Het Huis Stoclet in Brussel - Academie voor Beeldende Kunsten Aalst

esult of the experience of sea travel and the desire to reach new shores. The seafarer
had to develop solutions to a different set of challenges than the stay-at-home
“landlubber”: the ability to harness the wind, to navigate by the stars and continuously to
improve the ability of ships and their navigational instruments to cope with what Fuller
described as the “Fluid Geography” of the oceans.
After leaving the navy in 1922, Fuller co-founded the Stockade Building Company to
produce lightweight building materials. The knowledge he acquired there was to prove
invaluable to his later experiments with design and architecture. Disaster struck in 1927
when Fuller lost his job at Stockade. At the age of 32 he found himself on the shore of
Lake Michigan wondering whether to end his life there. Fuller took a decision to devote his
life to others by embarking on “an experiment to discover what the little, penniless,
unknown individual might be able to do effectively on behalf of all humanity”.
Fuller decided to concentrate on the field he knew best, construction. The following
year he made his first patent application for the 4D tower, a lightweight, prefabricated,
multi-storey apartment tower to be delivered anywhere in the world by airship. Once
delivered the towers would generate their own light and heat with an independent sewage
disposal system.
From then on, ideas and inventions seemed to flow from him in a continuous
stream. Driven by his philosophy of “more for less”, Fuller threw himself wholeheartedly
into a quest for a new way of housing mankind, in “Lightful Houses” so-called because
they were full of light, lightweight, delightful and so forth. This programme and his
accompanying vision of a world united by the most modern means of transport and
telecommunication evolved into Fuller’s philosophy of four-dimensional, or 4D design. He
defined this as thinking in time instead of only the three dimensions of space: thinking of
consequences for humanity instead of only immediate personal gain.
The project that made Fuller’s name was the 1929 Dymaxion House, which he
unveiled in the interior decorating department of the Chicago department store, Marshall-
Field. The name Dymaxion – Dy(namic)max(imum)ion – was coined by the marketer
Waldo Warren who, after listening to Fuller talk for two days, devised endless
combinations of syllables taken from his highly idiosyncratic vocabulary. Finally he found
the word which seemed to him best to dramatise Fuller’s personality. Made from
lightweight steel, duraluminium and plastic and suspended from a central mast from which
the rooms radiated in a hexagonal plan, the Dymaxion House was conceived not as private
property, but rather as temporary, transportable space that could be rented – rather like a
telephone issued by a telephone company.
As well as housing, Fuller was determined to design a revolutionary new car. In
1928 he had conceived a flying car with inflatable wings which was modified in
subsequent drawings into a streamlined road vehicle the rear of which would rise in an
aerodynamic lift to ‘fly’ steered by a rudder as the front rolled. In 1933 he presented his
plans for the three-wheeled Dymaxion Car with rear steering and front-wheel drive
powered by a Ford engine. The aerodynamic shape, most closely related to high
performance yachts, came partly from Fuller’s co-designer, the shipbuilder Starling
Burgess. The rave reviews of the car’s styling, speed and manoeuvrability were tragically
undermined when the first of three prototypes was rammed and overturned, killing the
driver, outside the entrance to the 1933 Chicago World’s Fair.
Undeterred, Fuller continued his experiments and gained an international reputation
for his work in lightweight, inexpensively and speedily constructed housing. In 1940, in
anticipation of the bombing of British cities, he was asked by the British War Relief
Organization to design an emergency shelter. Fuller worked with the Butler Company of
Kansas City, which manufactured grain silos of curved galvanised steel, to develop a self-