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The great porous globe that has suddenly landed among the ivy and trees of verdant LaGuardia Place turns out to be a structural model for a radical type of affordable, prefabricated housing. This single eye-catching installation -- Buckminster Fuller's Fly's Eye Dome -- marks the opening of a a week of Buckminster Fuller celebrations in NYC.
R. Buckminster Fuller (1895-1983), known as "Bucky," was a pathbreaking architect, inventor, and author who believed innovative design could address many of the world's problems. A consummate modernist, he studied the geometries of the universe for architectural inspiration. Time magazine smeared Fuller as "one of the century's great nutjobs," but the Whitney Museum is calling him "one of the great American visionaries of the 20th century." The series of events (which actually extends beyond this week) includes gallery openings, panel sessions, and film screenings hosted by the Buckminster Fuller Institute in collaboration with other organizations including the Center for Architecture (directly across from the dome) and the Max Protech Gallery.
Fuller wrote of the Fly's Eye Dome design in 1983, "The basic hardware components will produce a beautiful, fully equipped, air-deliverable house that weighs and costs about as much as a good automobile." He emphasized the structure's potential to harness passive solar energy and natural wind ventilation. And this before "Green" was in! The habitable version, naturally, offers windows. (Fuller's Dymaxion Car sold separately.)
Photos courtesy Gideon Fink Shapiro, top, and the Buckminster Fuller Institute.
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Knock it off with Bucky being a visionist or a savior of society. His structures are great for housing radar antennae but crappola for housing people. His dymnaxion car and house were bullshit and his writings unreadable.
I've always hated everything this half-assed utopian shitbag ever designed or built. It isn't clever, it isn't attractive, and it isn't architecture. It's just hyperrational egotistical ejaculate in a geometric wrapper.
Talk about unreadable. "Visionist." "Dymnaxion." "Crappola."
As for Time's article, it's hard to give it any credibility when it calls the EV1 one of the 50 worst cars of all time.
If Fuller died in 1983. As Yogi Berra might say, "He must have designed that before he died." That makes the design 25 years old. If it was such a great design both economically and functionally wouldn't there be a like a bazillion of these around the world? Instead it looks like some funky playground equipment left over from some World's Fair that the Beatles visited.
One other thing. The word "Green" makes me want to puke. Back in the mid sixties the word was "Ecology" same concept, different word. How about Organic, Sustainable, blah, blah, blah? It's not a new concept and unless it's economically feasible (unfortunately the bean counters at GM didn't think the EV1 was)it will not come to be. Paolo Soleri had his Arcosanti. How many people have moved in since he began construction?
Arcosanti is currently squatted by a couple hundred sweaty, pedantic, hippy cultists that grow squash in gullies fed by rainwater collected by a concrete berm that keeps their rusty crane from falling over and damaging the Sand Candle Suite.