Dymaxion house
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The Dymaxion House was developed by inventor Buckminster Fuller to address several failures he perceived with extant homebuilding techniques. Fuller designed several different versions of the house at different times, but they were factory manufactured kits, assembled on site, intended to be suitable for any site or environment and to use resources efficiently. One important design consideration was ease of shipment and assembly.
The word Dymaxion is a brand name that Fuller used for several of his inventions.
Criticisms of the Dymaxion Houses include its supposed "one-size-fits-all" cookie-cutter approach to housing which completely disregarded local site and architectural idiom, and its use of energy-intensive materials such as aluminum, rather than low-energy materials such as adobe or tile. Fuller chose aluminum for its lightweight, high strength, and long-term durability, arguably factors that compensate for the initial production cost.
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[edit] History
Fuller's young daughter died from an infection contracted because they lived in poor housing during a Chicago winter. This personal tragedy permanently changed Fuller's priorities. The first, most successful "Dymaxion" design was for the Soviet Union for temporary housing during World War II. It was mass-produced and based on tooling for a sheet-metal grain silo. Several hundred units were constructed and installed, but before the war ended the state housing ministry decided that the housing was unsuitable for permanent use. The grain-silo house was reported by inhabitants to be warm, easy-to-heat, well-lit, vermin-proof and arguably superior to the housing previously available at the installed sites.
The Siberian grain-silo house was the first system in which Fuller noted the "dome effect." Many installations have reported that a dome induces a local vertical heat-driven vortex that sucks cooler air downward into a dome if the dome is vented properly (a single overhead vent, and peripheral vents). Fuller adapted the later units of the grain-silo house to use this effect.
The final design of the Dymaxion house used a central vertical stainless steel strut on a single foundation. Structures similar to a bicycle-wheel hung down from this supporting the roof, whilst beams radiating out supported the floor. Wedge-shaped fans of sheet metal aluminum formed the roof, ceiling and floor. Each structure was assembled at ground level and then winched up the strut. The Dymaxion house was the first conscious effort at an autonomous building in the twentieth century.
It was a prototype that proposed to use a packaging toilet, water storage and a convection driven ventillator built into the roof. It was designed for the stormy areas of the world: temperate oceanic islands, and the Great Plains of North America, South America and Eurasia. In most modern houses, laundry, showers and commodes are the major water uses, with drinking, cooking and dish-washing consuming less than twenty liters per day. The Dymaxion house proposed to reduce water use by a gray water system, a packaging commode, efficient horizontally-agitated laundry equipment, and a unique personal cleanser called a fogger. The fogger would use very fine particles of water dispersed by compressed air. It would permit one to bathe with only a cup or so of water. Fuller is reported to have said that it worked on the same principle as commercial degreasers, but with much smaller water particles to make it comfortable.
[edit] The real Dymaxion house
Two Dymaxion houses were proptotyped - one indoors (the "Barwise" house) and one outdoors (the "Danbury" house). No Dymaxion house built according to Fuller's intentions was ever constructed and lived in. An enthusiast purchased both prototypes as well as assorted unused prototyping elements as salvage after the venture failed. He built the round house on his lakefront property, disabling the ventillator and other interior features. It was inhabited for about thirty years, although as an extension to an existing ranch house, rather than standing alone as intended by Fuller. This house as well as all the component prototyping parts were acquired by The Henry Ford in 1991. A painstaking process was used to conserve as many original component parts and systems as possible and restore the rest using original documentation from the Fuller prototyping process. It was installed indoors in the Henry Ford Museum in 2001 with a full exhibit.
Since there was no evidence of the crucial internal rain-gutter system, some elements of the rain collecting system were omitted from the restored exhibit. The roof was designed to wick water inside and drip into the rain-gutter and then to the cistern, rather than have a difficult-to-fit, perfectly waterproof roof.
During the prototyping process the idea for the packaging toilet was immediately replaced by a conventional septic system because the packaging plastic was not available. Other features worked as advertised, notably the heating, and the passive air conditioning system, based on the "dome effect."
The inhabitants said of the heavily modified version of the house that they actually lived in the bathroom was a particular delight. The children loved it for water fights because "it was absolutely indestructible as far as water was concerned." The bathroom consisted of two connected stamped copper bubbles, built as four nesting pieces. The bottom piece is fully plated in tin/antimony alloy and the top half painted. Each bubble had a drain. No area had a radius of less than four inches (10 cm) to aid cleaning. The commode, shower, bathtub and sink were molded into the structural shell in one piece. One bubble contained a step-up ergonomic bathtub and shower, high enough to wash children without stooping, but just two steps (16 inches / 40 cm) up. The oval tub had the controls mounted on the inside left of the entrance to the oval tub. The other bubble was the bathroom proper with commode and sink. The ventilation for the bathroom was a large silent fan under the main sink, which kept odors away from people's noses. All lighting was totally enclosed. To prevent fogging, the mirror faced into the medicine chest, which was ventilated by the fan. A plastic version of the bathroom was available intermittently up until the 1980s.
The large wrap-around windows and lightweight structures were very popular with the children, who crawled on the windowsill, and twanged the bicycle-wheel-style main struts.
[edit] See also
[edit] External link
- Henry Ford Museum has restored the prototype and installed it in the museum.
