House in Utopia
"No more architecture than a piano is music" was a model of a queer pearshaped house hung on a pole, exhibited in Manhattan for the first time last week. It was the latest development of Richard Buckminster Fuller's famed "dymaxion house" (from "dynamics" and "maximum service").
In Harlem's Savoy Dancehall for black men and women, a white man with a thinker's head and closecropped grey hair, last week spun his partner away, came walking toward her, flattened palms forward in the gesture of pushing as his shoulders twitched in the dance called the Lindy Hop. It was Architect Fuller, fifth generation in a line of Harvard men, onetime class drunkard, twice expelled from Harvard, greatnephew of Emerson's friend Margaret Fuller, Wartime U. S. Navy lieutenant, engineer, a prophet of civilization.
Buckminster Fuller talks no riddles when he says his dymaxion house "is not property to be owned, but a mechanical arrangement to be used." The new model has a fixed circular core, cased in a streamlined, pearshaped shield which swings with the wind, like a feed-tray for birds. The circular core, hung on a duraluminum mast planted on, not in, the ground, is lashed together by guy-wires on a system of triangular tensions, like an airplane. A square house piles up air pressure on the windward side, creates a vacuum on the leeward side, thus sucking the heat out. The streamlined house slides the wind off, fills the leeward vacuum space, saves heat, requires less resistance to wind stress. A cone on the housetop lets in air which settles evenly down in a slow draft.
The traditional house is an artificed cave. The traditional bathtub is an artificed pool. Buckminster Fuller has replaced these "feudal and finite" properties with what he calls "services." Dwellers in the dymaxion house will bathe with an airpressure hose squirting 90% air, 10% water, no soap, in a compressed fog over their skin. Little water, no bathtub, no faucets or sinks, will be needed. Toilets will be dry, a machine converting sewage into methane gas to provide the house's light and power. Air will be conditioned, making bedclothes unnecessary. All machinery will fit into the central duraluminum mast. The bed pneumatic, the closets full of revolving shelves, the walls transparent but windowless, the cooking done by vacuum mazda units, dishwashing and laundry done mechanically in three minutes, all doors opening at the wave of a hand before photoelectric cells, the dymaxion house tries to do everything directly and independently. It can be planted anywhere, regardless of water, sewage, gas or electricity supply lines.