8 ‘‘Spirit House’’ and ‘‘Steppenwolf’’ Avant-Garde: American Origins in the Dymaxion House Concept

2Claude Lichtenstein

3
4In architecture ‘‘form’’ is a noun; in industry ‘‘form’’ is a verb. Industry is concerned with doing, whereas architecture has been engrossed with making replicas of end results of what people have industrially demonstrated in the past.

5 Fuller, Nine Chains to the Moon

6 Seventy-five years after its conception, R. Buckminster Fuller’s 4D-house (Dymaxion house) venture retains its unique character.¹ Never since has architecture been attacked so fundamentally, and reinvented so genuinely, as it was with Fuller’s intellectual thunderbolt. No wonder his project has remained unrealized, not only as a specific project but also as a general strategy for housing. Few events in history of architecture can compare to the 4D-house project of 1928. It remains an alien element in architecture, an ‘‘odd case,’’ as was its author, R. Buckminster Fuller, among architects, whose very profession the man himself put into question in the most radical way.

7 The 4D house, however, raises some questions. What is the character of this event? Is it a specific project, or is it an imaginary model? Or is it a highly suggestive appeal to achieve a more flexible understanding of the nature of dwelling? Fuller might have laughed about these questions. In 1928 he was convinced of the imminence and importance of his proposal. But after 1930 he might have learned to deal with it in a more general and didactic way.² Fuller’s attitudes were dynamic rather than definitive. He started the 4D-house project to discover a generally valid formula for a wholly alternative standard of building activity. His project dealt with a horizon different from the usual one, and as it is the case with a horizon, it recedes to the same degree as one proceeds. While his goals remained the same for more than half a century, he continuously revised the repertoire of his tools and his ideas about how to achieve the envisaged goals.

8 Like Henry Ford, who actually made the profession of custom-built coach building obsolete, Fuller advocated a completely new understanding and practice of house building and dwelling that would harness the efficiencies of the machine age. Yet, although Fuller advocated technical means and mass production, his 4D house also had deep personal and spiritual inspirations.

9 As such, the Dymaxion house inevitably has a double character. It aims to be impersonal and objective, yet, because of its outstanding character, it witnesses an extremely personal (however plausible and consistent) view. Having remained a project—Fuller’s first and thus maybe his most important project and his launching platform as an author—it is the thrilling document of an individual trying to set new standards. This is a typical phenomenon: the quest for universal qualities can actually be a highly personal initiative. Faults do weigh more heavily if they are due to the universalistic approach, but they fade out if we see the personal signature in a proposal. Le Corbusier, for instance, is considered by some to be an inexhaustible source of inspiration for exciting ideas. To others, who are attached rather to measurable effects than to impulses, he is responsible for ‘‘having murdered the city.’’ And R. Buckminster Fuller, was he the orbiting apostle of unleashed technological progress and indestructible optimism? The answer requires some qualification. Yes, he believed in progress, and he intended to ‘‘make the world work’’ by harnessing technological and scientific progress; but he was aware that this alone could not replace human progress. Technological progress should be used only as an aid to human progress. The Dymaxion house was his motif to crystallize a new model of existence.

10 Fuller’s Radical Questioning of Architecture

11 Strangely enough, design is widely approved as creativity applied to mass production, and it profits from a wide acceptance of this dimension, whereas architecture is often considered the art of the custom-built single item. The fragile acceptance of handicraft is most warmly appreciated in the domains of jewelry, of haute couture, and of architecture. In addition, the world of architectural publicity and discourse is tightly (however unconsciously) attached to the idea of uniqueness, with the architect as the passionate hero. Each building, each home claims to be a single-case invention. From TV ads to film sets and the policies of the architectural press, the glamorous custom home is the symbol of a successful life in financial abundance. But, alas, this is not the ‘Great Combination Revealed Awaiting the Click at Each Turn' that Fuller announced in his mimeographed 4D Time Lock papers in 1928.³

12 Fuller always addressed himself toward humankind, and his job was to promote inclusive standards rather than exclusive extravagances. More radically than anyone else, he proposed the turnover of architecture from a handicraft issue to a true industry. But did he, in 1928, want to reshape the discipline of architecture? I do not think so—he was not a discipline-bound thinker. His intention was not to reshape the grammar of architecture; rather, he proposed a revolutionary antithesis of building. Unlike Le Corbusier or Gropius, he did not propose the industrialization of the building process according to an established repertoire of architectural themes, but he changed the idea of ‘‘architecture’’ according to his ideas about industrialization in house building. His ideas were imported from the automobile industry, from shipbuilding, and from aircraft technology. This venture led him gradually from the form-based right angle (the seemingly stable, in fact unstable, right angle) and later (from 1950 on) away from the tyranny of verticality to an omnidirectional structuring. His was the shift, generally spoken, from a shape-oriented to a structure-oriented understanding of design. The first step was the 4D house, with its revolutionary replacement of masonry and brickwork by metal and plastics.

13 Only a non-architect could work out a scheme as Fuller did with the Dymaxion house. Fuller himself identified this fact later (1946) in a talk given to technicians, remarking, ‘‘As engineers you certainly understand that man is born inside the frame of scientific measurement reference, therefore it is impossible unless he gets ‘outside’ of the whole phenomenon house for him to be very critical of his performance standards.’’⁴

14 R. Buckminster Fuller himself had gotten ‘‘outside’’ and had rejected the common assumptions about architecture. He had become familiar with the ruling mentality in the building business when he was the director of the Stockade Building System company from 1922 until 1927. He had witnessed, surveyed, and aided in the construction of 240 houses (along the East Coast and in the Midwest) according to the building method developed by his father-in-law, James Monroe Hewlett, and himself. An album with ‘‘Stockade’’ photographs shows that each house looked different from the others. This was the point that to Fuller became the pivotal problem, the question of a flexible system to facilitate the handmade process of building or the ‘‘teleological’’ approach. He mentioned his ‘‘initial teleologic preoccupations’’ and named his work ‘‘their resultant proclivities.’’⁵ Teleological to him was ‘‘a within-self communicating system that distills equitable principles…from our plurality of matching experiences.’’⁶ This led him to the design of a mass-producible house in a production mode analogous to that used in the automobile industry.

15 Fuller was not alone in wanting to replace, after five thousand years of building history, heavy walls and ponderous beams with a heavy-duty structure made of modern materials. This was the core idea of ‘‘modern architecture’’ in Europe and Russia after 1920.⁷ The Swiss avant-garde ‘‘ABC’’ group coined contemporarily a visual analogy formula much like Fuller’s polemics. ABC was a periodical published in Basel between 1924 and 1928; the authors were Emil Roth, Hans Schmidt, and Mart Stam. Russian constructivist El Lissitzky, who lived in Switzerland in 1924, hoping to cure his tuberculosis, was also associated with the group. They opposed the traditional and the new building practice with the amazing illustrations of ‘‘building times kilograms equals ‘Monumentalism’; Building divided by kilograms equals ‘Technique.’ ’’⁸ The thought is close to Fuller’s ‘‘teleology’’ keyword and to his ‘‘doing the most with the least.’’⁹ But there remains a difference between how Fuller and Europe’s avant-garde questioned architecture, although the most radical architects in 1920s Europe had arguments similar to Fuller’s. For instance, Hans Schmidt and ABC proposed that the building activity be focused at the maximum of impersonal character and of artistic ‘‘indifference,’’ and he stressed, in his action-based understanding, the difference between (static) ‘‘architecture’’ and (dynamic) ‘‘building’’ much like Fuller did;¹⁰ however, he remained within the reference frame of—in Fuller’s words—‘‘cubical’’ architecture.

16 The Dymaxion House as an Outpost

17 Fuller, who toured in the Unites States in 1929 with his crudely cobbled-together model of the 4D/Dymaxion house, was undoubtedly an outlaw, and the successful (sometimes European-trained) U.S. East Coast architects may have been amused by what they heard and saw—but, after all, they felt a bold spirit beating its wings in the American pioneers’ tradition. Harvey W. Corbett, the chairman of the New York Architectural League, who introduced Fuller in July 1929, did not hide his admiration.¹¹

18 A few years later, a color rendering in Fortune magazine pictured the Dymaxion house and the Dymaxion twelve-deck tower in a homogeneous ensemble of a newly built neighbourhood.¹² Fuller’s unsophisticated sketches had been integrated by the hand of the Fortune illustrator into the discourse of a more conventional dwelling perspective. An image like this looks similar to analogous drawings of modern architects. Yet there is a fundamental difference between this and a dwelling project of Neutra, Le Corbusier, Gropius, or Oud. Their proposals always referred to the factuality of the city, the civitas, which was crucial for maintaining societal order. To Fuller the city plays no evident role as the core of civilization. He used large cities during his lifetime as sounding boards for his ideas: Chicago, New York City when he was young, Philadelphia in his later years. These cities were his social platforms; they supplied him with his audiences, and they nourished his imagination. The city for Fuller was a place where he could accumulate energy impulses to launch himself. Practically, he probably enjoyed living in the cities, but intellectually he made the city responsible for many diseases of society. His design initiative did not deal with the cultural phenomenon of the city at all.

19 Fuller often spoke about the problems of the city. He considered national economies to be egotistical; thus, the city—the condensed essence of a national economy—was actually on the wrong side. Fuller believed that the world needed a supranational structure and a global responsibility network; instead, nations remained attached to the erroneous image of a flat Earth and remained embroiled in an endless chain of armed conflicts about the exclusive usufruct of territories.

20 A rough and awkward sketch drawn on a sheet of letterhead, not dated, but certainly from 1928, indicates his image: a view of the 4D-multideck towers spread over the whole dry land archipelago of the globe. There are no nations, not even continents any more. The territory is Earth’s dry land surface, a natural soil that can nourish the dwelling and building activity of all humanity around the globe.

21 Using this image of 4D towers as bases, Fuller refers, instead of to the ‘‘city,’’ to another basic constant in American history: the settlers’ experience of the ‘‘discovery’’ of unknown territories. He introduces the ‘‘lighthouse’’ as a building reference for the 4D house, akin in its geometry and in its attitude in marking a vanguard spot. The lighthouse is a sort of watchtower that guides the intrepid settlers who are making their way through the wild nature.¹³ The Dymaxion house concept, although radically new, seems to be an offspring of a genuinely American experience of dwelling, one that is not marked by the city but by westward movement into the vast, empty prairies. Whereas in Europe a house is built into an existing frame of society, with a given organization and laws, in the history of the United States a house was, after all, an outpost.¹⁴ There is a direct link between the American homestead, a lone outpost in the wilderness, and R. Buckminster Fuller’s multideck tower and mooring-mast structure.

22 In his lectures on the 4D/Dymaxion house, and in the documented newsreels of his presentation, Fuller explains how the house will provide ‘‘shelter’’: ‘‘It must be proof against earthquakes, floods, tornadoes, cyclones, marauders, electrical storms.’’¹⁵ Thus he introduces this elementary meaning of the home, and the shelter aspect has to do with realities of life in rural America, where people are constantly exposed to the perils of nature. Indeed, nature there is more threatening than in other regions of the world, since North America offers no such north-south weather-protection barrier as the Alps or the Himalaya.¹⁶

23 ‘‘The Anglo-Saxon origin of the synonym ‘shelter’ would be: SHELL scyld (shield) TER-trum (firm): That which covers or shields from exposure or danger; a place of safety, refuge or retreat’’¹⁷ Fuller himself, in biographical statements, credited the Dymaxion house with providing such a shelter and promising a convenient and safe environment to live in. Fuller and his wife, Anne, actually suspected that the poor living conditions in their drafty Chicago apartment had contributed to the death of their first daughter, Alexandra, who died in 1922 at the age of four from spinal meningitis and paralysis. In many ways the 4D house grew out of the deep depression and shock that Fuller experienced after this family tragedy and after he had lost his Stockade job. Fuller recounted a mystical experience along the banks of Lake Michigan that brought him back from the edge of self-destruction in 1927, and he committed himself to doing something good for humankind. He saw a congruence between his family’s tragedy and the poor living conditions of other people all around the world. Thus, his radical 4D housing concepts grew out of his desire to achieve some kind of salvation for humanity.

24 ‘‘Spirit House’’

25 The revolutionary impact of Fuller’s novel idea is expressed in an emotional sketch, certainly a key document, dated February 9, 1928. This sketch, one of the first in his exciting venture, depicts a central mast with dependent radiant bearing beams. He names the sheet ‘‘Spirit House’’ and expresses the importance of his discovery: ‘‘Spirit House—The new tool! Metal! Fibre Stress I utilizing dynamics + tensile strength/as yardarm/gravity/self tuning or plumbing.’’

26 The Stockade memorial album contains a photograph of a load test in the shop: a wall is being pressed until breakage. In conventional architecture weight and load tend to weaken a structure, whereas a tension-based structure stiffens when loaded. Thus he mentions among the factors of his house: ‘‘gravity’’ and ‘‘self tuning.’’ With his own approach Fuller had stepped outside the common reference system by the heuristic method of inversion.

27 The 4D/Dymaxion house proposed numerous unique or highly unusual features:

The lightweight mass-producible metal structure in analogy to the mass-produced cars;¹⁸
The central supporting mast and the radial structure;
Floor construction by piano wire and with pneumatic surfaces;
The omnidirectionality of the house (the first sketch was based on a rectangular plan, but Fuller switched to the hexagon in the spring of 1928, and the circular plan came later, with the Wichita House);
The organization of the plan with the machinery and appliances (assembly units) being used as partitions;
The triangulation of the plan; the abandoning of the right angle both in plan and also in elevation (window elements);
The equipment of the house with radio, TV, and communication facilities, providing the inhabitants with a full range of access to information;
The abandonment of individual property ownership in favor of the service concept—housing is a service industry rather than an individual asset, in analogy to the telephone service concept.¹⁹

28 This program offered unconventional, amazing, sometimes even outlandish ideas. In addition, I assume that this revolutionary concept was outside of the domain of the acknowledged discourse in architecture on either side of the Atlantic Ocean. I have already mentioned the correlation between the 4D-house concept and the settlers’ movement in American history. We must not forget to mention the limits of this reference, or better, the point where it detaches from this tradition. To Fuller, contrary to the settlers’ approach, the building ground was not a country, nor a nation, nor a personal claim. Fuller rejected the idea that land could be claimed as personal property; a territory was something to be used rather than possessed. Nor, however, was his view a socialist one, since property, private or collective, was not the point. He focused on use rather than exclusive or collective property ownership. He envisioned providing a housing service, something like telephone access at that time. Houses would be rented instead of owned, and housing would become a ‘‘world encompassing service industry’’ offering a reliable network of affordable, quality housing.²⁰ Cities would be supplanted by active transportation and communication between these bases.

29 One might assume that the 4D/Dymaxion house was nothing more than a relentless futuristic dream where the wonders of technology would overcome the old ways and means of housing. But this project was not based on technology or innovation for its own sake; the ‘‘Spirit House’’ was technology directed toward a humanistic goal: ‘‘Children are born truthful. They only learn deception, falsehood and instinct from the selfish prohibition of truth by their elders. …Let us solve the problem of the home, the housing of childhood, the prime reason for the home, and we will remove the majority of the traces of the dark ages of selfish unenlightenment.’’²¹

30 Words like these, written in 1928, may surprise anyone who thinks in terms of a thoroughly technical and materialistic reality, as was pushed forward in Europe after World War I. In France, during the 1920s, the meaning of ‘‘new spirit’’ was intentionally profane. Le Corbusier’s magazine L’Esprit nouveau (new spirit) was the fanfare of an aesthetic and artistic confession and offered a modern lifestyle built on the conviction of its rational premises. Le Corbusier’s pure creation de I’esprit refers to artistic autonomy of composition and to integral rationality. ‘‘Nous doter d’une fenetre mecanique! Nous architectes, nous nous contenterons fort bien avec un module fixe. Avec ce module, nous composerons,’’ insisted Le Corbusier.²² [Please provide us with a mechanical window element! We, the architects, will be most happy with such a module. In applying it, we will compose.] In these words we hear an artist on his quest for aesthetic intensity using mechanically produced building blocks. Fuller, however, did not search aesthetics for inspiration—he was responsive to natural sciences. His title ‘‘Spirit House’’ has, therefore, another connotation.

31 The Dedicated Management of the Home

32 Fuller’s concepts of shelter differed from both the European image of a vanguard architecture and the image of American-inspired rationalization and mechanization. His project had spiritual roots in America itself; indeed, in this respect Fuller does not seem to be the ‘‘random element’’ that he claimed himself to be. Perhaps there is a special American method that allows technology and spirituality to be alloyed rather than mutually opposed; this alloy has evolved in due course in American history.

33 ‘‘In the following drawings are presented modes of economizing time, labor, and expense by the close packing of conveniences. By such methods, small and economical houses can be made to secure most of the comforts and many of the refinements of large and expensive ones.’’²³ These words could be Fuller’s, but they are not. They come from Catharine and Harriet Beecher’s remarkable book The American Woman’s Home (1869), a rich compendium dedicated to ‘‘the Christian family.’’ The Beecher sisters and Fuller have amazingly comparable views and a similar content; only the layers are switched. To the Beechers the argument is ethical (they want people to live so as to please God), and the means are technical; to Fuller the argument is technical, but the goal is ethical (Fuller wants people to succeed in their unique existence on Earth).

34 ‘‘The grand art of ventilating houses is by some method that will empty rooms of the vitiated air and bring in a supply of pure air by small and imperceptible currents.’’²⁴ Such a claim stunningly foreshadows Fuller’s programs for the Dymaxion house and his later Dymaxion dwelling machine (‘‘Wichita House’’) project of 1946.²⁵ Again the words are from the Beechers’ book.

35 ‘‘The first and most indispensable requisite for health is pure air, both day and night…There are two modes of nourishing the body, one is by food and the other by air,’’²⁶ wrote the Beechers. Here, we can see them move with great ease between physical, physiological, and metaphysical arguments. They trace back the most important (metaphysics) to everyday living conditions:

36
37The human race in its infancy was placed in a mild and genial clime, where each family dwelt in tents, and breathed, both day and night, the pure air of heaven…No other gift of God, so precious, so inspiring is treated with such utter irreverence and contempt in the calculations of us mortals as this same air of heaven. A sermon of oxygen, if we had a preacher who understood the subject, might do more to repress sin than the most orthodox discourse to show when and how and why sin came.²⁷ This is a remarkable view, depicting the pragmatic, creative, and genuine attitude of the nineteenth-century Americans. It is remarkable with respect to Fuller, as well, because of the amazing correlation between the spiritual initiative of the Beechers (with a technical background) in 1869 and Fuller’s spiritbased high-tech home of 1928.

38 In his programmatic ‘‘balance’’ comparison between the conventional house and the lightweight, lightful 4D tower, Fuller points out the progress of his conception: The conventional house is ‘‘tied up to [the] city sewerage system,’’ whereas his house is ‘‘completely independent…, all in air—above dust area etc.’’ Isn’t this analogous to the Beechers, the dream of transcendence of technique into a sublimation of the human spirit, perhaps even a kind of ascension like in Mondrian’s 1910 theosophical triptych ‘‘Evolution’’?

39 The pure air that Catharine and Harriet Beecher praised obviously exceeded the operation of just ‘‘opening the windows.’’ They conceived of a scheme of air currents from inside the house, from the staircase/chimney block—the same core of a house that would be emphasized in the early work of Frank Lloyd Wright some forty years later. The principle of inversion mentioned above with Fuller’s shift from the ‘‘push’’ to the ‘‘pull’’ principle is evident already here. Fresh air comes from the center zone of the house, which is not identical with inside, since it is a part of ‘‘outside,’’ however located in the center. The hypothesis cannot be worked out here in detail, but technical progress manifests itself often in the mastering of a problem by the principle of inversion. Rain could be drained internally in hollow columns in Joseph Paxton’s Crystal Palace (1851), or—closer to Beecher and Fuller—the steam engine in the belly of a vessel had imperatively to be provided with oxygen by internal air ducts. And in 1924 Albert Kahn designed the Ford Laboratory Building in Dearborn, Michigan, with an air-conditioning system effected by hollow columns again. This building was widely admired for the brightness, cleanliness, and precision of its interior.

40 ‘‘The new building will be full of light (health giving light), Lithesomeness, and beauty hitherto unconceived of.’’²⁸ This is R. Buckminster Fuller’s twentieth-century vision, to be arrived at by the application of airplane technology that would be used to build the prototype Wichita House in the 1940s. He was inspired by advanced nineteenth-century thinkers, indirectly (or perhaps directly) by Catharine and Harriet Beecher, and quite clearly by the New England transcendentalists, among them mainly by his great aunt, Margaret Fuller (1810–50), whom he discovered while he was in full pursuit of his vision. Fuller cannot be rightly contextualized without recognizing some distinctly American preconditions and inspirations. Only by recognizing how he was able to crossbreed technology and salvation, to blend the new architecture inspired by the

41 European initiatives with American individualism and ingenuity, can we pay proper tribute to Fuller’s originality. He straddled the technical and spiritual worlds, insisting on the need to harness science to aid humanity. Fuller would often repeat his hope that the high technology (often developed initially for the military) would eventually be focused away from destruction toward construction, or ‘‘from ‘killingry’ to ‘livingry.’ ’’²⁹ Thus, in the earlier part of his career, he addressed himself to army generals—who provided a testing ground for his ideas, such as the Wichita House. But a few decades later, as he continued to speak about the need for adequate housing around the world, the hippie generation, too, could accept him as one of their own.