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.

The dymaxion house is more than an architect's headache. Bankers, among them Frank Arthur Vanderlip, have dickered to build it in mass, have frozen when Architect Fuller scrupulously explained that his house is designed to make land worthless. Since people could live as well one place as another in the dymaxion house, no place could be worth intrinsically more than any other. His house would be meaningless on the 1932 landscape of real estate. It predicates a whole new order of society, based on function rather than property, which Buckminster Fuller is ever ready to expound. In this new order no one would have to work more than ten hours a year on communal business; money ("credits") would bear no interest; the State would guarantee "primary survival" (food, clothes, shelter) to the lazy, and reward individual energy and enterprise with increased latitude for play and amusement. Buckminster Fuller was a successful manufacturer of molds for re-enforced concrete construction in 1927. Normal, ethical-minded, he was given pause when his company was bought out of his control. He went into the slums of northwest Chicago for the year of 1927. He gave up liquor and tobacco, talked to no one, thought systematically about life, civilization and his dymaxion house of which he had been thinking loosely since 1922. Theretofore he had believed in Emersonian ethics. Discovered he: "In ethics, you can be somebody else's goat. In physics, you can't do it." His logic keened by misfortune, he decided that it was better to use than to own. Ratiocinating his Utopia, last week Buckminster Fuller was insolvent. His coterie of disciples, among them Romany Marie, Greenwich Village restaurateur, Architect Frederic Keisler, Author William Harlan Hale, Sculptor Isamu Noguchi, supported him. He has not the $100,000 it would cost to build the first dymaxion house. What he wants is a half-billion-dollar corporation to build it in mass. His disciples have formed the Structural Study Associates. They publish the magazine Shelter. In the August issue will be pictures of a model house Fuller is making on an unofficial order from Soviet Russia, of wooden instead of tubular metal spars, of textiles such as canvas and balloon silk, of chrome nickel steel, wire mesh doped with translucent cellulose to let through violet rays, etc. etc. The Russian house will be built this winter in some shipyard now being kept secret. But he believes that the U. S. shelter problem is evolving so rapidly that his dymaxion house will begin to be produced by next June.

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