Buckminster Fuller / Wichita, Kansas / USA / 1946
In 1948 William Graham, a former investor in the project, purchased and combined both prototypes and created the “Wichita House,” which carried a refined vision of the original Dymaxion: the hexagon was transformed into a smooth circle, and the building was set only a few inches above the ground (rather than fully suspended, as the Dymaxion would have been). Aside from the patented Dymaxion bathroom, none of the original housing elements were included in the Wichita House.
In 1948 William Graham, a former investor in the project, purchased and combined both prototypes and created the “Wichita House,” which carried a refined vision of the original Dymaxion: the hexagon was transformed into a smooth circle, and the building was set only a few inches above the ground (rather than fully suspended, as the Dymaxion would have been). Aside from the patented Dymaxion bathroom, none of the original housing elements were included in the Wichita House.
Like his earlier project, the “Dymaxion House”, the Wichita House was intended to be a complete “dwelling machine,” and Fuller pursued this notion in lectures and writing, suggesting that industrial design and architecture had never been more compatible. In the end, the Beech Company (the company that was funding Fuller’s research into the Wichita project) decided not to produce the House, convinced that, despite its reception and improvements on his earlier Dymaxion House, the public was still not prepared to inhabit a machinelike object. Fuller and his team had to abandon their project and leave the Wichita plant where they had begun preliminary production in 1947. Like the Dymaxion, the Wichita House would enter the annals of replicable utopian homes that would never see the light of day.
Fuller called himself “neither an optimist or a pessimist, [but] a realist!” Initiative and Integrity were not empty words for Fuller, who presented us with choices for the future. “We have the option to make it if greed and ignorance are set aside, but it will be precarious, and we now have enough knowledge and world resources to provide for 100% of humanity. It will either be Utopia or Oblivion.”
Fuller called himself “neither an optimist or a pessimist, [but] a realist!” Initiative and Integrity were not empty words for Fuller, who presented us with choices for the future. “We have the option to make it if greed and ignorance are set aside, but it will be precarious, and we now have enough knowledge and world resources to provide for 100% of humanity. It will either be Utopia or Oblivion.”
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