chi (APX), the national fraternity for architecture and the allied arts. In 1976, he received the St. Louis Literary Award from the Saint Louis University Library Associates. In 1977, he received the Golden Plate Award of the American Academy of Achievement. He also received numerous other awards, including the Presidential Medal of Freedom, presented to him on February 23, 1983, by President Ronald Reagan.
Appearance, Final Years, and Death
Buckminster Fuller wore thick-lensed spectacles to correct his extreme hyperopia, a condition that went undiagnosed for the first five years of his life. Fuller’s hearing was damaged during his naval service in World War I and deteriorated during the 1960s. After experimenting with bullhorns as hearing aids during the mid-1960s, Fuller adopted electronic hearing aids from the 1970s onward. In public appearances, Fuller always wore dark-colored suits, appearing like “an alert little clergyman”.
Fuller’s last filmed interview took place on June 21, 1983, in which he spoke at Norman Foster’s Royal Gold Medal for architecture ceremony. His speech can be watched in the archives of the AA School of Architecture, in which he spoke after Sir Robert Sainsbury’s introductory speech and Foster’s keynote address. In the year of his death, Fuller described himself as follows:
Guinea Pig B: I am now close to 88 and I am confident that the only thing important about me is that I am an average healthy human. I am also a living case history of a thoroughly documented, half-century, search-and-research project designed to discover what, if anything, an unknown, moneyless individual, with a dependent wife and newborn child, might be able to do effectively on behalf of all humanity that could not be accomplished by great nations, great religions or private enterprise, no matter how rich or powerfully armed.
Fuller died on July 1, 1983, 11 days before his 88th birthday. During the period leading up to his death, his wife had been lying comatose in a Los Angeles hospital, dying of cancer. It was while visiting her there that he exclaimed, at a certain point: “She is squeezing my hand!” He then stood up, had a heart attack, and died an hour later, at age 87. His wife of 66 years died 36 hours later. They are buried in Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge, Massachusetts. His gravestone carries the phrase Trim tab.
The Dymaxion Chronofile and Published Work
For half of a century, Fuller developed many ideas, designs, and inventions, particularly regarding practical, inexpensive shelter and transportation. He documented his life, philosophy, and ideas scrupulously by a daily diary (later called the Dymaxion Chronofile), and by twenty-eight publications. Fuller financed some of his experiments with inherited funds, sometimes augmented by funds invested by his collaborators, one example being the Dymaxion car project. He styled his name as R. Buckminster Fuller in his writings, publishing more than 30 books and coining or popularizing such terms as “Spaceship Earth”, “Dymaxion” (e.g., Dymaxion house, Dymaxion car, Dymaxion map), “ephemeralization”, “synergetics”, and “tensegrity”. Fuller developed numerous inventions, mainly architectural designs, and popularized the widely known geodesic dome; carbon molecules known as fullerenes were later named by scientists for their structural and mathematical resemblance to geodesic spheres. He also served as the second World President of Mensa International from 1974 to 1983.
