The New York Review of Books

1.

One of the most persistent yet elusive dreams of the Modern Movement in architecture has been prefabrication: industrially made structures that can be assembled at a building site. Although prefabrication has a long history—the ancient Romans shipped pre-cut stone columns, pediments, and other architectural elements to their colonies in North Africa, where the numbered parts were reassembled into temples—the idea took on a new impetus with the technological advances of the Industrial Revolution. Nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century exponents of prefabrication were certain it would supplant age-old traditions of individualized design and handcrafted construction. The building art would be revolutionized by freeing designers and construction workers from repetitive tasks, and democratized by making high-style architecture more affordable.

However, in the century and a half since the first comprehensive masterpiece of modern architectural prefabrication—Joseph Paxton’s Crystal Palace of 1850–1851 in London, which combined modular planning, interchangeable parts, and fast construction—entirely ready-made buildings have been scarce at best, although prefabricated components are now used in virtually all construction. The major impediment has been a matter of economics. The financial benefits of prefabrication have never been as large as its advocates predicted, for although some labor costs can be reduced by machine manufacturing, on-site assembly of any building still depends to some extent on the handwork of skilled craftsmen.

The human element that can never be eliminated from the construction process was addressed by Buster Keaton in his two-reel film One Week of 1920, a prescient satire on prefabrication that must have bemused as well as amused audiences at a time when growing numbers of Americans were buying factory-made houses from mail-order catalogs. Rather than celebrating this modern innovation, Keaton—the peerless master of intricately choreographed and perfectly timed sight gags—imagined practically every catastrophe that could occur after the pieces for a ready-to-assemble dream house were delivered.

A captivating clip from One Week is among the many highlights of the Museum of Modern Art’s thought-provoking exhibition “Home Delivery: Fabricating the Modern Dwelling,” which overlapped this summer with the Whitney Museum of American Art’s “Buckminster Fuller: Starting with the Universe,” a retrospective on the engineer and inventor who designed several prototypes for prefabricated housing.

It says a great deal about the overestimated potential and unfulfilled promise of prefabrication that so many of the projects displayed in both shows were never carried out. Evanescent visions of the future are symptomatic of troubled times like ours and they also were common during the Sixties, when many felt that modern architecture had subsided into academic convention. In 1960, the Museum of Modern Art’s “Visionary Architecture” show, curated by Arthur Drexler, caused a sensation by displaying works like Fuller’s Dome Over Manhattan project, a two-mile-wide transparent canopy that would have enclosed the island’s midsection and made skyscrapers look like taxidermy specimens under a bell jar. In a review of that startling MoMA survey, Time magazine reassured its readers that such proposals “are not the work of crackpots but of reputable men.”

Ulrich Conrads and Hans-G. Sperlich’s Phantastische Architektur of 1960 abounded with illustrations of built, unbuilt, and unbuildable schemes by a host of nineteenth- and twentieth-century visionaries outside the mainstream Modernist canon, including Fuller, whose geodesic domes were depicted.¹ The revolutionary fervor that fueled the early Modern Movement had cooled by the early Sixties. But new, alternative versions of modernism found a plausible prehistory in Visionary Architects: Boullée, Ledoux, Lequeu of 1968, the catalog for an eye-opening exhibition of little-known eighteenth-century French renderings of hypothetical monuments on view at the Metropolitan Museum of Art just as les événements de mai played out in Paris.

Visionary schemes produced during the 1960s (many of which involved prefabrication, or employed engineering techniques devised or championed by Fuller) are now being reevaluated by architectural historians, including Larry Busbea, who teaches at the University of Arizona. Busbea’s superb Topologies: The Urban Utopia in France, 1960–1970 is the first book-length study of a time and place when technologically innovative design proposals flourished on architects’ drawing boards but languished in the corridors of power.

The most characteristic manifestation of France’s postwar architectural avant-garde was the multifunctional megastructure, idealized by leftist theorists and practitioners as a catalyst for social transformation. Exemplified by the Hungarian-born architect Yona Friedman’s several unbuilt Spatial City schemes of the late Fifties and Sixties for Paris and Tunis, these sprawling mixed-use agglomerations resembled vast jungle gyms connected by lengthy public concourses and interspersed with modular enclosures. Friedman considered his designs the building blocks for an “extendable city” in which easily reconfigurable lightweight frameworks would supersede socially oppressive urban patterns, epitomized by Haussmann’s Paris city plan of the mid-nineteenth century.²

Busbea, in confident command of very abstruse material, gives a brisk and lucid account of the theoretical issues that shaped architectural thought during the initial decade of the French Fifth Republic. He places those concerns within the larger intellectual context of the Prospectivists, a forward- thinking coterie that included politicians such as Pierre Mendès France and the journalists Jean-Jacques Servan-Schreiber and Françoise Giroud, who shared a conviction that their country’s restoration to its pre-war international prominence could be achieved through a concerted program of scientific and technological progress.

With the election in 1958 of the culturally conservative President de Gaulle—who built very little for a French chief of state, and contented himself with cleaning soot-blackened landmarks—officials increasingly viewed the avant-garde’s new urban vision as too inventive, ambitious, and unpredictable in political impact to risk their sponsorship. The exception was Renzo Piano and Richard Rogers’s Georges Pompidou Center of 1971–1977 in Paris (though it derived from an English source: the unbuilt Fun Palace of 1961–1964, a performing- and visual-arts complex conceived by the architect Cedric Price and the dramaturge Joan Littlewood).

Topologies is illustrated with several designs by French architects and engineers who adapted ideas closely associated with Fuller, such as Günther Günschel’s Project for a Dome Composed of Hyperbolic Paraboloids of 1957, a variant of the geodesic dome, and an undated structure by David Georges Emmerich, based on the principle called “tensegrity,” which Fuller picked up from the sculptor Kenneth Snelson at Black Mountain College. Snelson realized that the powerful forces needed for high-performance engineering could be held in dynamic tension with minimal structural apparatus. Fuller applied that finding to his compositions of weblike scaffoldings, both rectilinear and curved, which supported themselves with astonishing efficiency.

2.

During the 1960s, the American counterculture found a most unlikely idol in Fuller, who was over seventy and had worked for the military, but achieved the status of a rock star. In countless public lectures at colleges, conferences, and festivals throughout the hectic final decades of his life, this born salesman and indefatigable self-promoter mesmerized audiences with his epic lectures, which went on for as long as sixteen hours. As the ever-observant Philip Johnson enviously reminisced, “No one had the kids eating out of his hand like he did.”

Films of Fuller in action make it difficult to fathom why so many were so excited by his personal appearances, except perhaps as feats of endurance. He was unusually short, and so shortsighted that thick eyeglass lenses magnified his gaze to disconcerting immensity. His clipped New England monotone was no match for Robert Frost’s adorable twang, but Fuller exerted a hypnotic effect that belied his unprepossessing appearance, as he spun out homilies on how easy it would be to right all the world’s wrongs if only we followed his simple instructions.

It was hard to disagree with much of what he said—the unconscionable inequities in the global distribution of wealth ought to be redressed; no one anywhere should be allowed to live in hunger, disease, or poverty; science and technology must be harnessed for peaceful purposes rather than war. However, Fuller seldom got around to specifying the means by which such needed reforms could be instituted.

His rambling discourses, far less comprehensible on the printed page than they seemed when he delivered them in person, provide ample proof of a fertile but scattered mind and help to explain his obsession with inventing new systems and with wordplay, which he perhaps hoped would organize his hazy and disconnected ideas. (Fuller’s World Game of 1969, meant to teach the public about international resource allocation, has won him an avid constituency among linguistic theorists.)

Fuller’s spellbinding delivery of fuzzy prose brings to mind his greatest architectural contemporary, Louis Kahn, similarly verbose and vague. However, Kahn was no charlatan, which cannot be said with absolute certainty of Fuller, a talented structural engineer but a most unreliable social engineer who abandoned more than one of his almost-finished projects, it would seem, because the results might have disproved his overreaching claims or shown his theories to have been faulty. His most fantastic invention was not the geodesic dome—in retrospect the fool’s gold of mid-twentieth-century architecture—but rather the fictionalized life story he fed to credulous biographers.

His version of things remained unchallenged until Stanford University acquired the Fuller archive in 1999 (sixteen years after his death) and finally opened his copious papers to full scrutiny. As with Nixon and his White House tapes, Fuller was the agent of his own historical undoing by meticulously recording in private the very activities he lied about with such impunity in public. Fuller called his omnium-gatherum of 847 life-and-works scrapbooks the Dymaxion Chronofile, but a better name might have been Exhibits A through Z, because of all the damning evidence they contain. To be sure, Frank Lloyd Wright was less than wholly truthful in An Autobiography, but unlike Fuller he was unashamed to admit professional or personal setbacks, and there was often an essential veracity in the architect’s lies.

Among the first scholars to make use of this revealing trove was Loretta Lorance, whose unpublished 2004 doctoral dissertation at the City University of New York Graduate Center, “Building Values: Buckminster Fuller’s Dymaxion House in Context,” cites dozens of instances in which he distorted or falsified significant facts about his career, claiming, for example, that he was unfairly forced out as president of a prefab building materials and construction company because of a corporate restructuring, when in fact he was let go because of his own incompetence and mismanagement.³

Richard Buckminster Fuller was born in 1895 to a distinguished Massachusetts family that arrived from England six years before the founding of Harvard, which he attended for two years until he was expelled. As he recalled, “I cut classes and went out quite deliberately to get into trouble, and so naturally I got kicked out.” In 1917 he married the long-suffering Anne Hewlett, of the Long Island Hewletts, but he did not give up carousing until a string of personal and professional disasters led him to the brink of suicide ten years later.

In his autobiography, Fuller related that just as he was about to throw himself into Lake Michigan and end it all, he was suddenly encased within a “sparkling sphere of light” that levitated and hovered in midair, while a disembodied voice admonished him, “You do not have the right to eliminate yourself, you do not belong to you. You belong to the universe.” That transparent celestial orb and those words of cosmic consolation evoke the peculiar blend of Emersonian egocentrism and pantheistic mysticism that typified the American Transcendentalists, one of whose more prominent members was Fuller’s redoubtable great-aunt, the pioneering editor, journalist, and feminist Margaret Fuller. No wonder he became such a hit with the hippies, whose mantra of “We Are All One” was practically in the old man’s genes.