Buckminster Fuller imagined the
Dymaxion house "suspended by wires from a central mast" and hexagonal in shape with air-conditioning and an automatic laundry (Kelly 1951, 26).
When promoting the lightweight
Dymaxion house in the 1920s, Buckminster Fuller used to ask prospective buyers: "How much does your house weigh?" The same question should now be asked about every building, because each extra kilo requires more energy and resources to manufacture, transport and assemble, as well as to heat, cool, clean and maintain after construction.
Buckminster Fuller's
Dymaxion house never caught on, but it proposed a peacetime use for wartime factories.
Though we opened the
Dymaxion House exhibit in 2001, the journal--all three years of it--can still be found online at www.thehenryford.org/exhibits/dymaxion/index.html.
Fountain Factory, based on his prototype
Dymaxion House, contains a central mast core with a series of catwalks suspended above the factory floor.
Design innovations such as "lightful houses" and the
Dymaxion House Concept are also discussed.
By April 1928 Fuller had arrived at a fairly definitive design for a single-family house along these lines and applied for a US patent to cover what he would soon be promoting as the "
Dymaxion House" (the word itself was a portmanteau of "dynamic," "maximum," and "ion" created by the adman Waldo Warren for an exhibition of Fuller's house at Chicago's Marshall Field's department store in 1929).
This new generation of mobile and prefab dwellings harkens back to Buckminster Fuller's geodesic dome and
Dymaxion House inventions, which were admittedly a bit before their time.
Buckminster Fuller's
Dymaxion House to Inventor Biographies can be explored.
Prefabricated housing projects, such as Buckminster Fuller's "
Dymaxion House" and Walter Gropius's and Konrad Wachsmann's "Package House," achieved critical as well as government and corporate backing but nevertheless failed.
In 1927, Fuller created the
Dymaxion House, a seven-room circular home built around a central pier.
Models of Frank Lloyd Wright's unbuilt Cloverleaf housing project and Buckminster Fuller's
Dymaxion house, which had little impact on ordinary housing, are given much more prominence.