BUCKMINSTE FULLER’S BEDSPREAD

by

Christopher Howel

Just what is it that makes tomorrow’s homes so different, so unappealing?

I remember the future. I remember how it used to look: so streamlined, so metallic, so (for want of a better word) futuristic. We imagined going to work by gyrocopter. We imagined being slickly conveyed by moving pavements and monorails. We imagined multi-level cities regulated by anthropomorphic robots.

Of course, some limited parts of this vision have come to pass. There are indeed a few very rich people who go to work by helicopter. There are moving pavements and monorails in airports, if nowhere else. And if we think of shopping malls as a new kind of city centre, then certainly they contain something preprogrammed and robotic, and I suppose traffic lights are robots by any other name.

But this is not quite what we had in mind. We imagined it would be more space age, and yet in using that term we acknowledge that the actual space age existed in a recognizable, limited, historical past.

Here was a future without patina. It had clean edges and hard, parabolic lines. There would be no time here for crafts, for earth tones, for things woven and shaggy. Hippies would have been a life form to be destroyed.

The future looked smooth, solid and cold, a place of metal surfaces and symmetry, a place where Daleks could run free. It looked like, and often was, a cheap science fiction movie. It was all featureless corridors, and metal doors that slammed down out of nowhere. The future was uncarpeted, unfluffy. It had no pictures on the walls. It glowed with its own inner light. Public and private spaces seemed identical if not undifferentiated. We imagined ourselves in lofty, voluminous spaces, dressed in stainless steel body suits. We imagined ourselves slim and severe and scientific.

The future was a place where we were in control, where tribes were united. Both the environment and human nature had been tamed, and therefore we could deal with some truly thorny problems, like invaders from other planets ó not that they could ever prevail against our flawless technologies.

And yet in matters of popular taste, out there in the real world, there were those who thought the aliens were already amongst us, and that some of them were posing as architects. Some thought that Philip Johnson and Richard Neutra and Buckminster Fuller were not of this earth. And for many Americans, Buckminster Fuller was the scariest of all, since in so many ways he looked just like one of them, a Massachusetts’ native, born in the last decade of the nineteenth century, a regular guy, tie-wearing, bespectacled.

In my lavatory, I keep a copy of the House and Garden Book of Modern Homes and Conversions, Editor Robert Harling, London, 1966. It’s a largely photographic record of seventy or so ‘contemporary’ projects: a holiday home on the Sorrento peninsula, a converted London Transport sub-station, a Swedish waterside house shaped somewhat like a waterlily. And there amid all the glass and concrete, the teak furniture and the quaintly garish colour printing is Buckminster Fuller’s ‘Roam Home’ in Carbondale, Illinois.

It’s a geodesic dome, naturally, one of the ones made by the Pease Woodwork Company as a kit-home. It looks convincingly high-tech and industrial in an early sixties sort of way, and even though its appearance is less startling than some of Buckminster Fuller’s more radical designs, it’s still hard to imagine many people, then or now, actually wanting to live in it. Naturally, there’s hardly a right angle in the place, nowhere that a sofa or wardrobe or bookcase would look genuinely at home, but one could argue that in the future sofas, wardrobes and bookcases might be redundant. Buckminster Fuller might well have argued that himself. But a look at the master bedroom of the house throws the whole conception out of kilter.

The bedroom is an oddly shaped, poky, irregular polyhedron, with lots of doors leading into the bathroom and walk-in cupboards, and walls sliced into strange angular slabs. And there, pressed up against the partition wall are two narrow twin beds in which Buckminster Fuller and his wife apparently slept.

And the beds have CANDLEWICK BEDSPREADS!

I ask you! Candlewick bedpreads just like I had in my own bedroom at home when I was a boy. Couldn’t an imagination like Buckminster Fuller’s have come up with something harder, shinier, more of tomorrow than that? Well, undoubtedly he could have, but the point is, he didn’t.

In his own bedroom he demonstrated, even if he didn’t admit it, that the human heart is not industrial and futuristic at all. It is not high-finish and aluminium clad; all that stuff is just something to fill the glossy magazines.

It’s easy to see architecture and reality as metaphorically similar. Both, it might be claimed, are constructs. Both emerge from a collective, if multiform, unconscious. But that is surely the problem. The most startling architecture is constructed by those who are purist and visionary. Reality, however, is constructed by those who want something comforting, easy to live with and probably with a floral design. The future may not necessarily be candlewick (and pray God that it isn’t) but neither is it likely to be elegant, clean-lined, restrained and concerned with the morality of materials.

We used to imagine that the future would include us. It would be us in the helicopter, us on the monorail. But as we get older, the one thing we know about the future is that it goes on without us. It is a favourite consolation of old age to imagine that the world has gone to the dogs, that it is in chaos and ruin and that things can only get worse. We tell ourselves that we are better off without the future, whereas the truth may well be that the future is better off without us.