BECOM NG

LORET TA LORANCE

BUCKY FULLER
© 2009 Massachusetts Institute of Technology

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Lorance, Loretta.
Becoming Bucky Fuller / Loretta Lorance.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-262-12302-0 (hardcover : alk. paper) 1. Fuller, R. Buckminster (Richard
Buckminster), 1895–1983—Psychology. 2. Fuller, R. Buckminster (Richard Buckminster),
1895–1983—Criticism and interpretation. I. Fuller, R. Buckminster (Richard Buckminster),
1895–1983. II. Title.
TA140.F9L67 2009
620.0092—dc22
2008029418

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
 PREFACE IX

PREFACE

In the 1960s and 1970s, Buckminster Fuller (1895–1983) was a popular speaker
on the international lecture circuit. His untraditional way of thinking about the
world and how it works was embraced by many, especially those in the counter-
culture movement. They would sit through lengthy lectures of four or five or
more hours to absorb Fuller’s lessons on how to make the world a better place.
One reason the self-styled anticipatory comprehensive designer1 was popular
was he practiced what he preached.
Fuller pursued his goal along many paths. He designed houses for industrial
production to reduce the use of materials, labor, and costs. A major achievement
was the development of the geodesic dome, a hemispherical self-supporting
structure built of interlocking tetrahedra made from mass-produced parts. Fuller
saw the tetrahedron, a pyramidal form, as the basic shape of the universe. This
led him to devise a new type of geometry, synergetics, based on the 60-degree
angle, or two-dimensional triangle and three-dimensional tetrahedron, instead
of the 90- degree angle, or two-dimensional square and three-dimensional cube.
Fuller believed synergetics described the coordinates of the Earth, an unproven
hypothesis.2 His interest in the Earth went beyond defining its geometric order
to organizing a system for tracking its resources. He began tracking the planet’s
resources in the 1960s, which he named the World Design Science Decade. The
inventory of the Earth’s resources evolved into the ongoing World Game. The
purpose of the World Game is to show that the “world [can] work for everyone”;
it is also “an antidote to war games.”3 While these diverse accomplishments may
seem unrelated, they are all components of Fuller’s mission to teach people to
X PREFACE

use technology for positive purposes, not negative ones, and to treat the closed
ecological system of the Earth with respectful caution.
This philosophy was well developed by the 1960s, but Fuller did not begin
his career with such lofty goals. His first independent project was an attempt to
found a company, 4D Corporation, to manufacture a house of his design, Dy-
maxion House, in the late 1920s. Although this project was never realized, it
did help establish Fuller as someone who was willing to go against conventional
ideas and it did propel him into the public arena. His popularity was at its height
in the 1960s and 1970s when his ideas and work were seen as welcome alter-
natives to established social mores and conventions. Some people interpreted
these as rationale to withdraw from society, to drop out. This was not Fuller’s
intention. He believed it was important to work to effect change from an in-
formed position within society, not by turning one’s back on it. Therefore, it
is not surprising that his first independent project, the Dymaxion House, rep-
resented more than just a new design for an industrially reproduced house; it
was intended to make life better for its inhabitants who would in turn be able to
improve society.
The Dymaxion House was a radical departure from the traditional house
design, but it was not the first design for an industrially reproduced house. In
the nineteenth century, prefabricated houses were manufactured in the Brit-
ish Isles and the United States. A number of companies, such as Sears Roebuck
& Company, E. F. Hodgson & Co., and Gordon-Van Tine, had long histories of
manufacturing and marketing houses by the 1920s. Fuller’s idea of the industri-
ally reproduced house was much different from the models offered by his pre-
decessors. He did not want to produce the structural frame, interior partitions,
floors, ceilings, and exterior cladding as these companies did. He wanted to
manufacture the house and sell it as a complete unit with wiring, plumbing, en-
vironmental controls, and appliances. Fuller also rejected the reliance on stylis-
tic criteria, especially historic styles, unlike established manufacturers.
 PREFACE XI

Like Fuller, Howard Fisher was also interested in manufacturing houses in

a manner similar to automobile production. Unlike Fuller, Fisher successfully
founded such a company, General Houses, Inc., in 1932. European modern-
ists—especially Mies van der Rohe, Walter Gropius, and Le Corbusier—advo-
cated using standardization and prefabrication in houses. Yet Fuller was critical
of these architects because he believed they simply wanted to use technology to
package the traditional house in a stylish envelope.
With the design of the Dymaxion House he reconfigured the traditional
right-angled house into a radial plan with a metal and plastic exterior. The lack
of ornament, crisp lines, and use of planar surfaces reflect his understanding of
both International Style design criteria and methods of industrial production.
Fuller’s attitude toward mass production and prefabrication may have paral-
leled the interests of his contemporaries, but his unusual design concepts meant
the Dymaxion House was relegated to the realm of fantasy or futuristic archi-
tecture instead of being understood as a viable alternative to existing types of
contemporary houses.4
Fuller’s approach to design, allowing machine processes rather than aesthet-
ics to control his strategy, places him in an unusual position within twentieth-
century architecture. Although not a trained architect—in fact, he was not fully
trained in any field—Fuller regarded the Dymaxion House as a practical and
marketable solution to the need for shelter. He was disdainful of most architects
because he felt their designs were inhibited by their fidelity to the demands of
style or tradition. In terms of the house, the only traditions to which Fuller con-
formed were those of providing shelter and comfort. He believed houses should
enrich the physical and intellectual lives of their inhabitants. These guidelines
led him to reconceptualize the house as a radial container filled with labor-
saving devices capable of facilitating and easing everyday life. Fuller did not feel
bound by the stylistic conventions of architecture or its history as he sought to
apply the principles of industrial production to houses.
XII PREFACE

Becoming Bucky Fuller is the first in-depth study of the beginnings of Ful-
ler’s interest in industrial processes, the home-building field, and architectural
theory and design in the 1920s. It is a revisionist study of the development of
Fuller and the Dymaxion House. Much of the material under discussion will be
known to those familiar with Fuller’s activities in the 1920s and early 1930s. Of
course, one must revisit familiar material in order to treat it anew, which this
text most certainly does. Fuller always acknowledged that his work on the Dy-
maxion House initiated his lifelong mission to manufacture houses. He was not,
however, completely honest about the events leading up to the beginning of the
project, or about his own activities during this period, or about what he was
originally trying to accomplish. This is not to intimate that Fuller fabricated
the events of this time. It is, rather, to disclose that he took artistic license with
some of the facts of his life and work during the period under discussion to pre-
sent himself in the best possible light.
My argument in Becoming Bucky Fuller is based primarily upon a close reading
of papers in Fuller’s archives, especially the multivolume scrapbook he began
in 1907, the Chronofile. There is very little use of secondary sources in this text,
including the semi-autobiographical books and biographies on which Fuller
collaborated. With few changes and additions, the story of Fuller’s activities in
the 1920s and early 1930s is consistent whether it was written in 1951 (Richard
Hamilton’s unpublished biography, “Work of R. B. Fuller: Design Initiatives
and Prototype Engineering”5 ) or 1999 (Y. C. Wong’s dissertation, “The Geo-
desic Works of Richard Buckminster Fuller, 1948–68 [The Universe as a Home
of Man]”6). Even researchers who are critical of Fuller basically repeat the same
information (Karl Conrad’s dissertation, “Buckminster Fuller and the Techno-
cratic Persuasion”7 ). The reason for the consistency is simple: by 1939 Fuller had
decided how his development and activities during this period would be por-
trayed, and his version became the template from which later accounts were de-
rived.8 During his life Fuller granted very few people permission to consult his
private papers. Yet he did not destroy the documents contradicting his carefully
 PREFACE XIII

constructed story. A few Fuller scholars have consulted these papers, but they
elected to fit the information the papers contain into the accepted narrative
with few modifications. For me, these documents served as maps I followed as
I wended my way through the truth and fiction of Fuller’s biography and work.
Instead of trying to fit the information I discovered in Fuller’s papers into the
established sequence of events, I used it to write a parallel history, connected to
the original at major points.
In writing this parallel history, I use as much text from the original docu-
ments as possible. These texts are allowed to “speak” for themselves. In addi-
tion, there is no backward extrapolation from later materials. In other words, I
do not use information from Fuller’s later writings to explain what he was doing
in the 1920s. As he continued to work on his concept for the industrially repro-
duced house, Fuller expanded and refined his ideas. The later materials show
how the project progressed, not how it began. Although not all the first steps
are known, Fuller’s archives reveal a carefully planned, extensively analyzed, al-
beit unsuccessful, strategy to organize a corporation to manufacture and market
an industrially reproduced house with a full array of mechanical accessories, the
Dymaxion House.
Becoming Bucky Fuller is concerned with both the origins and development
of the Dymaxion House project and Fuller’s public persona. The years between
1922 and 1933 saw not only the development of Fuller’s first project for an in-
dustrially reproduced house but also the development of Buckminster Fuller,
the man with the vision and determination to follow the project through to
completion. This is not to privilege the early work over the later work, but to
thoroughly analyze for the first time Fuller’s activities during this period with-
out looking through the veil he placed over them. I have formulated my answer
to why Fuller cast the events of the 1920s into a seductive narrative instead of a
mundane reiteration of just the facts. “Just the facts” presents the life of an ordi-
nary person, and Buckminster Fuller was no ordinary person.