Stockade Building System

The Stockade Building System was R. Buckminster Fuller's first commercial venture, co-founded in 1922 with his father-in-law James Monroe Hewlett after Fuller's job at the Kelly-Springfield Truck Company was eliminated. The company manufactured compressed-fiber building blocks made from excelsior (wood wool), coated with plaster, and molded via the proprietary "Stockade Pneumatic Forming Process." The blocks featured large vertical holes into which concrete could be poured for structural support, while their fibrous composition allowed builders to saw openings for joists and beams -- a practical advantage over solid masonry. Fuller supervised factory production in Queens, New York, and oversaw the construction of approximately 240 houses along the East Coast. The venture was, by Fuller's own later framing, his "first full-scale attempt to apply industrial efficiency to domestic architecture." Testing took place at Tarpon Springs, Florida in 1926, and a 1920 "Stockade Patented" catalog in the Internet Archive suggests the concept predated the formal partnership.

Hewlett (1868-1941) brought considerable credentials to the enterprise. A Beaux Arts architect who graduated from Columbia and studied at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris, he had worked at McKim, Mead & White and painted the ceiling murals of Grand Central Terminal -- one of New York's most recognizable interior artworks. He served as president of both the AIA Brooklyn chapter and the Architectural League of New York. Two patents were granted for the Stockade process: US #1,604,097 (October 19, 1926) and US #1,633,702 (June 28, 1927). The product was later marketed under the name "Soundex" and became a Celotex product, surviving in commercial form well after Fuller's departure.

Fuller's experimental ambitions exceeded his financial discipline. "Never interested in achieving high profits," he earned the distrust of the company hierarchy, and by 1927 the stockholders forced him out. The professional failure arrived in the same period as one of the deepest personal tragedies of Fuller's life: the death of his four-year-old daughter Alexandra from complications of polio and spinal meningitis. The combined devastation triggered severe depression, alcoholism, and thoughts of suicide. What followed was a two-year period of near-total silence and meditation, after which Fuller launched his lifelong "Guinea Pig B" experiment -- dedicating himself to discovering what one individual, without wealth or credentials, could contribute to changing the world. The Stockade failure thus marks the hinge point in Fuller's biography: the end of conventional ambition and the beginning of everything that came after.

See Also

• R. Buckminster Fuller -- co-founder
• Dymaxion House -- the next housing concept after Stockade's failure
• 4D Time Lock -- the 1928 manifesto written after the crisis
• Wichita House -- a later housing venture that also failed
• Criticisms of R. Buckminster Fuller -- the pattern of credit disputes
• Fuller's 1927 Crisis -- the crisis triggered by Stockade's failure
• Shelter Magazine -- Fuller's next public platform after Stockade

Sources

• Stockade Building System raw source