The future of transportation did not proceed according to plan. Touted as the greatest advance since the horse-and-buggy when it rolled out of the factory in 1933, the first car that Buckminster Fuller built burned up in a fire a decade later. A second one got shredded for scrap metal during the Korean War. As for the third of Fuller's three prototype Dymaxion vehicles, there were rumors that a Wichita Cadillac dealer warehoused it in the '50s for his private pleasure. The rumors were wrong. In 1968, some Arizona State University engineering students found it parked on a local farm. Repurposed as a makeshift poultry coop, the last vestige of Fuller's futuristic transport was slowly succumbing to the corrosive effects of rain and chicken poop.
The farm belonged to a man named Theodore Mezes, who'd bought the three-wheeled car for a dollar some decades earlier. The students gave him $3000 and hauled it home, but they couldn't make it run. So they resold it to Bill Harrah – a casino mogul with a museumful of Duesenbergs and Pierce-Arrows – who had the aluminum shell refurbished and the windows painted over so that people couldn't see the ruined interior. In Harrah's collection – later rechristened the National Automobile Museum – the Dymaxion car cruised into automotive history.
And there it might have remained indefinitely, a restored icon of Fuller's stillborn vision, if a former colleague hadn't decided to conceive a new one a quarter century after Fuller's death. The colleague was Sir Norman Foster, architect of Wembley Stadium and the Beijing Airport. As a young man, Foster had collaborated with Fuller on some of Fuller's final architectural projects – mostly unrealized – and Foster wasn't shy about using Fuller's name to add intellectual heft to his subsequent commercial success.
Money was no issue. Foster hired the British racing car restorers Crosthwaite & Gardiner, and had the original Dymaxion shipped on special loan to East Sussex from Reno, Nevada. Construction took two years, more than twice the time that Fuller required to build the original. The back axle and V-8 engine were stripped from a Ford Tudor sedan, the same source as Fuller had used. These were flipped upside-down on the chassis so that the back wheels powered the car from the front end. A third wheel, controlled by steel cables stretching from the steering wheel to a pivot at the back of the automobile, acted as a sort of rudder. Atop the chassis, a zeppelin-shaped body of hand-beaten aluminum was wrapped around an ash-wood frame. To this aerodynamic shell, several attributes from the other two Dymaxion cars were added, most prominently a long stabilizing fin. Adapting the best qualities from Fuller's three prototypes, Foster's Dymaxion Car No. 4 is the idealized vehicle that Fuller never had the funding to build: the closest metal can get to the Dymaxion legend. Or is it?
Few people besides Foster have actually driven the Dymaxion No. 4, and even he cautiously clocks less than half the 120 mile-per-hour speed that Fuller boasted his Dymaxion could handle. (While carrying eleven passengers, no less, and with thirty-mile-per-gallon fuel efficiency. In other words, the car purportedly could travel at twice the speed of a Ford Tudor on half the fuel, carrying three times the number of people.) The truth is that Fuller's streamlining is unwieldy in crosswinds, the rear-wheel steering is ropey even on a dry and windless day, and the system of rudder cables is sluggish and unstable. None of this would have surprised Fuller. He refused to let anyone pilot a Dymaxion without special lessons, and injured his own family when a failed steering component caused his car to flip en route to a Harvard reunion. He may have privately been relieved when his company collapsed shortly after the third prototype was completed. "I never discussed it with daddy, but I think the accident turned him away from the car," Fuller's daughter Allegra told the design writer Jonathan Glancey in 2011. "I think he thought that if the car did this to his wife and child then maybe it wasn't the thing to do."
Foster had no such compunction. His modern Dymaxion faithfully recapitulates Fuller's unresolved design flaws, an unabashed tribute to Bucky's genius that perversely enshrines everything wrong with the original vehicles. As Foster confessed to the New York Times in a 2010 interview, the car is "so visually seductive that you want to own it, to have the voluptuous physicality of it in your garage." In fact, the sheer stylishness of the thing is so mesmerizing that even Fuller himself lost sight of the ideas that made it truly revolutionary, far more than a futuristic mode of transport. Before the Dymaxion car became the Dymaxion car, it was a machine designed to mobilize society, rocketing people away from virtually every assumption about life in the 20th century.
Mezes's chickens had the right instinct. The iconic object needs to be destroyed for the Dymaxion vision to be restored.
Excerpted from You Belong to the Universe: Buckminster Fuller and the Future by Jonathon Keats, to be published by Oxford University Press in April and available for pre-order now. Read Part II of the excerpt here.
