Mobile Utopia.

BUCKMINSTER FULLER, DESIGNING FOR MOBILITY

By Michael John Gorman. Milan: Skira. 2005, [pounds sterling]34 ($65.)

This book set out to investigate the idea that Buckminster Fuller had a central ambition--to achieve the construction of the autonomous intellectual and practical individual home that could be deployed (by helicopter) wherever the owner wished. It begins at the time BF commits 'egocide' rather than suicide in Chicago in 1927. Fuller apparently decided at that moment to 'make the world work for one hundred per cent of humanity, in the shortest possible time, through spontaneous cooperation, without ecological offence or the disadvantage of anyone'.

The writer identifies Fuller's strong philosophical approach while revealing his desire to physically demonstrate a new model home--not simply a construction but a way of living. Herein lies the most evident of many paradoxes in Fuller's life--and it is carefully revealed by Gorman.

Fuller's own hyperbole is that all his design work starts 'with the universe' and if Fuller's goal was to transform the dwelling unit through the exploitation of industrialisation and geometry based upon his 'unique' insight into nature, he also believed that this would change human behaviour.

Gorman writes a lucid explanation giving the reader a historical, geometrical, technical and philosophical trace throughout the story.

Fuller considered Henry Ford 'the greatest artist of the twentieth century' and dreamed of the industrially produced autonomous home air-lifted to the idyll island of your choice using the geodesic dome. It had its origins in Ford's approach to standardised volume production and the post-war housing crisis. It was a seductive development of his prior hopes for both versions of his Dymaxion House and his Standard of Living Package, neither of which were commercially unsuccessful.

However, people found that living permanently in a dome was profoundly disturbing, and produced a lot of waste (space, energy, covering material off-cuts). Given the current archi-political preoccupation with the inexpensive prefabricated approach to housing supply, this book is a timely reminder of the dangers of design hype.

The book also reveals aspects of Fuller's persona that hitherto have remained relatively private. It conveys a sense that Fuller was brilliant in captivating and exploiting design students and others. The book captures this 'I am the pilot of Spaceship Earth' character rather well. The reality of the deployable universal lightweight home seems in the end to be less about sharing the planet, and more to do with single choice economics and a last fling at a utopian idea of the home. Fuller, cocky, self-assured designer-architect-engineer-poet-philosopher-anticipator, who promoted his synergetic view of the world with his technological developments and vision of global unity, is certainly brought down to earth with a bump in this absorbing book.

It is also a visually rich book that contains many unknown illustrations from the forty five tonnes of archive inherited by the Stanford University Libraries, where the author was recently curator of the Buckminster Fuller Collection.