IKEA IS THE world’s third-largest consumer of wood. Producing nearly ten thousand different goods, the company furnishes more than 80 million households through stores in twenty-six countries and catalogues in twenty-nine languages. Half the new kitchens in Norway are made by Ikea. An estimated one in ten Europeans were conceived in an Ikea bed.
Ikea has achieved this ubiquity by meeting common domestic needs with standardized products that most families can afford, and the $50 billion company counts financial success as a sign of public service. The corporate vision of “creating a better everyday life for the many people”—which surely reads better in Swedish—is approached with messianic conviction. “It is our duty to expand,” proclaims the Ikea employee-manual-cum-manifesto, quoting company founder Ingvar Kamprad. “The objective must be to encompass the total home environment.”
From flat-packed coffee tables to prefabricated houses, Ikea’s total home environment is designed scientifically through a combination of economics and anthropology. Price is the starting point for a product subsequently refined through consultation with consumer focus groups. It’s a powerful feedback loop, since popularity equates to economy of scale, making products more affordable, and greater affordability makes them more popular still. In a 2013 Wall Street Journal article, Ikea CEO Peter Agnefjäll characterized the process of designing a new kitchen as “finding ways to engineer cost out of the system,” and the effectiveness of the process is proven by the results: Ikea sells a million kitchens per year for as little as $3,000 apiece. “We have such a big influence,” Ikea research manager Mikael Ydholm boasted in the same Journal article. “We can actually, to some extent, decide what the future will be like.”
To what extent? The sheer size of Ikea gives it enormous influence, yet that power comes from pandering to popular whim. Ikea design is reflexive. The company can only really decide that the future will be cheaper, and, for a company bent on expansion, that’s less a decision than a foregone conclusion.
Creating a better everyday life for the many by engineering cost out of the system, Ikea is a logical endpoint of Modernist idealism: When Le Corbusier called on industry to “occupy itself with building and establish the elements of the house on a mass-production basis”—as he wrote in his 1923 treatise Toward an Architecture—he could have been ordering a factory-made Ikea BoKlok house outfitted with mass-produced Ikea furnishings. However, neither BoKlok nor Ikea are inevitable outcomes of Modernism. The urge to industrially improve domestic life for the multitudes—to realize Le Corbusier’s fabled machine for living—might have taken a different path, one that dead-ended in 1948 on a 640-acre farm in Kansas.
That’s where the only complete prototype of Buckminster Fuller’s Dymaxion Dwelling Machine was installed by an entrepreneur named William Graham to house his wife and six children. Just two years earlier, the round aluminum home, built in a Wichita plane factory provided to Fuller by Beech Aircraft, appeared on the cover of Fortune magazine. Giving it a “better than even chance of upsetting the building industry,” Fortune predicted that it was “likely to produce greater social consequences than the introduction of the automobile.”1 As Fuller’s venture collapsed, and Graham picked up the pieces in a liquidation sale, Fortune eulogized that “what happened to Dymaxion demonstrates the unbridgeable gap that sometimes exists between an idea and its fulfillment.”
Characteristically for a business magazine, Fortune attributed the gap to finances and management, and scholars have since shown how Fuller’s obsessiveness smothered Fuller Houses, Inc.2 But problems of personality and money were relatively trivial. The greater issue was described by the industrial designer George Nelson at a 1948 Museum of Modern Art architectural symposium. Nelson argued that the Modernist architecture of Le Corbusier and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe had far more in common with traditionalist housing than either had with Fuller’s fully industrial dwellings. The gap was unbridgeable because it had to be leaped without looking back. Nelson forecast that “the effect on ‘modern architecture’ of structures now possible will be as catastrophic as the effect of the pioneering work of the early 1900s on the production of the academies.”
Of course that isn’t what happened. Instead the academies defensively embraced “modern architecture” and engrained it in the next generation of architects.3 And as architecture schools and their alumni have increasingly focused on Modernist stylistics—or the Postmodernist game of stylistic hide-and-seek—Ikea’s cost engineering has become Modernism’s most profound innovation, while the Wichita House has been installed as an exhibit at the Henry Ford Museum, tended by docents posing as 1940s real estate agents.
Fuller’s prototype is unlike most objects at the Henry Ford, the steam engines and passenger jets parked on the timeline of human progress. Beneath the Wichita’s shell of midcentury nostalgia is a provocation to vindicate George Nelson: to build the dwelling machine that twentieth-century Modernism indefatigably promised but could never quite deliver.
THE MODERNIST PURSUIT of the ideal home began in 1910, when twenty-seven-year-old Walter Gropius, working as an assistant in the architecture office of Peter Behrens, drafted a memorandum enumerating the basic criteria for industrialized housing. His “Programme for the Establishment of a Company for the Provision of Housing on Aesthetically Consistent Principles” was boldly addressed to the president of AEG, the German manufacturer that had engaged Behrens to design a turbine factory the previous year and had retained the eminent Berlin architect as an “artistic consultant”—an industrial designer avant la lettre. “The idea of industrialization in housing can be translated into reality by repeating individual parts in all the designs promoted by the company,” Gropius wrote. “For all essential parts the best dimensions have to be decided first of all. These standard dimensions form the basis for the designs and are to be kept in future designs. Only by these means can mass sales be guaranteed.” Though he didn’t make the analogy, Gropius was proposing to approach housing in the way that Henry Ford had just begun to streamline automobile manufacturing. Had AEG heeded his advice, they could have made houses on an assembly line, like the cheap new Model T.
Four years later, Le Corbusier (another former Behrens employee) sketched his first plans for Maison Dom-ino, a sort of universal support for housing roughly comparable to a car chassis. Comprising horizontal slabs separated by pillars and connected by staircases, the reinforced concrete structure was completely open and perfectly modular. Walls could be suspended anywhere, and Dom-ino units could be combined to make a house of any configuration and scale. Since this self-contained support structure could be industrially fabricated, the architect could concern himself with optimizing life inside, and optimal solutions could easily be replicated ad infinitim. Anticipating mass-production, Le Corbusier applied for a patent, and proposed that Dom-ino could solve the housing shortage in Flanders following the catastrophic Battle of Ypres. Instead it served as a conceptual platform for a few unique homes such as the Maison Citrohan—slyly named after the Citroën automobile—his prototype machines for living.
Those machines were, according to Le Corbusier, the first rational domestic architecture, anticipating the course all modern architects must eventually take. “I look at things from the point of view of architecture, in the state of mind of the inventor of airplanes,” he wrote in Toward an Architecture. “The lesson of the airplane is not so much in the forms created, and one must first of all learn not to see in an airplane a bird or a dragonfly, but a machine for flying; the lesson of the airplane is in the logic that governed the statement of the problem and that led to the success of its realization. When a problem is posed to our era, it inevitably finds a solution. The problem of the house has not been posed.” The purpose of Toward an Architecture was to pose the problem, and to provide the inevitable solution: “A house is a machine for living in. Baths, sun, hot water, cold water, controlled temperature, food conservation, hygiene, beauty through proportion.” For inspiration, Le Corbusier illustrated his treatise with photos of automobiles and airplanes, such as the Delage and the Caproni, exemplifying the results of problems “well-posed.” All an architect need do was to follow their example. How hard could it be?
Seemingly impossible. Just as Le Corbusier couldn’t translate Maison Dom-ino drawings into physical dwellings—retreating from Ypres to make French luxury homes in the rectangular Dom-ino style—he came far short of a Gianni Caproni or Louis Delage in evaluating the housing problem, and he certainly didn’t engineer a solution analogous to the machine precision of a car racing down a track or a biplane looping the loop. A machine for living, in Le Corbusier’s most exacting analysis, should provide “shelter against the heat, cold, rain, thieves, the inquisitive,” and should be divided into “a certain number of compartments … for moving about freely.” How many? “One for cooking and one for eating. One for working, one for washing oneself, and one for sleeping. Such are the standards for the dwelling.”4
Certainly this was a sensible alternative to bourgeois extravagance, but it hardly required the state of mind of the inventor of airplanes. Moreover, because Le Corbusier’s analysis of the problem was nebulous, elaboration on the solution only convoluted it. In less than a decade, the architect veered from the lean Maison Citrohan to Charles de Beistegui’s extravagant apartment and roof garden. (Featuring electrically operated windows, mobile movie screens, and shrubs that could be raised and lowered on automated platforms, the bon vivant’s Paris bachelor pad was quite possibly the ultimate machine for partying.) Adieu, bourgeoisie. Bonjour, aristocratie! Rigging a dwelling with modern gadgetry doesn’t make the house itself a modern technology any more than cockpit seating turns a horse-drawn carriage into an airplane.
Other Modernists, including Walter Gropius, also struggled to realize Le Corbusier’s machines. Collaborating with Adolf Meyer—yet another former Behrens assistant—at the Bauhaus Weimar in 1923, Gropius revisited his abandoned AEG concept with a set of “building blocks out of which, depending on the number of inhabitants and their needs, different types of machines for living can be assembled.” Compact and modular, the Baukasten im Großen were to be manufactured in assorted modern materials, including concrete, glass, and steel, all standardized to permit any structural arrangement. With their engineered interchangeability, they had the quality of appliances that could be configured to process the lives of inhabitants.
The Baukasten modules were even more mechanistic than Maison Dom-ino’s chassis-and-coachwork building model, but, as with Dom-ino, the machine metaphor proved too good to be true: Though Baukasten served as formal inspiration for the Bauhaus masters’ Weimar residences, they never became feasible at a deeper functional level.
These early failures to make a machine for living did not dampen Modernist zeal for mechanistic housing. If anything, the industrial paradigm only became more deeply enshrined. However, without a clear idea of what function the machine must serve—without a well-posed problem—the ideal became increasingly muddled. At the Bauhaus and after, Gropius increasingly focused on the process of industrialization: how housing could be made by machine. He built blocks of identical boxes for his Dessau-Törten housing development of 1927, designed copper-clad prefabs in the 1930s, and co-developed a rapid-assembly “packaged house system” in the 1940s. His Bauhaus successor, Hannes Meyer, was dedicated to machine-like functionalism, determining the layout of housing and even their color schemes based on psychological data enlisted to make workers more productive: the house as machine for manufacturing robots. The final Bauhaus director, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe (yet another former Peter Behrens assistant), appreciated machine-age materials for their aesthetic qualities, and the formal freedom they afforded. From the Tugendhat House of 1928–1930 to the Farnsworth House of 1951, his minimalist compositions in glass and steel set the standard for elegance, forging a sort of industrial sublime: the International Style.
All of these possibilities—structural, functional, and aesthetic—are consistent with Toward an Architecture. The abyss between Le Corbusier’s insistence on “controlled temperature” and “beauty through proportion” is so wide that architects as diverse as Gropius, Meyer, and Mies all fall in between, whether or not they were working under Le Corbusier’s influence. Furthermore, mobile homes in rural trailer parks could legitimately be called machines for living, as could the little boxes of suburban Levittown.5
The sheer diversity of these dwellings paradoxically reveals their similarity. And if all of these are machines for living, is it really justifiable to exclude the old Southwestern adobe, the traditional Japanese kominka, the ancient Roman villa? Each was temperature controlled, and all achieved beauty through proportion.
Compare Corb’s mythic machine for living to the machine for flying: Before the Wright Brothers took off over Kitty Hawk, there simply were no airplanes.6 Then, in 1946, something happened. The media started calling Wichita the Kitty Hawk of housing.
BUCKMINSTER FULLER FIRST read Toward an Architecture on January 30, 1928, just months after the book was published in English. Noting in his diary that he studied it “until very late at night,” and that he read it again in February, he identified deeply with Le Corbusier’s ideas, so much so that he recommended the book to his sister with the uneasy note that he was “nearly stunned … by the almost identical phraseology of [Le Corbusier’s] telegraphic style of notation with notations of my own set down completely from my own intuitive searching and reasoning and unaware even of the existence of such a man as Corbusier.”
Fuller’s intuitive searching and reasoning had begun several months earlier, when he was ousted from the construction company founded with his father-in-law in 1923.7 Stockade Building Systems produced lightweight wood-fiber blocks used to build walls. That was Fuller’s only real exposure to architecture, and it was a world apart from European Modernism: His father-in-law was an architectural traditionalist, and Fuller’s own unique contribution to Stockade—beyond sales and marketing—was to develop a brick-molding system.8 Fuller appreciated that industry might transform housing when he encountered Le Corbusier’s treatise, as his letter to his sister suggests, but it was Le Corbusier’s exhortation to “close our eyes to what exists”—and to reconceive housing as a machine—that set Fuller into action.
Almost immediately he started drawing plans overflowing with architectural ambition. Some he predated to 1927, ever anxious to establish his originality.9 All are alive with the urgency of a man determined to pose the problem of housing with engineering precision—and to solve it by inventing a literal machine for living.
By Fuller’s reckoning, the underlying problem of the house was mobility. Like an automobile, he believed, the ideal machine for living should be mass-produced in the controlled conditions of a factory.10 Unlike cars, he realized, there was no way to move finished houses off the factory floor. As a result, mass-production was limited to parts, the approach favored by the Bauhaus.11 However, if houses were designed to be airlifted by Zeppelin, then they could be delivered absolutely anywhere in their entirety: They could be as self-contained and quality-controlled as the new Ford Model A. In order to be airlifted, houses would have to be light, constructed with as little material as possible. The strongest materials by weight were metals, and metals were strongest in tension. (By Fuller’s calculations, the tensile strength of steel was twelve times the strength under compression.) So the optimal factory-built house wouldn’t rest on the ground. It would be suspended from a mast.12
Sketches from early 1928 show Zeppelins dropping bombs and lowering fully furnished ten-story buildings into the craters they made. (A handwritten annotation helpfully explains that cables would stabilize the towers while the craters were filled with concrete “like setting [a] big gun in war time.”) Drawn in a naive style befitting their architectural oddity, the skewered cylindrical high-rises are shown in locations ranging from the North Pole to the Sahara.
A more grounded version of Fuller’s idea was professionally drafted for the patent he filed in the spring of the same year. The patent application shows a conventional rectangular house pierced by a “utility chassis” that holds the house aloft and provides all the plumbing. By the time the paperwork was done, Fuller had reconceived his home as a hexagon, which permitted much simpler suspension, and he’d started thinking more comprehensively about what a dwelling machine could accomplish. The patent application was abandoned, and Fuller went public with his invention at the May 1928 meeting of the American Institute of Architects.
They essentially ignored him. (It didn’t help that the annual convention opened with a statement against “peas-of-a-pod” prefabrication.)13 So he expanded his campaign. He sent mimeographed copies of his industrial housing manifesto, 4D Time Lock, to everyone from his mother to Albert Einstein. He also started lecturing and showing models of his house—rechristened the Dymaxion—everywhere from Marshall Field’s department store to Romany Marie’s Tavern.14
Bearing this mechanistic new name, Fuller’s conception of the dwelling machine soon surpassed anything Le Corbusier or Gropius would recognize as architecture. His vision was truly all-encompassing. Corb had written about “a machine for living in.” Fuller effectively dropped the final preposition, making the machine for living as integral to the inhabitant as a cytoskeleton is for an amoeba.
Fuller’s most fully documented presentation of the Dymaxion House was at the New York Architectural League on July 9, 1929, where a stenographer transcribed his entire lecture. “Trying to find out what was wrong with the world and what I individually could do about it,” he told the gathered architects, “I have come upon the thought that housing was responsible for practically all of our ills—this preconceived idea of doing things on a vanity basis rather than having things done on the basis of the clearest, most intelligent research test of science.” In his judgment, solving the problem of the house amounted to scientifically re-engineering society.
The suspension system was no longer just a means of decreasing material usage and making cheap mass-produced shelter available to everyone everywhere. According to Fuller, the structure would allow inhabitants to “overcome all the elements.” The height of the house would prevent flooding, the triangulation of suspension cables would protect against earthquakes, and the octagonal symmetry would streamline the casein plastic shell so that it could withstand a tornado. Streamlining would also optimize the internal climate. Floor and roof vents would eliminate drafts caused by air turbulence, facilitating efficient heating in winter, providing natural air conditioning in summer, and vacuuming away dust throughout the year.15 Temperate and clean, the Dymaxion would bolster physical health, while mental health would be ensured by “drudge-proofing” the home with automated appliances to replace manual labor—including an instantaneous dishwasher—freeing people to improve themselves by reading under artificial daylight or watching broadcast lectures on television.16 And the energy bill to keep all this technology running? No problem. Fuel would be derived from human excrement via a waste packaging toilet. In fact, the house would be entirely self-sufficient, without any need to connect to municipal sewage and plumbing. Showers would be taken with a pint of water sprayed through a “fog gun.” With air delivery and an omnitransport vehicle in the driveway, people could live anywhere, and move their whole household at will. Not only would this be the end of inner-city slums’ disease and crime, it would also make real estate as meaningless as the ownership of the seas beneath a ship. Here Fuller revealed his world-changing radicalism, his conception of civil engineering as a mandate to re-engineer civilization. In fact, the goal was nothing less than “to lick materialism as the basis of progress in the universe,” Fuller informed the New York Architectural League. Or, as he explained it to Time Magazine in 1932, a house “is not a property to be owned, but a mechanical arrangement to be used.”
According to Time, bankers were enthusiastic about his machine but not the economic function that Fuller considered integral to its performance. Nor did he help his cause when, asked to build a prototype for the 1933 World’s Fair, he requested $100 million in funding, pointing out that Henry Ford had spent $43 million to make his Model A.17 With perfectly solid logic, Fuller maintained that a fairground one-off was no prototype because a prototype had to model the infrastructure that would manufacture and distribute it; the housing industry was also part of Fuller’s machinery.
Assembly-line logic was only part of the explanation for Fuller’s untenable funding request. Fuller also had to contend with the reality that most of the necessary technologies didn’t yet exist: not only televisions to edify the masses and bioreactors to convert their waste into energy, but also basic materials like durable lightweight plastics for walls and high-tension alloys to hold the houses aloft. Through lectures and articles, the machine could continue to evolve as new technologies suggested engineering solutions—and those solutions suggested additional physical and sociopolitical problems to be solved by a more advanced Dymaxion.18
World War II brought an end to Fuller’s fantasies, and the peace that followed afforded him an irresistible opportunity. The sturdy Dymaxion Deployment Units he designed for the military—made by modifying cylindrical corrugated-steel grain bins—suggested that his dwelling machines could likewise be fabricated from contoured sheet metal. The facilities to do so became available with the armistice, as weapons factories lost their main line of business and homecoming soldiers sought their share of the American dream. Facing a housing shortage and an idling factory workforce, most everyone agreed for the first time that traditional stick-built homes were history. Appointed by President Harry S. Truman, housing expediter Wilson Wyatt called for “widespread use of mass-production methods.” And Fortune magazine argued that “the only way to make housing in an industrial society is to make them the way everything else is made—in factories.”
That was the premise of Fortune’s April 1946 article featuring Fuller, illustrated with pictures of him standing on the factory floor of Beech Aircraft in Wichita.19 Beech provided facilities and labor in exchange for an interest in his new company. It all made sense. His Wichita House channeled the logic of his prewar Dymaxion through the real-world experience of making Air Force shelters, situating his utopian vision in the context of an aircraft plant organized to produce large numbers of complex flying machines in high-strength aluminum alloys.20 Designed to be shipped in a tube and erected in a day, the mast-hung thirty-six-foot circular aluminum dwelling was remarkably practical, while retaining remarkably many of the qualities that made Fuller housing so radical.
In terms of aerodynamics, it was more advanced than anything Fuller had previously conceived. The curvature was refined in a wind tunnel, as was the shape of the eighteen-foot ventilator capping the domed structure. This rotating flue aligned with the breeze. In tandem with internal convection currents, it facilitated climate control and dust removal through filters embedded in a suspended trampoline floor.
The suspension was also superior to his prewar system, balancing the house’s weight with steel struts triangulated to provide structural rigidity. Walls were mere membrane, which meant they could be thin and light, and sliced through the middle with a 360-degree panoramic window. In total, the weight of the house was three tons, less than a thirtieth the weight of a conventional one-family home, and the expected price was $6,500, the cost of a Cadillac (though fifty cents cheaper per pound).
Of course much was still missing: automated housekeeping, autonomous power, television. However, the fusion of external protection and internal efficiency in an affordable, portable factory-built system put the Wichita House at approximately the same technological level as contemporaneous cars and aircraft—somewhere between a biplane and an F-14—and also plotted a direction of progress in terms of engineering. This is what separates it from the mechanistic formulae of European Modernism. Cars and airplanes are more than the sum of their prefabricated parts, and certainly more than their external appearance. The real innovation is in the integration of technologies from multiple domains to augment functionality in manifold dimensions: speed, reliability, comfort, efficiency, expense, durability. Fuller always insisted that his rule of doing more with less was different from Mies’s maxim that less is more, and he was correct. There was nothing minimalist about his ambitions for the Wichita House. On the contrary, the ultimate machine for living would be fantastically complex because greater complexity would augment functionality relative to weight. Materials are replaced by intelligence—and ingenuity is an infinitely renewable resource.
Or an endless excuse for procrastination. As Beech general manager John Gaty was telling the media that his plant could make 60,000 houses by 1947—and that factories nationally could roll out two million units a year—Fuller was busy stamping completed blueprints “obsolete” and thinking up new improvements. The housing shortage became less acute. The Cold War brought new business to aircraft factories. The outmoded Wichita prototypes were abandoned and taken home by William Graham. When Fuller saw what Graham had done, he disowned the project, sniping that the architectural modifications “forever grounded this aeroplane.”
He had some justification in saying so. Graham set the house on a conventional foundation, eliminating the mast and rotating ventilator. He also caulked the openings designed for air circulation. As a result, the house was extremely hot in summer, even with conventional air conditioning. The shiny aluminum shell became just another counterproductive Modernist decoration.
But the total functional failure of the only Dymaxion home ever inhabited also exposes a problem that Fuller never confronted: His machines were completely inadaptable. Ever sensitive to peas-of-a-pod criticism, he claimed that future models of the Wichita House would be available in different sizes and colors, a typical diversionary tactic of engineers confronting messy human psychology.21 There is a crucial sense in which conventional machines are incompatible with housing, as becomes apparent when you consider that the most mechanistic dwelling is a maximum-security prison. A machine for flying must be compatible with physics, and physical laws are predictable and unchanging. People are not air molecules. For Fuller, as for Le Corbusier, the machine analogy was misleading. Eliding the tension between maximum and dynamic, a true machine for living must be as individualistic as its inhabitants.
A WIKIHOUSE IS not technically sophisticated. Made of plywood and pegged together with a mallet, the house can be erected in a day by the family that will live in it. No more skill is required than you’d need to assemble a piece of Ikea flat-packed furniture. But if the architecture is rudimentary, the WikiHouse infrastructure is revolutionary. All the pieces can be fabricated anywhere on a CNC machine—a sort of robotic mill—now standard equipment in most large woodshops. In other words, the WikiHouse isn’t really a building, any more than Wikipedia is a book. It’s data, freely shared and fully editable.
WikiHouse software encourages alteration of dwellings. Modified in Google SketchUp, 3D models of homes are automatically flattened into bundles of 2D templates that can be sent directly to a CNC machine for cutting in any rigid material. As new dwelling models get uploaded to the open-source WikiHouse library, the range of options increases, yet all permutations remain compatible since the flattening process is standardized. WikiHouse accomplishes what Walter Gropius proposed in 1910, with decision-making transferred from a corporate producer to the individual consumer.
Still, there are limits to what can be achieved through all-embracing do-it-yourself simplicity, especially given the engineering constraints of two-dimensional CNC. WikiHouses are less machines for living than survival shacks. They are simply adequate.
Additive manufacturing can considerably increase the sophistication of the house-in-the-cloud while retaining its adaptability. For example, the Italian engineer Enrico Dini has invented a machine that can print architectural-scale structures in bonded sandstone, and the contour crafting technology developed by Behrokh Khoshnevis at the University of Southern California (USC) can output any 3D file in construction-grade concrete.
Khoshnevis’s architecture is printed in layers by a gantry-mounted nozzle. The gantry is motorized, guiding the nozzle back and forth across the entire floor plan, extruding cement wherever specified by a digital blueprint. Following each pass, the gantry lifts the nozzle a step and the process is repeated. By these means, a building of virtually any shape can be made at a rate of several square feet a minute. Since the process is additive, walls can be hollow, and voids can be left for plumbing and electrical conduit. “A single house or a colony of houses, each with possibly a different design, may be automatically constructed in a single run,” claims Khoshnevis on USC’s contour crafting web page. Additive manufacturing offers the industrial advantages of automated mass-production without the challenge of moving whole buildings (or even prefabricated components) because the factory is mobile in its own right.
And additive manufacturing isn’t limited to traditional materials like stone and concrete. A British architectural consortium called Softkill Design is experimenting with housing printed in bioplastics. Befitting the new medium, their laser-sintered models bear less resemblance to houses than to fibrous exoskeletons. In 3D printing, raw materials are expensive, but complexity is free. As Softkill’s Aaron Silver explained to Dezeen in 2013, “We created an algorithm that mimics bone growth, so that we’re depositing material only where it’s necessary and most structurally efficient. It’s not a purely structural object; we’ve also tried to ‘design’ with it, to create our own forms.”22
Buckminster Fuller would have referred to this as design science, and additive manufacturing would certainly have suited his goal of making Dymaxion housing available anywhere, as evoked by another term he liked to use, repro-shelter. But there is also a way in which additive manufacturing, combined with the standardized adaptability of WikiHousing, goes beyond Fuller’s futuristic vision by industrializing customization.
How might it work? Begin with the basics. House or apartments? How many floors? Number of square feet? Location? Budget? Architectural forms populate the computer screen, generated from a library of structural algorithms. The materials are appropriate to the location, and the structures are appropriate to the materials as well as the desired parameters. Layers of insulation are added. Methods to heat and cool the machine are selected from auxiliary libraries, as are lighting and plumbing. They are automatically woven into the structure and integrated with each other to work together. A power estimate is calculated, and means of harvesting energy are selected. If sustainable sources are insufficient, appliances are modified, insulation increased, structures changed. The process is iterative. The libraries are collaborative and cumulative. The process is flexible. The results are personal, yet no less optimal than one-size-fits-all Dymaxion engineering. More optimal, really, since the dwelling machine is also optimized to the physiology and psychology of inhabitants.
Additive manufacturing software and hardware will need to mature before these dwellings can be built. 3D printers will need to use multiple substrates, mixing materials as they print. At that advanced stage, the printer can also become a new kind of utility chassis at the core of the dwelling machine: an appliance that fabricates the whole house around it and alters the infrastructure over time to keep the home in equilibrium with the residents.23
This utility chassis would also be suited to furnishing the dwelling machine, which could be considerably smaller than conventional housing: There’s no reason that possessions would need to be physically stored in closets and attics if they could be additively manufactured when required, and their materials could be subsequently recycled. Nor is there any reason why they’d always have to take the same shape. If guest beds and cooking pots are just data, Ingvar Kamprad’s objective “to encompass the total home environment” would be encompassed by the house itself—no need for Ikea.
And that could foster economic changes more substantial than Ikea’s one-dimensional mission to “engineer cost out of the system.” When Fuller asserted that the Dymaxion “is not a property to be owned, but a mechanical arrangement to be used,” he was evoking the logic of the mid-century telephone business, where Bell would lease customers the equipment, and the value was in the service. Similarly, Fuller’s mobile and replaceable repro-shelters were meant to let families plug into a neighborhood without owning the land.24 Future repro-shelters, licensed or shared as data, might make that feasible,25 and the digital distribution of furnishings could replace commodity-based physical ownership with on-demand borrowing.
“In architecture, form is a noun,” Fuller wrote in his 1938 book Nine Chains to the Moon. “In industry, form is a verb.” The industrial house promised by Modernism was never meant to be a fixed machine for living. To fulfill the Modernist promise, it must become a living factory.
1. Life magazine was slightly less hyperbolic. “Unveiled last week was the most startling solution yet offered for the U.S. housing shortage,” announced an article in the April 1, 1946, issue. “Some called it a house, others a machine. … Although its 8,000-pound weight [actually 6,000 pounds] licked the problem of national distribution, big bugaboo of other factory-made houses, one major question remained: Would people buy such a strange house?” It may have helped Fuller’s fortunes at Fortune that he was a technical consultant for the magazine from 1938 to 1940.
2. Martin Pawley provides a detailed account of the fallout in his biography, Buckminster Fuller.
3. “Although the design of the Dymaxion House was unusual, it was not influential,” University of Pennsylvania architect Witold Rybczynski pronounced in a 1992 New York Times essay.
4. Le Corbusier supported his argument with machine-age analogies, such as that “railway cars and limousines have proven to us that a man can pass through small openings.” Twenty-three years later, Fortune would make an almost identical point with respect to Fuller’s Wichita House: “Because it is so completely radical there is no basis for comparison with the traditional dwelling—one thinks instead of plane cabins, ocean liners, the interiors of streamlined trains, all of which have full public acceptance.” (Italics in the original.)
5. Likewise, later designer prefabs and trophy mansions of starchitects such as Richard Meier and Daniel Liebeskind—and of course the Ikea BoKlok.
6. As with most firsts, the Wright Brothers’ claim to primacy is debatable, but that isn’t the issue. What matters is that airplanes were invented, whereas housing emerged out of prehistory. Even the Neanderthal rock shelter of Riparo Bombrini shows basic spatial organization that Le Corbusier’s 1923 schema would classify as modern.
7. Fuller was forced out by stockholders. The circumstances of his dismissal are fully and meticulously described in Loretta Lorance’s Becoming Bucky Fuller.
8. The most famous home built by Hewlett’s firm, Lord, Hewlett & Hull, is the 147-room Clark Mansion at Fifth Avenue and 77th Street in Manhattan, a Beaux-Arts monstrosity that a 1911 article in The Architectural Record dubbed “an appropriate residence for the late P. T. Barnum.”
9. By the time of the Fortune article, he was attributing the whole development of his house to 1927. In later accounts, he sometimes nudged the date back to 1922.
10. The Dymaxion car was a natural extension of the Dymaxion House in more ways than one.
11. Fuller was fully aware of Bauhaus developments, following the work of Gropius and Mies, along with most other major developments in architecture—and records of his scrupulous research are preserved in his Dymaxion Chronofile—though characteristically he denied any connection. In his 1955 essay “Influences On My Work,” he writes that “Many people have asked if the Bauhaus ideas and techniques have had any formative influence on my work. I must answer vigorously that they have not.”
12. Fuller wasn’t the only one thinking about architecture hung on a mast. At almost exactly the same time, the German brothers Heinz and Bodo Rasch were working on their hypothetical Suspension Houses Project, drawing skyscrapers stabilized with cables. However, unlike the work of Gropius and Mies, this was well outside the mainstream, and most certainly would have been unknown to Fuller.
13. Obviously, none of this coincides with his personal myth. Fuller preferred to believe that the resolution was specifically directed at him, an account of events he repeated so often, and deemed so important, that a version was included in his New York Times obituary. “In May 1928 Mr. Fuller offered to assign full proprietary rights to his patents covering the Dymaxion house to the American Institute of Architects. The institute rejected the offer, and at its annual meeting in 1929 it passed a resolution damning all prefabricated building concepts: ‘Be it resolved that the A.I.A. establish itself on record as inherently opposed to any peas-in-a-pod-like reproducible designs.’ Mr. Fuller no doubt recalled that rebuff with some bemusement when, in 1970, the institute presented him its gold medal for his contributions to architecture.” (Among other falsehoods, there never were any patents to give.)
14. The rechristening is attributed to the ad man Waldo Warren, who, Fuller claimed, also coined the word “radio.” Standard etymological sources don’t credit Warren, so it’s entirely possible that Fuller made up the story in order to add luster to Dymaxion as a word and idea. In another life, Fuller could easily have been an ad man himself.
15. At least one of Fuller’s models included a nude female statuette lying atop a bed, Fuller’s provocative way of illustrating the house’s perfect climate control, which he said eliminated the need for bedclothes.
16. This was just two years after the inventor Philo T. Farnsworth transmitted the first electronic television image. CBS started to experiment with television programming in 1931, followed by NBC in 1932. Fuller would himself be involved in these early stages, as discussed in the next chapter.
17. Just as each Model A cost $500 in mass-production once the initial expenditure was made, Fuller anticipated that each of his mass-produced houses would cost just a couple thousand dollars, matching the price-per-pound of a Ford.
18. Fuller explored all of these possibilities in his short-lived architecture magazine, Shelter. He published provocative articles by everyone from Richard Neutra to Frank Lloyd Wright, as well as his own writing and photo essays comprising images of airplanes, radio towers, and suspension bridges—a sort of updated version of the industrial photography in Le Corbusier’s Toward an Architecture.
19. Other aircraft manufacturers, including Goodyear and Tailorcraft, were also exploring housing as a postwar product line, as was Reynolds, at the time the nation’s second-largest aluminum producer.
20. Fortune referred to this potent combination as “the fortuitous interaction of a Puritan conscience with the atomic age.”
21. In his 1938 book Nine Chains to the Moon, Fuller famously described man as “a self-balancing, 28-jointed adapter-base biped; an electro-mechanical reduction-plant, integral with segregated stowages of special energy extracts in storage batteries, for subsequent actuation of thousands of hydraulic and pneumatic pumps, with motors attached; 62,000 miles of capillaries; millions of warning signal, railroad and conveyor systems; crushers and cranes (of which the arms are magnificent 23-jointed affairs with self-surfacing and lubricating systems, and a universally distributed telephone system needing no service for 70 years if well managed); the whole, extraordinarily complex mechanism guided with exquisite precision from a turret in which are located telescopic and microscopic self-registering and recording range finders, a spectroscope, et cetera, the turret control being closely allied with an air conditioning intake-and-exhaust, and a main fuel intake.”
22. Softkill’s structures are developed with algorithms akin to those used by Daimler for bus chassis, as discussed in the previous chapter.
23. All of this should be equally achievable in an apartment building, with individualized apartments produced and serviced by a communal utility chassis.
24. At a far less sophisticated level, that’s what trailer parks offer.
25. With considerably more quality than in a trailer park plug-in.