18 DYMAXION HOUSE

R. Buckminster Fuller

AnnMarie Brennan

Buckminster Fuller, Photograph of Dymaxion Dwelling Machine Wichita House with steel
tube “packaging” overlaid with drawing submitted to the U.S. Patent Office, filed March
26, 1946.*

The Companions to the History of Architecture, Volume IV, Twentieth-Century Architecture.

Edited by David Leatherbarrow and Alexander Eisenschmidt.
© 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2017 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
SHIP SHAPE

In January 1975, the American designer and inventor R. Buckminster Fuller

(1895–1983) gave a series of 12 continuous lectures lasting 42 hours. In the lectures,
simply titled “Everything I Know,” Fuller spoke on a broad range of topics that
included his personal history, inventions, and the seemingly esoteric vignettes that
illuminated his thinking. At one point he spoke admiringly of the indigenous
Polynesian people of New Zealand, the Māori. Initially classified as “ignorant”
by European settlers because they could only count to two, Fuller claimed that
the Māori were in fact quite advanced since they had already discovered the
advantages of binary systems, anticipating the emerging world of computers.
Fuller continued to note that these “water people” who ruled the South Pacific
seas, despite not having literature or written language, did not possess charts or
maps for navigation. They lived their lives without very much need for clothing,
and therefore the Māori seamen did not have pockets in which to carry devices
such as compasses. However, they did have very long ear lobes embedded with
large discs fashioned out of bone or ivory, which, according to Fuller, signaled
the cardinal points of a type of corporal compass. Fuller admired the Māori and
considered their novel method of navigation as “a very mature, very economic,
very efficient kind of information controlling device.”1 Not only could the Māori
navigate the open seas of the South Pacific with their “information controlling
devices,” but the constantly changing forces of weather, tides, and currents
necessitated that their rings merge within the extraneous skin, thereby transform-
ing the surface of the body into a site of performance. This small passage demon-
strates Fuller’s appreciation for other skilled “water people,” but more
importantly it illustrates his approach to design centered upon the very same
appreciation of performance, and underlines his understanding of the built envi-
ronment as being formed by undulating flows, forces, and turbulences of a non-
Cartesian, smooth space reminiscent of the sea.
The concept of dynamic forces shaping form in order to increase
performance was the foundation of Fuller’s most noted project, the
Dymaxion House. While Fuller is best known for his dome structures,
the Dymaxion House is perhaps the most important failed architecture project
of the twentieth century. It can be considered a failure because the project
never achieved its primary goal of being a mass-produced house that would
be transported directly to its customers across the United States at an affordable
price. The house’s significance, however, lies in the fact that Fuller reimagined
the way people would live in the future, and introduced to the architectural
profession new criteria by which to judge and assess housing design, which
was according to a standard of improved performance, not unlike the
 Dymaxion House 3

manufacturing and performance benchmarks of industrially-designed objects

such as boats, cars, and airplanes. His insight into this advanced approach
was derived through his ability to transfer knowledge from his experience in
manufacturing and the U.S. military to the field of design.
The design and redesign of the house spanned the entirety of Fuller’s early
career from 1927 to 1946, undergoing many name changes; from the initial 4D
Lightful Houses of 1927, to the Fuller or Dymaxion House, to the Dymaxion
Dwelling Unit or Machine, to the last version, the 1946 Wichita House. It served
as the catalyst for many auxiliary projects that were guided by Fuller’s principle of
the Dymaxion creed, which included the Dymaxion bathroom unit, the Dymaxion
car, and Dymaxion deployment units.
The house design developed through many iterations over a period of almost
20 years; therefore, when speaking of the Dymaxion House, it is a reference to
a specific design vision that proposed the application of scientific methods of
industrial assembly to construction processes, rather than simply the design
of one type of futuristic-looking house. A constant theme defining all of Fuller’s
projects during this time was the concept of the Dymaxion creed. The term
“Dymaxion” is the combination of the words “dynamic” and “maximum,”
where the “maximum gain of advantage [is derived from] the minimal energy
input.”2

Industry: Housing Design Based on Performance

As a young adult, Fuller was twice dismissed from Harvard University, and each
time this happened his mother would send him to work in factories. His first job
was an apprenticeship to a machine installer at a cotton mill in Quebec, his second
was with the Armour Meat Company where he was fascinated by the rapid, com-
plex, and semi-automated methods of the meatpacking process. Although his time
on the factory floor was brief, Fuller was able to observe and comprehend the
important principles that determined success in industry. He too witnessed first-
hand how a factory operated and the manner in which the machine tools func-
tioned, and most importantly he gained insight into the ways in which value
was created. He would later claim that a significant corollary of mass production
was that it was premised upon a process of “constantly improving performance,”
dependent upon perpetually improving the technology for manufacturing pro-
ducts of “increasingly improved and measurable performance.”3 This crucial aspect
of successful industry was one that Fuller did not see happening within the con-
struction of American housing.
Therefore it was through the design and production of the Dymaxion House
that Fuller sought to establish a new housing industry by treating houses like indus-
trially-designed products engineered to be mass produced within a factory using
4 Revisiting the Modern Project

the latest in material technology and adhering to advanced performance standards.

He conceded that engineered building products, such as elevators, lighting, and
heating systems were products of industry; however, the house, in its entirety,
was not conceived with the same drive toward constantly improved innovation
and increased performance.
Adhering to his Dymaxion creed, Fuller’s house was to be produced mostly from
the lightweight material of aluminum, manufactured in a factory, and then shipped
in a reusable stainless steel tube to any location within the United States along with
trained service crews who would immediately set upon the task of assembling the
house. A large crane would suspend a central aluminum mast, the house’s main
structure, while other parts, such as the main ground floor platform, and interior
and exterior walls, were to be constructed by connecting them to the central mast
by a universal joint. This central column, or mast, would also perform as the
mechanical core, containing all of the plumbing, electrical, and ventilation systems.
Once the assembly was completed, and state-of-the-art appliances and pre-
fabricated bathrooms installed, the house would be lowered onto the ground
and “anchored.”4

U.S. Navy: Dealing with Dynamic Forces

Fuller was introduced to sailing and navigation as a young boy growing up on a

small island in Penobscot Bay, Maine. After his university misadventures, he
enlisted in the U.S. Navy, a move that fostered his childhood interests of sailing,
navigation, and boats. Fuller thrived in the disciplined environment of the Navy
where he was exposed to the logistics of Atlantic transport operations and the
organized movement of supplies moved over large expanses of geographical ter-
ritory. His responsibilities as U.S naval officer required the ability to understand
statistical methods (and early versions of operations research), map projection,
and chart making.
John McHale noted that the atmosphere of the Navy exposed Fuller to “precise
mathematical reckoning, advanced communications and the technical know-how
involved in the logistics of mass tonnage movements, ballistics and navigation;”
influences that ultimately led to his concept of comprehensive total environmental
design and pre-planning.5 His exposure to the inner workings of manufacturing
coupled with the logistical prowess of the Navy provided Fuller with the conclu-
sion that the key element to success in industry was to understand it as a constantly
mobile entity of fluid systems. Fuller explained that by 1927, he understood that
innovation for house manufacturing was not to be found in the automobile indus-
try, but in shipbuilding and the aeronautical world, which was based on the prin-
cipal of measuring performance per pound of weight.
In order to illustrate the amount of advanced engineering and technology that
went into shipbuilding compared to architecture, Fuller often made the
 Dymaxion House 5

comparison between the Mauretania ocean liner and the Hotel Belmont in New
York City.6 The hotel, Fuller noted, received its electricity from the city infrastruc-
ture and received its food twice a day from local suppliers, since its refrigeration
storage capacity was very small. However the ocean liner was required to carry its
own power and provisions for 1,500 people for a total of 30 days. Based on a per
guest basis, the Mauretania weighed one-fifteenth of the Belmont, proving that
weight does not equal stability. The Mauretania could withstand the motion of
open sea, whereas the Hotel Belmont would collapse under the same conditions.
Fuller concluded by pointing out the fact that if the Mauretania weighed as much as
the Belmont Hotel per unit of performance the boat would quickly sink.

4D Lightful Houses

Fuller’s first iteration of the Dymaxion House, called the 4D Lightful House, was
based on a hexagonal plan created through the geometry of triangles. The primary
problem with existing housing stock for Fuller was the heavy, load-bearing walls of
traditional construction. To alleviate this issue, Fuller set out to design a house
made of lightweight yet strong modern materials that made up most ship and air-
plane construction.
The Dymaxion House was designed according to its performance in fuel con-
sumption, water requirements, actual production of individual parts, wind and
other weather conditions, and the ease of construction and delivery of materials
to the site. Unlike the existing housing stock in the United States at this time, Fuller
imagined a new type of house as well as a novel means of constructing it. In addi-
tion, he proposed a method of distributing the houses as rentable, exchangeable,
and replaceable units, just as the telephone company would rent or lease a phone to
its customers, and then provide the necessary logistics and infrastructure for the
distribution of telephone services.
The 4D Houses, soon to be renamed Dymaxion Houses, would remain as a
scaled model, nevertheless the project was essential in establishing Fuller’s theory
of “ephemeralization.” In Nine Chains to the Moon, Fuller defined ephemeralization
as advanced technology’s innate ability to do more with less material, and thereby
continually improve the quality of life while using less energy and natural
resources.7

Dymaxion Bathroom

The 4D House included a prefabricated bathroom unit installed much like a corner
cabinet. The first prototype, consisting of a continuous surface of welded copper,
was commissioned by the American Standard Heating and Plumbing Company in
6 Revisiting the Modern Project

1930. An additional 12 prototypes were developed in 1936 for the Phelps Dodge
Copper Company. The innovative aspect of this bathroom design was that it
was a compact, self-contained, structural unit that included a shower, bathtub, soap
holder, toilet, walls, floor, and washbasin shaped from one continuous surface. At
first the material was die-cut from a sheet of copper; this proved to be too heavy,
however, and subsequently stainless steel was specified, and later fiberglass. The
design was the culmination of considerations regarding performance, supported
by the inherent properties of the material selected, using the most advanced indus-
trial methods of manufacture.
Sigfried Giedion, in his concluding chapter on the mechanized bathroom in
Mechanization Takes Command, was the first historian to take serious note of
Fuller’s Dymaxion bathroom unit, and claimed that the central mechanical core
of the Dymaxion House was a harbinger of postwar housing design. He glow-
ingly described how the Dymaxion bathroom was easily and efficiently
manufactured:

All the components are pressed simultaneously with the metal skin, their hollows
sometimes helping to give the system additional rigidity. [E]very square inch was
worked out, so that the dies would have the highest industrial efficiency, and the
bathrooms could be stamped out by the million at minimal cost.8

Despite his initial praise, Giedion would conclude that the bathroom unit fell
short in terms of comfort; its dimensions were not unlike those found on a boat
or submarine and therefore too small and rigid for any house design with a flexible
ground plan.9

Dymaxion Car
Since the Dymaxion Dwelling Machine was conceived as a house that could be
built in any location without roads or other infrastructure, Fuller devised a mode
of transport as an accessory to the Dymaxion House: “I decided to try to develop an
omni-medium transport vehicle to function in the sky, on negotiable terrain, or on
water – to be securely landable anywhere, like an eagle.”10 The Dymaxion Trans-
port Unit was initially designed as a “hoverable-type jet stilt ‘flying bedstead.’”11
However, these plans were modified to create a state-of-the-art, streamlined car,
engineered with the assistance of famed yacht designer Starling Burgess.
Burgess assisted in translating Fuller’s concept into an aerodynamic automobile.
He was best known for his design of the Enterprise, the 1930 America’s Cup winner.
Not unlike the duralumin mast of Fuller’s Dymaxion House, Burgess’ innovative
yacht design was the first to use duralumin masts and winches, reducing the work
required of 20 sailors down to four. A 1933 article in Fortune magazine claimed that
Burgess, a “fine mathematician,” was known to rise at 4 am to complete a series of
 Dymaxion House 7

calculus problems, and noted that his experience in designing streamlined yachts
was “tremendously helpful in designing the [Dymaxion] car.”12
Shaped into the streamlined form of a teardrop, the 11-passenger, three-wheeled
car was easily maneuverable since its rear wheel acted as a boat rudder steering the
direction of the vehicle. The front wheels, providing traction, were powered by an
eight-cylinder Ford motor concealed within a custom built chassis and bodywork
made of duralumin, weighing about 1,700 pounds compared to the Ford Sedan at
2,700 pounds.13 Despite the advanced technology and streamlined, futuristic aes-
thetic, the Dymaxion car would be yet another shelved project, as an unfortunate
accident involving the car at the 1933 World Fair killed the driver and injured two
other passengers. The cause of the accident was not entirely known; however, it
was rumored to be a problem with the steering, prompting investors to abandon
the project.

Dymaxion Dwelling Machine, or Wichita House

By 1944, Fuller was re-enlisted in the military and serving as an officer in the Eco-
nomic Warfare Division when union leaders in Washington, D.C., who remem-
bered the 1927 mass-produced Dymaxion House, contacted him. As the end of
World War II approached, the U.S. Department of Labor, along with the Aeronau-
tical Production Division of the War Production Board, were trying to find a solu-
tion to a series of anticipated problems that would plague the country at war’s end;
a shortage of laborers wanting to work in Mid-Western armament and airplane
factories, a surplus of materials, specifically aluminum, and a shortage of appropri-
ate housing for the general civilian population. It appeared that the production of a
redesigned Dymaxion House could resolve all of these problems, while achieving
Fuller’s goal of transforming house construction from a craft-based trade to an
industrialized system.
The major difference between the 1927 version of the Dymaxion House and the
1946 Wichita model was that Fuller re-engineered the exterior skin according to the
improved tensile strength of aluminum and incorporated the most-advanced
knowledge of aircraft construction since it was to be produced at the B-29 bomber
Beech Aircraft plant in Wichita, Kansas. The original hexagon shape changed to a
streamlined circular plan, and the roof was a smooth, curved surface compared to
the previous angular form. The aluminum monocoque roof was self-supporting,
and the curved exterior walls were tied back to the central mast through tension
members enveloped within the roof. With the mast in compression and the roof
and walls in tension due to the double curvature shape, the structure, modeled
upon the idea of a Chinese lantern, was substantially rigid and did not require addi-
tional bracing, columns, or trusses for support. The increased performance in struc-
ture can be found in what Fuller described as shape factors. When Fuller placed the
Dymaxion prototype in a wind tunnel, he discovered that heat loss occurred in
8 Revisiting the Modern Project

direct proportion to drag, revealing that heat loss could be reduced if the house
shape took on an aerodynamic form.14 The air quality and comfort was further
assured through a ventilator located on the roof, which would change the air in
the house up to ten times per hour.
The redesign enabled Fuller to realize an actual prototype that manifested his
theory of ephemeralization with a house encompassing 800 square feet of floor
space and weighing a total of 4 tons; demonstrating a 98% reduction in weight from
a traditionally built home. Despite these technological innovations and a willing
pool of 3,000 customers placing orders, the Wichita House would not be mass pro-
duced. Investors were unwilling to contribute the required $10 million to re-tool
the aircraft plant since the project did not have any marketing, distribution, and
installation strategies.

Dymaxion Legacy
The greatest legacy of the Dymaxion House was the manner in which Fuller’s
design approach influenced generations of future architects and historians. Interest-
ingly enough, it seems that Fuller received more acknowledgment and apprecia-
tion for his work by British architects, historians, and designers than American
ones. Alison and Peter Smithson were inspired by the continuous structural surface
of the Dymaxion bathroom unit for their 1956 House of the Future. Within the
same U.K. design circles, the Dymaxion House served as a demonstration of port-
ability for the architecture group Archigram.15 While these young designers
attempted to imitate the technical and mechanical imagery of Fuller’s designs,
and the kit-of-parts aspect of the Dymaxion House appealed to the new postwar
sensibility for mobility, Archigram was not interested in the performative nature
of the house. As Hadas Steiner noted, Archigram wanted to create a type of mobile
architecture that “violated the principle of firmitas” and the Dymaxion House
served as an applicable precedent.16 Fuller’s house actualized this new postwar
urge for freedom and the ability to roam, and it was this secondary dynamic aspect
– the house’s ability to be located anywhere without the reliance of infrastructure –
that inspired Archigram.
The next generation influenced by Fuller’s concepts includes the group of archi-
tects characterized as High-Tech, such as Norman Foster, Nicholas Grimshaw, and
Richard Rogers. The Dymaxion House demonstrated a new set of design values
that placed research, the development of technology regarding energy, perfor-
mance, and the transfer of knowledge from other industries above any outmoded
notion of (postmodern) style. Foster claimed that Fuller had a “profound influence
on my own work and thinking. Inevitably, I also gained an insight into his philos-
ophy and achievements.”17 During the last decade of Fuller’s life, Foster established
a relationship with the inventor/architect, and his admiration for his work included
financing a built replication of Fuller’s Dymaxion car.
 Dymaxion House 9

Although not acknowledged as an important influence, the work of contempo-

rary American architect Greg Lynn seems to revisit problems similar to the ones
Fuller addressed almost 80 years ago. Not unlike the “dynamic” in Fuller’s Dymax-
ion creed, Lynn’s design strategy is one based on the concept of “animation.” In his
1999 book, Animate Form, Lynn proposed a new architecture that was not animate
itself, but was in fact formed by moving, fluid forces acting upon it. By adopting this
approach to architecture, traditional notions of statics and structure were replaced
by a “more advanced system of dynamic organizations.”18
To illustrate his concept, Lynn often cites the designing of a boat hull, where
naval architects are required to factor in mobile forces such as flow, wind, turbu-
lence, and viscosity, in both upwind and downwind performance. However, the
actual boat hull is static in its final form; “While physical form can be defined in
terms of static coordinates, the virtual force of the environment in which it is
designed contributes to its shape.”19 The design of the boat hull negotiates these
shaping forces by engineering curves and inflection to modulate and respond, but
the actual surface of the hull does not move.
Since the publication of Animate Form, Lynn has in fact entered into a new design
realm that includes both moving and non-moving parts called “projectiles.” Like
Fuller, one of Lynn’s first projects was to design a factory-produced house called
the Embryological House (2000). Using an iterative process of digital animation pro-
grams borrowed from film and aerospace industries, Lynn set up a series of control
curves and shape grammars within a matrix that determined the way each form
would interact with others, and then established a set of expressions dictating
how the geometry defined structure, cladding, and apertures.20 This process, an early
attempt at mass customization, created a series of 50,000 varied house designs which
did not require adding or subtracting structure or cladding to create this formal
difference.
Paralleling Fuller’s interest in everything related to boats and sailing, Lynn estab-
lished a company with a naval architect, and now designs seafaring vessels such as
the GF42 Trimaran. The process of designing these boats includes the application
of fluid dynamics, which calculates both the force of wind and the dynamics of
water within a single model. A basic, instinctual geometry of the hull, rig, and sails
is created, and then these shapes are sent to a computer with massive processing
power, to calculate all of the data. It is through this iterative process – the analysis of
the flow and motion across surfaces, together with a graphical response – that the
final design is selected.
For Lynn, the most innovative aspect in the boating construction industry is the
simple fabrication of materials for the hull and sails consisting solely of layers of
fibers and resin rather than a frame structure with cladding fastened to it; a con-
figuration that occurs in most traditionally conceived architectural works. Consid-
erably less expensive than Fuller’s process of constructing with panels of die-cut
aluminum panels for the Dymaxion House, these vessels are made from 100% car-
bon fibers strategically placed along load paths and then molded together with glue
10 Revisiting the Modern Project

and heated into a strong composite material.21 Fuller and Lynn discovered the per-
formative advantages of shape factors and the collapsing of both envelope and
structure into one smooth continuous surface.

Conclusion
In his 1969 book, Architecture of the Well-tempered Environment, the British architec-
tural historian Reyner Banham, in reference to Fuller’s Dymaxion approach of
“ephemeralization,” recalled Paul Valery’s book Eupalinos, the Architect. He
explained how Eupalinos was primarily concerned with applying accepted meth-
ods to complete specific tasks, and, according to the tradition of the architectural
profession, discovered a theoretical problem embedded within every pragmatic
decision. However, Tridon, the shipbuilder, attempted to resolve the problem
at hand in the most direct and efficient manner, whether it was part of the ship-
building tradition or not, and considered philosophical theories as additional guid-
ance toward achieving the most direct solution. Banham continued the analogy by
pointing out that contemporary architectural education was comparable to a
“sophisticated yacht with glass-fiber hull and aluminum mast” and other advanced
materials. However, in terms of performance, the architecture produced by these
elite institutions still required “an onboard motor to be used (under conditions of
great embarrassment) in emergencies.”22 He concluded by noting that arguments
that defend the use of traditional methods in architecture often ignore the fact that
outside the “protected circle” of academia and the staged discourse of architectural
media, “there has been for almost a century a tide of innovation in environmental
management fully comparable with that in nautical design.”23
These insights begin to explain the unsuccessful acceptance of Fuller’s Dymaxion
House. A 1947 Fortune article referred to prefabricated housing as “the industry that
capitalism forgot,” noting that an entire generation of architects dismissed the possibil-
ity of prefabricated housing because they could not foresee how it could work within
contemporary political and financial structures, as is still the case today.24 Nevertheless,
Fuller’s concept of performance transferred from the sphere of industrial design and
manufacture to architecture is a noble goal with continuing resonance in contemporary
architectural practices that currently explore the increased possibilities of new advances
in digital software and custom fabrication technologies. It becomes clear that the pro-
fession now needs to find a solution to overcome the same political and economic bar-
riers that thwarted Fuller’s best efforts.

Notes

* Courtesy Carl Solway Gallery, Cincinnati, Ohio, and The Estate of R. Buckminster
Fuller.
1. R. Buckminster Fuller, “Everything I Know,” transcript, Session 4, Part 8. (Jan. 1975),
http://bfi.org/about-fuller/resources/everything-i-know/session-4#part8
 Dymaxion House 11

2. “Design: The Dymaxion American,” TIME Magazine 83, no. 2 (Jan. 10, 1964), http://
content.time.com/time/subscriber/article/0,33009,875527-5,00.html.
3. R. Buckminster Fuller, “Designing a New Industry,” in The Buckminster Fuller Reader,
ed. James Meller (London: Jonathan Cape, 1970), 155.
4. Ibid., 209.
5. John McHale, “Buckminster Fuller,” Architectural Review (July 1956): 107.
6. Fuller, “Designing a New Industry,” 164.
7. R. Buckminster Fuller, Nine Chains to the Moon [1938]. (New York: Anchor Books,
1971), 252–9.
8. Sigfried Giedion, Mechanization Takes Command: A Contribution to Anonymous History,
2nd ed. (London: Oxford University Press, 1969), 707.
9. Ibid., 709.
10. R. Buckminster Fuller, Inventions. The Patented Works of R. Buckminster Fuller (New
York: St. Martin’s Press, 1983), 31.
11. McHale, “Buckminster Fuller,” 110.
12. “Off the Record,” Fortune (June 1933): 12.
13. Ibid., 8.
14. Fuller, “Designing a New Industry,” 201.
15. Simon Sadler, Archigram: Architecture Without Architecture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press,
2005), 107.
16. Hadas Steiner, “Off the Map,” in Non-Plan: Essays on Freedom Participation and Change in
Modern Architecture and Urbanism, ed. Jonathan Hughes and Simon Sadler (Oxford:
Architectural Press, 2000), 128.
17. Kelly Minner, “Video: Norman Foster Recreates Buckminster Fuller’s Dymaxion Car,”
Archdaily (March 22, 2011), http://www.archdaily.com/121530/video-norman-foster-
recreates-buckminster-fullers-dymaxion-car/.
18. Greg Lynn, Animate Form (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1999), 10.
19. Ibid.
20. Greg Lynn, “Carbon in Motion,” video (March 22, 2013), https://vimeo.com/
63581578.
21. Greg Lynn, “Introducing Composites, Surface, and Software,” in Composites, Surfaces,
and Software: High Performance Architecture, ed. Greg Lynn, Stephen Nielson, and Nina
Rappaport (New Haven, CT: Yale School of Architecture, 2010), 11.
22. Reyner Banham, The Architecture of the Well-tempered Environment, 2nd ed. (Chicago:
The University of Chicago Press, 1984), 268.
23. Ibid.
24. “The Industry Capitalism Forgot,” Fortune 36, no. 2 (1947), 67.

Bibliography

Banham, Reyner. The Architecture of the Well-tempered Environment. 2nd ed. Chicago: The
University of Chicago Press, 1984.
Fortune. “Off the Record,” Fortune (June 1933): 12.
——— “The Industry Capitalism Forgot.” Fortune 36, no. 2 (1947).
12 Revisiting the Modern Project

Fuller R. Buckminster. “Designing a New Industry.” In The Buckminster Fuller Reader, edited
by James Meller. London: Jonathan Cape, 1970.
——— Nine Chains to the Moon [1938]. New York: Anchor Books, 1971.
——— “Everything I Know,” transcript, Session 4, Part 8. (Jan. 1975). http://bfi.org/about-
fuller/resources/everything-i-know/session-4#part8
——— Inventions: The Patented Works of R. Buckminster Fuller. New York: St. Martin’s
Press, 1983.
Giedion, Sigfried. Mechanization Takes Command: A Contribution to Anonymous History.
2nd ed. London: Oxford University Press, 1969.
Lynn, Greg. Animate Form. New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1999.
——— “Introducing Composites, Surface, and Software.” In Composites, Surfaces, and Soft-
ware: High Performance Architecture, edited by Greg Lynn, Stephen Nielson, and Nina
Rappaport. New Haven, CT: Yale School of Architecture, 2010.
McHale, John. “Buckminster Fuller.” Architectural Review (July 1956): 107.
Sadler, Simon. Archigram: Architecture Without Architecture. Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press, 2005.
Steiner, Hadas. “Off the Map.” In Non-Plan: Essays on Freedom Participation and Change in
Modern Architecture and Urbanism, edited by Jonathan Hughes and Simon Sadler.
Oxford: Architectural Press, 2000.
TIME Magazine “Design: The Dymaxion American.” TIME Magazine 83, no. 2 (Jan. 10,
1964). http://content.time.com/time/subscriber/article/0,33009,875527-5,00.html