Architecture
Bucluninster Fuller (Design Museum, till 15 October)
The American dream writ large
Alan Powers
If one American characteristic is excess, then Richard Bucicminster Fuller (1895-1983) was a typical case. He gave lectures that lasted for hours. He would not use a simple word if he could create a poly- syllabic neologism in its place. He worked in so many fields of design and invention that it becomes wearisome to enumerate them. He never stopped all his life.
Fuller had some important things to say. Even so, he looks at first sight like a Boys' Own Paper mad inventor-scientist, with his three-wheeled `Dymaxion' car, lightweight houses delivered by airship (neither of them taken up for development) and, what was his most widely adopted invention, the Geodesic Dome, of which 200,000 are now believed to exist all over the world, assem- bled with frames made from straight, lightweight components. Fuller was an important inspiration to the English high- tech school of architects in the 1960s — Norman Foster and Nicholas Grimshaw sat at his feet. Perhaps it is no surprise that we have a dome at Greenwich, although not a geodesic one.
His vastness needs digesting and editing, and the exhibition Your Private Sky at the Design Museum, originating from the Museum far Gestaltung at Zurich, does the job very well. The accompanying book of the same title (£28) is even better, and may well reinvent Fuller for our time after a period of neglect. Much of what he was thinking required our current miniature and lightweight technologies and our com- puters to make it possible, while his prophecy that improved global communica- tion would transfer the world's resources from armaments ('lcillingry') into the means of pleasure ('livingry) can be glimpsed through the clouds. Even the 'World Game' which he proposed for the US Pavilion at Expo '67 (in one of his domes which still stands in Montreal) has finally been universalised through comput- ers games like Civilisation and SimCity. And, as we all know, the 1997 Nobel Prize for Science was won by scientists who iden- tified a molecular form which they called the Buckminsterfullerene in his honour.
Linking all Fuller's enterprises was a typ- ically New England philosophical back- ground. Fuller was excited to discover that his great-aunt, Margaret Fuller, had been a thinker revered by Ralph Waldo Emerson and the early 19th-century Transcendental- ists. To some extent, Bucky merely translat- ed their idealism through the medium of technology. His concept of '4D' denoted the continuous change and movement which Emerson identified in nature. Hous- es were unnecessarily solid and static, even cars were cumbersome and heavy. One of the most touching objects in the exhibition is the 'Rowing Needle' of 1947, a catama- ran rowing skiff which he made for use at Bear Island, a family property in Maine where, amidst wind and water, much of Fuller's growing up took place. As a US Navy sailor in the first world war, he devel- oped special admiration for naval know- how.
Houses occupied much of his attention, and he developed successive models for cir- cular dwellings using car and aircraft tech- nology. These are well presented with models, and accompanied by a full-size ver- sion of his Dymaxion bathroom, a pressed- metal all-in-one job. Fuller was involved in what the book calls the 'magic summer' of 1948 when 'the core of a genuinely Ameri- can form of art' developed around him at Black Mountain College. His geodesic domes, developed in 1950, were widely adopted by the hippy movement for practi- cal and symbolic reasons, and made out of recycled car panels at 'Drop City', Col- orado, as well as representing the US gov- ernment in Montreal and Moscow.
Fuelled by an unearthly self-confidence, living on coffee and doughnuts in Green- wich Village in the 1930s while staying awake for days and nights on end, there was something inhuman about Fuller for which his transparently good intentions cannot entirely compensate. Whatever it was deserves to be taken seriously, for it was the American dream writ large, rather like spending all one's time under a bright light. Architects are always prone to enthu- siasm for Fuller's way of viewing the world, even though he believed that they would be replaced by industrial designers. High-tech architecture has so far given us only the illusion of Fuller's world of cheap, efficient and disposable buildings, for in reality they are the opposite of these qualities. Like Fuller himself, architects often have diffi- culty coming down from the sky and con- necting with the earth, an element apparently lacking from his psyche. There is nothing sensual or tactile in his work at all.
Fuller's manifold activities may indeed reflect the dynamic processes of nature, but we have also learnt that sustainability is usually better achieved by slowing things down rather than speeding them up. In lan- guage terms, a neologism is no substitute for a metaphor which makes the world a richer and more complex place. For the second time this year, the Design Museum is the receiving house for an important travelling exhibition, and is acting as a valu- able link between Britain and the outside world.
Previous page
