Putting Together the Pieces of Bucky Fuller’s House Again

Some jigsaw puzzle--3,600 pieces with a combined weight of three tons and no final picture. Together they make up R. (Richard) Buckminster Fuller’s landmark Dymaxion House, a round house made of aluminum, plexiglass and stainless steel that will become a new exhibit in October at the Henry Ford Museum & Greenfield Village in Dearborn, Mich.

A mix of engineer, philosopher and inventor, the visionary Fuller, who died in 1983 at age 87, was considered in his time to be both a genius and a crackpot. He conceived of the Dymaxion House in the 1920s and exhibited an early version in 1929 in Chicago’s Marshall Field’s department store as a marketing strategy to showcase modern furniture for sale. The name Dymaxion was invented for the installation by an advertising writer who strung together favorite Fuller words, including “dynamic,” “maximum” and “tension.”

Fuller wanted to build a house that could be mass-produced and would be low maintenance, affordable, easy to clean and environmentally conscientious, but he had to wait until 1945 for his Dymaxion prototype to be built. This was done at the Beech Aircraft factory in Wichita, Kan., which had been a manufacturer of wartime airplanes in aluminum. “Might as well go from ‘weaponry to livingry’ is what Fuller said,” says Nancy Villa Bryk, curator of the Ford Museum’s “Dymaxion House Experience.” The Dymaxion is also seen as a precursor to Fuller’s better-known geodesic dome design of the late 1940s.

Fuller was continually disappointed between the time he conceived his version of the American dream home and when it was finally built, says James Ashby, restoration coordinator of the Ford museum project. “Fuller worked with a New York architectural firm in the 1930s to do estimates on the cost and weight of the design. The cost was six times the budget and the weight four times his target. The modern materials he wanted to use just weren’t economical for mass production in 1931. Fuller concluded that he was just too far ahead of his time and that he would have to wait to see his dwelling machine realized.”

Even after the prototype was built in 1945, the Dymaxion never was mass-produced because of a falling out between the inventor and his financial backers. Bryk says Fuller estimated the house would have cost a buyer about $6,500 in 1946.

“We know Fuller wanted to engineer a housing solution that would change the way Americans live,” Bryk said. “He thought that houses were beginning to dictate our lives rather than meet our needs. These rooms are not very large, but he would say that they were large enough to do what you needed to do in there, that the less time you spend on your house, the more time you spend with the people you love.”

Measuring 36 feet in diameter, the Dymaxion looks like a spacecraft hovering above the ground, with stakes around the perimeter. Inside, the rooms are pie-shaped wedges--an entry, a living area, kitchen, pod for a washer and dryer, two bedrooms, two baths. In 1992, the Ford Museum was given the only known prototype by the William Graham family of Wichita, the original owners.

When they built the house, the Grahams did not stick to Fuller’s specifications; they used caulking on some parts, for example, plus metal fasteners, which caused some elements to rust. The house had stood on a lakeside lot attached to the Graham’s ranch-house residence for 44 years before the dismantled pieces were moved to Dearborn.

In 1998, Ashby, an architectural conservator, began overseeing the task of putting the house together. Parts, which were already documented, were piled on shelves and in corners of a storage area inside the museum. They were moved about three miles from the museum to an 8,000 square-foot storage warehouse, where Ashby and a team of about six are restoring and reassembling the pieces.

Ashby has drawings of the prototype in progress but not the final product, which looks like and is built like an umbrella. The internal “cage,” as Fuller called the framework, is made of stainless-steel tubes and steel rods that are suspended from a 16-foot-tall central mast.

Ashby pointed out that no single part weighs more than 10 pounds, in keeping with Fuller’s plan that a house should be low-cost to build and transport. “The whole idea was the house was easy to put together and pull apart. Rarely do you need someone’s help to pick up even the 14-foot floor beams,” Ashby says. The floor--or “deck”--is made of aircraft plywood. Ashby added that the floor virtually snapped together because of the angled plywood panels and aluminum clips.

The plastic aircraft windows that circle the perimeter are fixed shut. Aluminum panels below the windows can be dropped open to allow air to circulate. “He was an extraordinary visionary person,” Ashby said. “He reinvented how we think about housing. How [houses] are sold. He talked about dealerships, pricing their options and ordering the way you order a car.” The approximately 1,000-square-foot house was designed to fit in a huge cylindrical crate.

In terms of Fuller’s vision, Ashby said, “we are seeing a lot of relevance today of sustainability of design. This is a house which used wind power. He also intended to collect rain water with an interesting system. What people will find cool is a motorized storage system --inside the closets. You press a button and storage boxes move past you. There is no bending over or reaching up.”

The closets also function as room dividers. Ashby said that Fuller liked mood lighting. He had lights with colored filters mounted on top of the closets.

“There is this huge rooftop ventilator that sits on top of the mast that has a big wing on it to catch the wind. It’s supposed to draw stale air out of the house. And this whole ventilator is sitting on a 1942 Buick wheel hub, and it works beautifully.”

Bryk sees a certain heroism in Fuller because he approached housing in a radical and different way, no matter what anyone said or thought. One recent assessment of Fuller’s genius came from Bryk’s 11-year-old son, who thinks the Dymaxion is “the coolest house he has ever seen.”

It’s the kind of praise Fuller would have appreciated.

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Candace Wedlan can be reached at [email protected].