Richard Buckminster Fuller was one of the greatest geniuses the last few centuries have produced. His work is hard to classify within a single discipline, given that he carried out projects related to architecture, engineering, and industrial design. Above all, he was a great visionary and inventor of the twentieth century. His 4D Tower, a building that could be constructed almost entirely out of plastic and aluminum, is one of the most incredible housing projects ever conceived. But why were they never built?
A Genius of the Twentieth Century
Over the last hundred or two hundred years, humanity has seen some privileged minds emerge. People of the stature of Einstein, Darwin, Freud, or Tesla — among many others — used their brains to develop ideas and theories that would transform our vision of the world. Richard Buckminster Fuller, born on July 12, 1895, in Milton, Massachusetts, was one of them. Perhaps his name is familiar to you thanks to fullerenes (or fullerene), the third most stable form of carbon. These molecules are very popular among chemists, both for their structural beauty and their versatility in synthesizing new compounds, since they appear as cylinders (carbon nanotubes), ellipsoids, or spheres.
These molecules are named in honor of Buckminster Fuller, who used that shape to build geodesic domes in architecture. From childhood, Richard showed great curiosity and inventiveness. When he was young, he used to build things using materials found in the forest, and often developed his own tools. He attended classes at Milton Academy and Harvard University, from which he was expelled twice. Later he joined the Navy as a radio operator and editor of a publication, a field in which he found inspiration for many of his creations, such as the central mast of his 4D Tower.
The 1920s were a decisive decade in Fuller's life. At that time, together with his father-in-law, he developed the Stockade Building System, a system for producing lightweight homes resistant to the harshest weather or fire conditions. Although he could never mass-produce them, the experience helped him develop several ideas he would return to later. In 1927, his youngest daughter Alexandra died of polio, and Buckminster sought comfort in drinking. He came close to suicide, but quickly overcame that personal crisis. Convinced that his daughter had died because of the unhealthy conditions typical of the housing of that era, he began working on finding solutions.
The first step was to publish two essays — 4D and 4D Timelock — in which he explained his ideas for improving people's lives. Those texts included an entire new design philosophy and schemes for building industrialized housing, which he called “4D Houses”. Fuller thought that our home is actually a “machine for living”. Although he wasn't the only one with this vision, he was the first to go further, defining it in entirely functional terms: “a dwelling is a system for satisfying human needs for protection against the elements, privacy, and hygiene.”
Dedicated to designing a home suitable for mass production, he devoted himself fully to developing concepts that would make it possible. Only in this way, Fuller thought, could costs be reduced to the level necessary to make his machine for living affordable to the majority of the population. That's how he arrived at the concept of the 4D Tower.
The 4D Tower
The 4D Tower was a building with 12 hexagonal floors. All services — drinking water, sewers, electricity, etc. — were included in a central mast, which also supported at its top a mill that could produce electricity from wind energy. The structure of the mast, which served as the building's backbone, was made of aluminum, while the walls, windows, and ceilings were plastic. Remember that in 1927 plastics were just beginning to become popular, so nobody had thought of using them to build homes. The floors of each level were made up of inflatable tiles, also made of rubber.
Each apartment was a hermetically sealed unit. Its doors were also inflatable and did not let dust in. Cleanliness and germs — surely his daughter's death still tormented him — were a constant concern for Fuller. His tower had a central air circulation system that provided ventilation and heating to each living unit, while another parallel system handled vacuuming and a supply of compressed air that facilitated cleaning. At night, a powerful light was projected through the interior of the mast and carried to each room through a system of mirrors and prisms. If you wanted to “turn off” the light, you simply closed the duct through which it reached your apartment.
The 4D Tower was “ecologically correct”. Each one had its own water tanks, septic systems, and clean energy sources. Based on this building's design, he also conceived his “4D house” or “Dymaxion House”, which was nothing more than one of the tower's floors mounted individually. Fuller coined the term Dymaxion as an abbreviation for Dynamic Maximum Tension, and used it to define his philosophy focused on getting the maximum out of every available material. He used this word as a brand in many of his inventions, such as the Dymaxion house, the Dymaxion map, or the Dymaxion car.
A Legacy of Unrealized Ideas
Richard Buckminster Fuller died on July 1, 1983, at the age of 87, leaving us a legacy of ideas that still transform industry today. Why were 4D Towers or Dymaxion houses never built on a massive scale? It's possible that — as has happened to many other brilliant ideas — the world was not ready for such a change. In 1927, when Fuller proposed a plastic home, people associated that material with fragile and cheap elements, like balloons or toys. An investor would hardly have risked his money on such a project. However, his concept of the “central mast” (among others) has been adapted in a large number of constructions, and surely any interstellar ship with artificial gravity obtained from rotation on its axis that we build in the future will have something similar inside. That day, Buckminster Fuller will have reached the stars.
