Bubble Boy

How Buckminster Fuller combined environmentalism with high design.

by Will Doig

July 21, 2008

Like many people, I've long had a vague, amorphous idea of who Buckminster Fuller was. He was the guy who designed futuristic landscapes in that modish, Jetsonian sensibility. He lived in the mid-twentieth century, and his buildings resembled flying saucers; his cities looked like vast interplanetary hubs. He was an ambassador to a future more stylish than the present.

The reason many people think of Fuller as the godfather of utopian, starry-eyed optimism is that he wanted them to, as a new exhibit at the Whitney Museum of Art suggests. As a scientist worried about our civilization's rapid consumption of resources, Fuller knew that for his conservation-minded designs to catch on, he'd have to convince huge numbers of people to radically change their lifestyles.

Fuller believed the way to achieve this goal was to make conservation stylish — not in the trendy sense, but literally stylish: make environmentally friendly buildings, homes and cars look awesome, and people would embrace them. He arrived at this idea as early as 1920, a good fifty years before the modern environmental movement took hold.

This belief produced two outcomes. One is that Fuller is often thought of as more stylish than substantial. His most famous portrait, a Time magazine cover, portrays him as a trippy pop-culture icon, not a preeminent scientist. The Walt Disney corporation's decision to build a theme park around his most famous design didn't help sober his image up, either.
Fuller envisioned airborne spheres that would hover above the earth and hold several thousand "passengers." (Buckminster Fuller and Shoji Sadao Project for Floating Cloud Structures (Cloud Nine), ca. 1960 Black-and-white photograph mounted on board 15 7/8 x 19 3/4 in. (40.3 x 50.2 cm) Department of Special Collections, Stanford University Libraries Image courtesy the Estate of R. Buckminster Fuller.)

But Fuller's belief in stylishness produced something enduringly valuable: a trove of incredible schematics, prototypes and drawings, most of which never became a part of our culture, but all of which still inspire and awe. Fuller's greatest contribution to the environmental movement wasn't his structures themselves, which weren't built on a wide scale, but his inspirational designs, many of which are on display at the Whitney.

You have to believe he knew some of these designs would never actually get built — enclosing midtown Manhattan in a protective bubble, for instance. But he knew they'd grab attention for his cause. He called himself not a scientist, but a "comprehensive anticipatory design scientist." He coined the phrase "Spaceship Earth" to try to make people see our planet as a groovy interstellar vehicle that needed care and maintenance, just like a trendy car. His language and drawings were meant to connect with people's desire for fashion. For Fuller, being hip was a means to an end.

The super-efficient prefab houses he designed in the '50s were originally called 4D homes, but he soon changed the company's name to something flashier: Dymaxion Homes. These super-smart structures were constructed of airplane materials, which were in abundance after World War II. And since no single piece weighed more than ten pounds, the entire house could be built by one person. They looked like space ships, and included rooms whose stated purposes were things like "grilling, music and dancing." They never went mass market, but pictures of Dymaxion homes dazzled the public.

His Dymaxion cars were equally snazzy; by the '60s, Fuller had switched his focus from individual spaces to communal living — which consumes fewer resources — and his cars reflected that. Each teardrop-shaped automobile held eleven passengers, got thirty miles to the gallon (very high for the time) and could travel at 120 miles per hour on a V8 engine. (They were early prototypes for a rocket-propelled model he never got around to.)
A model of Fuller's Dymaxion car, with a Dymaxion home standing behind it. (Dymaxion House and photograph from the Collections of The Henry Ford, Dearborn, MI. 1934 Dymaxion "2" 4D Transport courtesy of the National Automobile Museum, the Harrah Collection, Reno, NV.)

But his most enduring renderings are of fantastical structures that depicted a future straight out of science-fiction: spheres (each housing several thousand "passengers") that would hover in midair high above the earth, and designs for floating cities in the sea that would free up fertile land on the continents. These weren't mere drawings, but actual diagrams — schematics — backed up by scientific principles that Fuller said proved they would work. With these, he managed to make the public confront the reality of its out-of-control resource consumption without alienating them by presenting a depressing, dystopic future. He was trying to show that a more earth-friendly lifestyle could be glamorous.

Which projects Fuller seriously thought could work is anyone's guess — I'm not sure he honestly believed we'd all move into giant spheres suspended in the air. But he must've thought the Dymaxion homes and cars could catch on. Unfortunately, they never did — as the suburbs metastasized into the wilderness, people stuck to their familiar ways, building the destructive, inefficient tract housing many of us still live in today. By the time his geodesic dome appeared at Montreal's World's Fair in 1967, it already looked retro.
A Dymaxion community as envisioned by Fuller. Such designs reflect the mid-century suburban ideal; later, he would shift his focus from individual to communal dwellings. (Model of Dymaxion Dwelling Machines community, ca. 1946, refabricated 2008. Photograph by Patrick Hobgood, Iannis Kandyliaris, and Ilias Papageorgiou.)

But the drawings and blueprints he left behind are more than archaic curiosities. Whether we recognize it or not, much of the modern environmental movement's appeal is now rooted in aesthetics. Environmentalists are beginning to think like Fuller; they're realizing that societies are more easily cajoled than forced when it comes to making big changes, and as such, they've put significant effort into the design aspects of today's "green" market. The most stylish car is a Prius, the most stylish market a Whole Foods, and the most stylish home an environmentally friendly one. They may not be Dymaxion, but Fuller obviously grabbed our attention.  n°


©2008 Will Doig and Nerve.com