0 Crystallization of an Idea: 4D Becomes Dymaxion
1Perhaps the most significant element in biography is the study of crises. These are the existential moments when a man’s world falls away from him, and he is left with nothing but the agonizing environment which is himself. William James at such a moment made the reassuring discovery that the one process in the universe over which he had a slight measure of control was his own thoughts, and that by giving them direction he could, in some sense, reconstruct his world. Fuller, in his moment of crisis, also turned his mind inward. He made an inventory of his values, his equipment, the goals which were obtainable, procedures which were available.
2 His justification to himself for continuing to exist—the rationalization of his plight—was that he had no moral right to destroy the techno-economic resources which were contained in his personal experience; these resources belonged to society. This position was then, and is now, a special Fuller Categorical Imperative, a universal statement of an ethical position. But to translate this into practical action was clearly another matter. The translation called for comprehensive analysis, unique methodology, and rigid self-discipline.
3 Toward these ends, Fuller made a hard contract with himself. He agreed to dedicate himself to a persistent search for the all-over social design factors—principles that could make possible the quantum jumps to human betterment—and to make this search his cardinal concern. He looked on himself as a development and holding company for the insights that belonged properly to society itself—including the billions of persons still improperly privileged and inadequately sheltered.
4 In his inventory of the factors relating to what he called the potential human emergence from general disadvantage to general advantage over physical environment, he found that the problem demanding the highest immediate priority—and the one with which he was best equipped to deal—was that of shelter.
5 He developed, first, a concept of major and minor ecological patterning, that is, regularities in the relations of organisms to their physical environment. For example, birds’ seasonal, world-sweeping migrations represented to Fuller a major ecological patterning; birds’ nest-building and ‘‘local regenerative to-and-fro-ing,’’ he regarded as the related minor ecological patterning. He drew parallels with the human situation, developing a concept of major and minor ecological controls in the economic life of homo sapiens. Here the world’s industrial network emerged as the major control. The minor, or local, ecological control was shelter. With his usual comprehensiveness, however, Fuller conceived of shelter as virtually everything which gave man a local technical advantage in his struggle against the elements. It included not only a house, but the utilities which tended to make a house autonomous and the transportation which shuttled a man between his place of work and his place of physiological renovation.
6 It was then a logical necessity for him to make the jump from shelter to the constituent parts of the universe—and from these to the mathematical relations which maintain the parts in dynamic spatial equilibrium. ‘‘If man is to demonstrate any important mastery of his universe,’’ Fuller maintained, ‘‘then all the fundamental behavior phenomena of his dynamic universe—as demonstrated in the 92 (atomic) primary team plays—must be involved directly or indirectly in the process.’’
7 His argument was this: To master the universe progressively, man must first master the synergetic principles governing the relation of parts to wholes. Secondly, he must master the principles establishing the most economical relationships systems. Finally, he must master the principles determining the ‘‘evolutionary transformation tendencies of the hierarchy of parts relationships and their family of coordinate and accommodative complementarities.’’
8 These are tightly-compressed general statements whose immediate meanings are clouded by Fuller’s technical Latin-isms. What they imply is that society’s effective control of its environment requires, progressively:
- (1)
- a grasping of the general system patterns of the physical world, such as that expressed in the Einstein energy-mass equation;
- (2)
- the most economical ways of converting these system relationships to work.
9 The geodesic domes, which provide maximum structural strength with minimum structural materials per operative unit, are examples of such economic energy transformations.
10 It is Fuller’s third point which provides difficulties. It contains a subtle idea whose implications are not immediately apparent: Action and interaction of events are accompanied by relative displacements and accommodations of other events. For example, when a stone is dropped into a tank of water, the stone does not penetrate the water molecules. The molecules are jostled; they ‘‘accommodate’’ the stone, and in the process jostle their neighboring molecules, which, in turn, jostle their own border companions. Thus waves of relayed jostling are propagated. Each relayed wave, although a composite of local actions, provides a synergetic continuity of those actions. The consequence is a pattern of events which has an integrity of its own, independent of the local accommodations (which are innocent with respect to the overall synergetic pattern). The same stone, dropped successively in pools of water, milk, and gasoline, will generate the same wave patterns. Yet the waves are essences neither of milk nor water nor gasoline; the waves are distinct and measurable pattern integrities in their own right. The invariant relationships which govern pattern integrities in nature Fuller refers to as ‘‘pure principle.’’ The stone thrown into the tank inaugurates a complex of accommodative events operative in pure principle.
11 When radio or television waves pass through the walls of a house, when light waves pass through a window or a lens, there are always some comprehensively relayed local jostlings, some sets of sub-microscopic eddies of force, that accommodate the push through. The complementary effect—what in conversational language is the ‘‘resistance’’ of the wall, window, or lens, and what Fuller calls ‘‘the precessionally shunted pattern relay’’—is responsible for re-election, refraction, and filtering.
12 To Fuller, the end product of man’s progressive striving to master the universe is society’s common wealth in its most basic sense: ‘‘the industrially organized ability to project certain and constantly improving standards of survival by the many—without deprivation of any.’’
13 Fuller observed that for the first time in history it was possible for men to set themselves methodically to the task of production for all on a scale entirely without limit, and that this massive production could be effected without any fundamentally new capital accounting—because the real costs have been discharged in advance. The underwriting has been the enormous, and as yet undocumented investments of time, intellect, and disciplined effort by the pioneers in scientific principles and comprehensive technology—the men who separated out atoms, structured new molecules, and measured the cosmos. These resources he regards, collectively, as the ‘‘consciously-initiated design science operative (through its tool complex) as a synergetic wave patterning of global magnitude.’’
14 All that is keeping society from a realistic attempt to utilize total resources for total production for total population, Fuller reasoned, is a naive preoccupation with economic tactics long ago made obsolete by science. These tactics are side effects of ancient fears. They are vestiges of social memories, the vague recall of times of scarcity and isolation, of plagues and disasters, when the tragic sense of life was intertwined with the belief in the inevitability of war of all against all.
15 Fuller’s thoughts about housing and transportation were definitive. He envisaged the contemporary living pattern as local spherical control systems, everywhere surrounded by an air ocean. The most direct route from place to place is by air, and transportation of men and buildings is possible by air. Air-lifting, he concluded, is the key to around-the-world shelter distribution.
16 Of importance in Fuller’s thinking was the problem of transporting large units of structure. If shelter was to be given the economic advantages which derived from mass production, entire houses and apartment houses must be constructed in factories and delivered as totally assembled products, like automobiles. But with existing transportation facilities, no house can be moved more than a few miles. It is not practicable to load a house on a flatcar or a trailer and transport it through city streets, under and over bridges, and through tunnels. It is theoretically possible, to deliver a full-size, pre-assembled house by air. The air ocean has its shores everywhere, and its lanes are open. In 1926 an Italian dirigible had flown safely to the North Pole and back; the dirigible was a large rigid structure containing gas cells to float it, and was enveloped by a unitary skin with low aeronautic resistance. In 1927, the Graf Zeppelin was in building. Her structure was the dimensional equivalent of a 30-story skyscraper in horizontal attitude. Aeronautical delivery of housing was to Fuller as realizable as it was basic; it could make the project of mass-producing shelter feasible.
17 Toward this end he proposed a house exhibiting maximum strength at minimum weight per unit of structure. Unlike conventional houses, whose essential form had not altered since the time of the Egyptians and Babylonians, the Fuller house would be stressed like an airplane with compression parts and tension parts separated out. Conventional houses, built brick upon brick, or beam on column, are almost pure compression structures; yet brick and stone support no more weight today than in the day of the’ Walls of Jericho. The great technological advance was in tension materials like the new steel alloy cables. A logical modern house would have a structure similar to that of a wire wheel turned on its side, with the hub acting as a central, pre-fabricated compression member—an inflatable Duralumin mast. The remainder of the house would consist of walls and cable supported floor decks suspended around the mast.
18 Many of these ideas were contained in a book Fuller published in mimeographed form, in 1927. The title of the work was 4D; the symbol stood for the ‘‘Fourth Dimension’’ in relativity physics, the time-space dimension. Two hundred copies of the book were run off and bound; a subsequent edition, incorporating comment, charts, and additional material, was called 4D, Timelock. [Ful28]
THE 4D HOUSE
19In April, 1928, Fuller completed the essential designs of the 4D house, and filed a patent application covering the central features.
20 The house was actually the world’s first tangible embodiment of what one French architect hopefully designated as a ‘‘Machine-for-Living.’’ Its purpose was avowedly not only to keep the occupants sheltered from the bite of the elements, but to reduce to a minimum the drudgery of physical existence. The central mast, in which basic utilities were factory-installed, came ready for instant use. The windowless walls were of transparent, but swiftly-shutterable, vacuum-pane glass. The house was to be dustless; the air drawn in through vents in the mast was filtered, washed, cooled or heated, then circulated. Laundry was automatically washed, dried, pressed, and conveyed to storage units. Clothes and dish closets, refrigerator and other food compartments contained revolving shelves rigged to move at the interruption of a light beam.
21 The entire house was designed to be relatively independent of piped-in water, thus fully operative wherever it was erected. A ten-minute atomizer bath was produced with a quart of water, which in turn would be filtered, sterilized, and recirculated. Fuller’s toilets required no water. They consisted of a splashless hermetic and waterproof packaging system which mechanically packed, stored, and gross-cartoned wastes for eventual pickup for processing by chemical industries. Dusting was by compressed air and vacuum systems. Floors and doors were pneumatic and soundproof. Beds were pneumatic. There were no partitions qua partitions. The various living pattern areas were divided by Fuller’s prefabricated utility units, which contained vertically-and horizontally-moving shelves and hangers, or laundry or other utility facilities. These pneumatic based and crowned utility components reached from floor to ceiling; the intervals between them were opened and closed by pneumatically positioned and inflated drawer curtains.
22 To Fuller, partitions in a house are negative elements, symbolic of an economy of scarcity. They are what he calls ‘‘a make-do, like socialism.’’ When there is not enough space to go around, both provide an arbitrary subdivision of inadequacy. But competent design can always provide adequacy. In the 4D house, the occupants were given ample space, and the logical arrangement of the equipment automatically developed the privacy appropriate to psychological grace.
23 Fuller holds privacy to be a condition that can be violated only through the sensorial spectrum. Sight, hearing, touch, and smell ranges, however, are readily controlled within economic limits. At an open-air tea party you cannot hear, touch, smell a group in conversation on the other side of the lawn. Optical privacy is readily had with inexpensive opaque membranes.
24 It is a cardinal assumption of Fuller’s that all design should be muted at zero as with a musical instrument. A violin or a piano is not itself a form of music, nor is it a container of music; it is a device for articulation. A house has a corresponding function. The harmonic potentials for design should be articulated by those who live in the house; what is significant is the personality of the dweller, not the dwelling. Yet the range of harmonic capabilities of the house should be comprehensive with respect to the spontaneous articulation of all the senses of the dweller. In this the esthetics of a house has a broader sensorial spectrum than the esthetics of an orchestra whose instrumental harmonies have only auditory charm. The total sensorial spectrum is characterized by a variety of expressive frequencies. Where musical tempo are expressions at a relatively high frequency, both in man-made music and in the sound patternings of nature, the visual and olfactory patternings of nature have slower rhythms. The white of winter, the variety of the summer’s greens and the reds of autumn, even the lilac scent held for two weeks in May—these are low-frequency, long wave expressions in contrast to the rustlings of leaves, the song notes of birds, or the high-frequency hiss of the surf. And in all of these areas of sensation a house must be sympathetically resonant.
25 The 4D dwelling was designed to provide what Fuller conceived as ‘‘high-standard functioning, unconsciously compatible with man’s unconsciously coordinated internal mechanisms and chemistries.’’ The design, he held, must implement, but not impose. ‘‘There must be no lion’s claw feet on the instruments, nor frozen rococo music to impede the regenerative evolutionary preoccupations of the ever-emergent new life. It was the ever-new life, with its incredible and as yet little understood complex of faculties, sensibilities, and intuitive initiations, to which the 4D dwelling was dedicated.’’
26 What was economically sensational about the planned 4D house was the cost to the consumer. Based on the price scale then current in the automobile industry, Fuller estimated that if such a house, completely equipped, could be mass-produced, it could be marketed at 25 per pound (in terms of the 1928 dollar). Fords and Chevrolets at that time were selling at 22 per pound. (Today Fords and Chevrolets, completely equipped, sell for 80¢per pound.) Fuller’s 4D house dwelling machine of 1928, optimally equipped, weighed a total of 6000 pounds. At 25¢per pound, this meant a 1928 retail price of $1,500. On a 1960 basis of 80¢per pound for approximately the same brand of ‘‘metallurgical pound cake,’’ the 4D house, mass-produced and distributed by the automotive industry, would sell for approximately $4,800—installed and ready for occupancy anywhere in the United States.
27 It should be emphasized that this price would be possible only through the use of mass production techniques. However, at present there are more than 100,000 house producers in the United States whose total output averages only 500,000 craft-built houses per year (or five units per builder). The biggest craft builders are turning out 5000 houses a year. Yet in the auto industry even an output of 5000 units by one of the six prime producers is regarded as a small day’s run.
28 Because of its price and the ease with which it could be air-transported and erected, the 4D house, in Fuller’s eye, was a relatively dynamic commodity. Because the houses would be provided as incidental instruments (like telephones) by a service industry, they could be installed anywhere in the world, freeing their users from shackles to any one locality, ‘‘ergo, making possible world citizenry.’’ The houses could not only be installed and removed in minutes, by the service industry, but their progressive obsolescence would be methodically digested by the service companies by progressive substitution of improved types, with every new installation.
29 It was Fuller’s belief that his projected shelter utility companies would necessarily operate with the economic philosophy which has characterized the telephone utility policies, namely, that systematic replacement of obsolete equipment with more effective equipment is a dynamic economy which results in constantly increasing dividends. Thus an industrial complex serving more and more people, in more and more places, with increasing efficiency, performs what is fundamentally a wealth-multiplying operation. The benefits accrue to all, consumers, management, stockholders, suppliers, and subcontractors. And since the benefits keep feeding back into the system, such techno-economic patterns are infinitely regenerative.
30 In keeping with his total-dedication-to-comprehensive-design principles, Fuller, in May, 1928, offered to assign full proprietary rights in the 4D house patents to the American Institute of Architects, whose vice-president, at that time, was Fuller’s father-in-law, James Monroe Hewlett. The offer was not accepted; but at the annual meeting, in which it was taken under consideration, the Institute passed a resolution: ‘‘Be it resolved that the American Institute of Architects establish itself on record as inherently opposed to any peas-in-a-pod-like reproducible designs.’’
31 Four years later, Archibald MacLeish took up the cudgel for Fuller in a Fortune article called ‘‘The Industry Industry Missed.’’ He pointed out that the human problem today is not more house for the money, but more housing for the money. It is not enough to have old houses, at old prices, in new envelopes. The problem is at bottom a problem of fundamental design—and this Fuller alone had faced.
32 ‘‘Mr. Fuller’s design,’’ he wrote, ‘‘has an importance altogether apart from the probability or improbability of its general acceptance. It may well be the prototype of a new domestic architecture. And at the very least it will destroy the great architectural dogma that a house is what our great-grandfathers called a house, and that the architects’ sole opportunity is to modify what already exists.’’
4D BECOMES DYMAXION
33The term Dymaxion, now so decidedly a Fuller trade-mark, was coined in 1929; and, ironically, not by Fuller. The Marshall Field department store, in Chicago, that year had to introduce for sale its first stock of ‘‘modern’’ furniture purchased in Europe after the Paris Exposition of 1926. Casting about for a setting which would dramatize the advance design of the furniture, the Marshall Field promotion experts came across the 4D house, which had been featured in the Chicago Evening Post by C. J. Bulliet, then editor of the art news section. The 4D house existed only as a model; but psychologically astute promoters at Marshall Field reasoned that such a model, prominently displayed, advertised, and lectured about in a hall next to the room with the so-called ‘‘advanced design’’ furniture, would make the ‘‘modern’’ furniture appear conservative—new, but not too new. It has always been a trustworthy sales practice to walk forward backward.
34 The promotional minds of the Marshall Field organization decided that for maximum publicity effectiveness Fuller’s ‘‘house of the future’’ required a name more acceptable than ‘‘4D,’’ which seemed to suggest not so much the ‘‘fourth dimension’’ as a grade in public school or, perhaps, living quarters on the fourth floor of an ordinary apartment house.
35 Waldo Warren, an advertising specialist identified to the organization as a ‘‘wordsmith,’’ was assigned to Fuller for the specific purpose of forging a more seductive name. Warren listened as Fuller outlined the philosophy embodied in this prototype house. He took note of the key sentences and boiled these down to key words. From the significant syllables of these words, he manufactured a series of synthetic words each of four syllables. Each word combined the meanings of a pair of others. Fuller was asked by Warren to eliminate from each pair the word he found most offensive. The surviving combination was ‘‘Dymaxion,’’ a fusion of syllables related directly and indirectly to ‘‘dynamism,’’ ‘‘maximum,’’ and ‘‘ions.’’ Fuller maintains he did not choose this word and that ‘‘it just emerged.’’ Marshall Field copyrighted ‘‘Dymaxion’’ in Fuller’s name.
36 Fuller did not, in 1927, regard the 4D Dymaxion house as a project then ready for industrial production and distribution. The design called for materials of standards higher than those then available: high-strength, heat-treated aluminum alloys; rustless steel cables with a tensile strength in excess of 200,000 pounds to the square inch; structurally stable transparent plastics in large-scale functions; photo-electric eyes; relay-operated door openers. ‘‘I simply stated what had to be done,’’ he claimed, ‘‘and what I knew could be done. And by taking an inventor}’ of my experience, I could predict within good proximity what would be available—and when. I could see that it would be a minimum of 25 years before the gamut of industrial capabilities and evolutionary education of man—as well as political and economic emergency necessities—would permit the emergence of the necessary physical paraphernalia of this comprehensive anticipatory design science undertaking.’’
37 Posing against a vision the existential facts of social change, Fuller delivered a lecture to himself. ‘‘If I were an absolute dictator,’’ he said, ‘‘I might be able to inaugurate the full-scale industrialization tool-up of earth-girdling, air-deliverable dwelling service with the investment of one billion 1928 dollars. However, such a billion-dollar, stitch-in-time investment is utterly unrealizable at this time. In spite of the fact that the goal and path to it are clearly visible, the sad reality is that society’ will probably saddle itself with trillions of dollars of pay-as-you-go, trial-and-error, evolutionary expenditures. If I am not willing to live through a quarter century of tantalizing, frustrating, completely insecure development, I had best drop the whole matter at once—and get myself a good job as a ‘thing’ salesman.’’
38 The developments followed, more or less as Fuller predicted. In 1927, seeking photo-electric cells and relay-actuated devices, he wrote to his brother, Wolcott, an engineer with the General Electric Company, asking for technical cooperation. Wolcott wrote back: ‘‘Bucky, I love you dearly. But can’t you make it easier for your relatives and friends by not including preposterous ideas.’’
39 The following year Fuller received this telegram from Wolcott:
4041YOU CAN OPEN YOUR DOOR BY WAVING YOUR HAND AFTER ALL STOP. WE HAVE DEVELOPED PHOTO-ELECTRIC CELL AND RELAY STOP SEVENTY TWO DOLLARS FOR THE SET.
42 Fuller met the same kind of reaction when, in 1927, he talked with engineers at the Aluminum Corporation of America. He showed them drawings of the proposed 4D structures in which he specified aluminum alloys as yet unrealized, but alloys that it seemed to him reasonable to expect in the quite-near future.
43 One engineer laughed. ‘‘Young man,’’ he said, ‘‘you don’t seem to realize that we don’t use aluminum in buildings. It is used only in percolators, pots, ashtrays, and souvenirs.’’
44 Fuller saw no joke. ‘‘Don’t you have any alloy stocks in your laboratory —alloys that are heat treatable for my experimental purposes?’’
45 ‘‘Look,’’ said the engineer, resentful of Fuller’s persistence. ‘‘We have two kinds of aluminum, soft, and softer. Which do you want?’’
46 Five years later, in 1932, the first heat-treated aluminum alloys became available; and the development marked the realistic beginning of the large-scale airplane industry.
47 Shortly before the opening of the Chicago World’s Fair, young Dawes, the son of Charles Dawes, of Dawes Plan fame, approached Fuller with the suggestion that the Dymaxion house be made a feature of the Chicago World’s Fair; young Dawes was one of the Fair’s promotion executives.
48 ‘‘I would not be willing to display just a mock-up of the house,’’ Fuller said to him. ‘‘But I would be willing to develop a true prototype—one fully engineered and ready to go into production.’’
49 ‘‘How much will it cost?’’ Dawes asked.
50 ‘‘I will have to re-check my figures,’’ Fuller said, ‘‘and let you know.’’
51 The interim five years since his cost estimates of 1927 had seen the realization of many technical developments, including the heat-treated alloys of aluminum whose development he had anticipated, and which arrived industrially on schedule. The implication followed that the research and development yet to be completed could now be covered by a figure considerably less than his original ‘‘stitch-in-time’’ billion dollars. After recalculating his costs, Fuller again met with Dawes. ‘‘The basic cost today,’’ he said, ‘‘is a hundred million dollars.’’
52 Certain that he was dealing with a lunatic, Dawes turned and left the room. He was aggrieved. All he asked for was a house; Fuller offered him an industry.