Buckminster Fuller (1895–1983) was a self-appointed architect, highly original thinker and compelling speaker who was committed to arguing his personally imagined ‘rational’ future into being, sometimes in four-hour lectures. Part of this vision included new industrial system-built houses for which he coined the name ‘Dymaxion’, a term that feels at once beckoning, scientific and indecipherable. Of course, the inhabitants of these new living units were to have a flying car and, accordingly, the first Dymaxion car design shows stubby inflatable wings. As built, the car was wingless but was intended to raise its tail and ‘plane’ on two front wheels – a tendency that made it hard to control at speed; the rear-wheel steering made it difficult to control when going slow, too!
At a time when mainstream automakers were experimenting with both rear engines and rear-wheel drives or front engines plus front-wheel drive, the Dymaxion bucked all the trends by having, uniquely, a rear engine and front rear-wheel drive. Unfortunately, the prototype was involved in a fatal accident at the 1933 Chicago World Exposition, though this may not have been connected with the unconventional aspects of the design.
The car should perhaps be regarded more as a piece of Modernist polemics than as a practical vehicle. Togther with the weird body design devised by Walter Gropius for Adler, the Dymaxion proved for ever that architects should not meddle with automotive design.
The shape of the future? There is something at once admirable and sad about Buckminster Fuller’s quixotic attempt to remake the world.