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Fuller was always concerned with housing. He thought housing industry should be
service-industry
Fuller called construction industry as a crafty and drafty industry and regarded it as an 18th century skill that was still inappropriate
in an industrial society
In the summer of
1940 fuller and his friend were driving through Missouri where Mark Twain lived. Fuller noticed in wheat fields a row of
galvanized steel bins
He was struck by the ease, which these could be turned into fireproof livable huts.
Nobody had thought of them as houses before
Fuller told his friend, this was the most effective engineering unit for a small prefabricated house
That bin would provide enough room to house a small family at a cost of less than dollar per square foot
with fireproof construction and that was 80% below the cost in construction industry
Soon his friend agreed to put money into Fuller's idea
After the World War two they were shortage of housing in US and fuller was one of the people who wanted to solve the problem.
This Dymaxion Deployment unit was successor of dymaxion house.
It was to be produced using factories workers and
technologies that had produced world war II aircraft
Investors gave fuller enough money to build a prototype.
It seemed like he was about to pioneer a whole new industry
People wrote letters to fuller displaying their interest in his newly built design of home
Fuller kept iterating the design and the stockholders
were getting impatient asking him to start producing them.
He had still changes. He wanted to make he had
35,000 people sending in checks demanding the house,
but Fuller's perfectionism did not let him start producing the houses on larger scale
But when he realized that he was not going to get any more financing
unless he surrendered all his control over manufacturing
and design, he pulled the rug under his feet and went home
because he didn't want for the capitalism required with those conditions
It all came to a nasty fight and he stood on his ground firmly
and company went bankrupt
One of very interesting incidents mentionable about Fuller's perfectionism is that Calvin Tomkins
worked on a profile for a New Yorker in 1965.
I worked on a profile for The New Yorker magazine of Bucky in
65
The checking Department got hold of it about three weeks before I was supposed to run and and by that time Bucky was off
I think he was in New Zealand at the time and they reached him by telephone and
Checking department at the new yorker is quite accustomed to spending a long time
checking facts, but in its think this was unprecedented in their experience because
They were on the phone to New Zealand with Bucky for something like 17 hours
Because he wanted to go over every single fact
Only two prototypes of Dymaxion deployment units were ever produced.
As for one and only Wichita house which was a hybridized version of the two prototypes
designs by fuller. One of the investors bought it and re-assembled it across town his family lived there for 20 years
After failure of the Dymaxian deployment the units, Fuller had to reconsider his life
He was struggling, there was no academic institute that would accept him
But in 1948, Black Mountain College was looking for an architect for its summer program
They couldn't find one though so they hired Buckminster Fuller.
The place Fuller was going had no real classes, no curriculum, no real grades nothing but a place where people used to congregate
Fuller came there with his intention of building giant
geodesic domes and soon started his own experimentations with students.
In first attempt the thing immediately
collapsed. Instead of being unhappy
he said he learned from his failure.Like always he was dreaming with ambition
but there was a larger purpose behind the things he was doing, he said in
conversation with a student that it was perfectly conceivable that he would be able to provide housing for
all the people of the world with this basic geodesic dome, which could be restored
stacked and delivered and dropped from air into countries like India and Pakistan.
Following year, Fuller returned to college, the initial geodesic dome model was built and it stayed.
Soon fuller became Johnny Apple of geodesic dome.
Johnny Chapman better known as Johnny Appleseed was an American pioneer
nursing man who introduced apple trees to many states within US.
The dome was such a hit that fuller started his own company
Geodesics, Inc.
His first customers were US Marines.
August 1st, 1953, Fuller finally got his modern igloo flying after all.
Soon his domes spread across the globe and endorsed by people from all walks of life
Today there are about almost 2,000 geodesic domes in 40 countries around the earth.
In 1967, Fuller was selected to build U.S. Pavilion at World's Fair.
In 1968, Fuller was awarded gold medal for architecture for 1968
He didn't particularly pay any interest whether he was an architect or not
his only aim was to use technology to benefit mankind and doing so he made contributions that had artistic as
well as engineering value.
In late 1960s, Fuller proposed a system,
the Dymaxion map or World Game as it was called,
for plotting resources, trends, and scenarios, essential for playing on Spaceship Earth,
so things could be managed in the best possible way.
In Fuller's terms, we are onboard spaceship called Earth and the illogic of
200 plus nations is all trying to steer spaceship in different directions
But the project was never realized on global scale as he envisioned. His dream was so much ahead of his time.
The last phase of Fuller's life mostly consisted of him lecturing around the world.
maybe out of realization that humanity wasn't going to enjoy Earth all-together on equal level
or maybe that his geodesic domes were not going to be mass-produced.
Fuller died on 1st July 1983 11 days before his 88th birthday
During the period leading up to his death, his wife was admitted in Los Angeles hospital dying of cancer
It was while visiting her that he exclaimed at a certain point "She's squeezing my hand".
He then stood up, suffered a heartbreak and died an hour later at age 87.
His wife died 36 hours later.
In his 1970 book, I Seem To Be a Verb, he wrote quote
I live on earth at present and I don't know what I am.
I know that I am NOT a category.
I'm not a thing- a noun. I seem to be a verb, an
an evolutionary process—an integral function of the universe."