Difference between revisions of "Dymaxion House"

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=failures==
 
=failures==
1. house is a labor of love  
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1. A house is a labor of love.  The systematic mechanization of the home, and Bucky's incredibly futuristic outlook, ignores any past conception of what has been characterized as "homely." The common conception of "home" usually involves unforeseen additions and renovations, seemingly useless nooks and crannies that always get piled with tchotchkes and "homely" detritus.  For a greater discussion of this idea of homeliness, "[[File: thinking_homely.pdf| Thinking Beyond Today]]," an essay by Daisy Froud of architecture firm The AOC, excellently discusses this domestic phenomenon.
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2. creating the most efficient house
 
2. creating the most efficient house
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3. needs to have a critical mass of people who are willing to sacrifice choice.
 
3. needs to have a critical mass of people who are willing to sacrifice choice.
  

Revision as of 02:20, 8 December 2008

DYMAXION = DYnamic + MAXimum + TensION



Henry Ford Museum
diagrammatic model of Dymaxion House Construction
Bucky and house.jpg
invitation to debut of the Dymaxion House
"The nude model model on the model bed in this model Dymaxion House was considered a bit scandalous in 1929, as she demonstrated the precise climate control of the Dymaxxxion House."
An illustration of Bucky's metaphor of using the housing construction process to buy a car

Buckminster Fuller

[Read Up. The Man, the Myth, The Legend]

Buckminster Fuller was a man of no formal training as a physicist or architect who nevertheless had a revolutionary and lasting impact on both fields. Infamously charismatic, Fuller decided to make his existence on earth:

"a lifelong experiment designed to discover what-if anything-a healthy young male human of average size, experience, and capability with an economically dependent wife and newborn child, starting without capital or any kind of wealth, cash savings, account monies, credit, or university degree, could effectively do that could not be done by great nations or great private enterprises to lastingly improve the physical protection and support of all human lives, at the same time removing undesirable restraints and improving individual initiatives of any and all humans aboard our planet Earth"

In his pursuit of this lifelong goal, Fuller created many novel and pragmatic alternatives to modern dwellings, modes of transportation, urban layouts, and more. R. Buckminster Fuller based his designs on the principle that resources on earth are abundant enough to support all human life, as long as we humans can exercise the ingenuity to use everything to its maximum potential. All of his inventions are therefore his attempt to revolutionize social conception of certain practices he found wasteful. Fuller's ultimate goal was no less lofty than the preservation of mankind on earth from his own self-destruction. This desire is embodied most elegantly in the Dymaxion House.

Story of dymaxion house

In the era of industrialized technology, Fuller found resource mismanagement inexcusable. One of the practices he most lamented was the lack of industrial production of houses. To build houses by hand, Fuller thought, was an archaic practice that was especially apparent when you compared it to the idea of building a car by hand. [INSERT PICTURE OF CAR BUILDING HERE] To construct houses out of materials considered by the general public as more sentimentally "natural," like wood, than of a material which was cheap, light, sturdy, and comparatively indestructible, like aluminum, was a gross waste of resource. Fuller considered creating such a building tantamount to planned obsolescence.

The Dymaxion House was a work that took Fuller 19 years to bring to fruition for a variety of reasons. While the initial idea was created early in Fuller’s career, the project hit many snags, and lived through many delays,

autonomy and efficiency

cheap light and reproducible <---hangouts from social reform, goal modernity, - making home life around him systematic life at the end of the production line?


behavioral

indiviuality within a house......

failures=

1. A house is a labor of love. The systematic mechanization of the home, and Bucky's incredibly futuristic outlook, ignores any past conception of what has been characterized as "homely." The common conception of "home" usually involves unforeseen additions and renovations, seemingly useless nooks and crannies that always get piled with tchotchkes and "homely" detritus. For a greater discussion of this idea of homeliness, "File:Thinking homely.pdf," an essay by Daisy Froud of architecture firm The AOC, excellently discusses this domestic phenomenon.

2. creating the most efficient house

3. needs to have a critical mass of people who are willing to sacrifice choice.



Wrong place, wrong time, OR The eternal pendulum of pop culture

One possible cause of the death, or non-implementation, of the Dymaxion House could be in fact completely divorced from the design itself, and more reliant on prevalent social and cultural attitudes of the time. One could argue that the cultural aesthetic of the United States has shifted its preference between two opposing poles, on the one hand the concept of mass homogeneity, association with "popular" culture, and a singularly unified "public," and on the other the desire for individuality and finding one's "niche." This can be seen throughout the 20th century: WWI as unity, the prosperous 20's as individuality, the Great Depression (30's), WWII (40's) and 50's suburbanization/baby boom generation all acted as unifying cultural forces, the 60's and 70's promoted individual liberty, and the ubiquity of the ubiquitous I-want-my-MTV generation in the 80's and 90's.

The failure of the Dymaxion House to popularize could simply be attributed to the cultural climate of the time and place. Fuller first publicly unveiled the design on July __, 1929, at the tail end of the [Roaring Twenties], and just months before Black Tuesday and the stock market crash. This unfortunate timing fell at the end of an affluent era, when people had the choice and money to not live in something that looks like what everybody else is living in, and just before anybody who would potentially fund or could potentially fabricate the Dymaxion House en-masse. All of the "good" qualities that Fuller touted were in fact all of the undesirable qualities of the time period.




The Politics of Futurism and the Dymaxion House

In the failure of the Dymaxison House, the politics of futurism comes into question. While certainly the Dymaxion House found opposition to success through its own failure in the marketplace, the ideological context which it was conceived may be equally responsible for pre-fabricated housing to catch on in the late 1930s.

Certainly one of the common follies of Dead Media lies around the concept of being "before its time," a device or media which looked to solve problems which were outside the everyman's needs. In looking to solve "future-issues," by fundamentally rethinking what a house was, the Dymaxison House failed to reconcile with the evolution of the house itself. In the wake of "New Deal" politics, Fuller himself looked to recreate the most basic of American possessions

DYMAXION HOUSE; Pitter-Patter On the Roof

Published: May 31, 1992

To the Editor:

In reading Witold Rybczynski's essay "A Little House on the Prairie Goes to a Museum" [ April 19 ] , I was reminded of the time in 1944 when I participated in a conference with Buckminster Fuller regarding his Dymaxion House. I attended at the request of my boss. He told me he would like to have an engineer accompany him. (I am an aeronautical engineer.) He wanted me as window dressing. Since I might feel uncomfortable if I said nothing, he advised, "You can say anything you feel like."


We drove to the New Jersey Meadowlands, where we discussed the possibility of my boss financing a 500-house development. It was wonderful to hear Fuller's description of the technical achievements in his house, and the idea of a central compression column and thin curtain walls sounded extremely efficient.


I realized that the three-hour conference was almost over and I had not made a single comment, so I asked: "Mr. Fuller, Grumman Aircraft gave me an employee's discount on an aluminum canoe. I like the canoe, but it isn't good for fishing because of the noise the water makes against the hollow aluminum. Would the noise on the roof be bothersome?"


He laughed and said, "Well, I hadn't thought of that."


On the way back to New York, I asked my boss if he was going to buy the houses, and he told me he was not. I said, "Why not? They seem so exciting." He told me it was because of the question I had asked and explained: "It wasn't your question; it was his answer. If he hadn't thought of that, I wondered how many other things he hadn't thought of."


- LEONARD M. GREENE White Plains, N. Y.

Sources

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9E0CE6DD163EF932A05756C0A964958260&scp=17&sq=buckminster%20fuller%201992&st=cse - Dymaxion Letter to the editor

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9E0CE7DC1339F93AA25757C0A964958260&sec=&spon=&pagewanted=all

http://www.paleofuture.com/2008/12/tomorrows-kitchen-1943.html