DYMAXION

Mr. Buckminster Fuller's Dymaxion house is being shown this week at the rooms of the Harvard Society for Contemporary Art: When the first rumors of its marvels began to circulate in Cambridge, there was more cynicism and discountenance than even at Brancusi's Golden--Bird, or at the Modern French pictures. Consider a house which is primarily a machine to live in, which can be manufactured in mass, assembled at service stations and delivered in 24 hours, costing as a minimum $500 a ton. Its translucent watts is of casein, its inflatable doors and floors, its collapsible mast, its bathroom cast in a piece--all these were fantastic items to catch the imagination. However as many architects from the school and offices of the vicinity have honored the 4D plan with more than an incredible smile.

Its basic principle of decentralization, its independence of power resources, electric light, its amazingly simplified practicality in the perfection of detail has convinced many of the most obdurate, and has frightened many of the most farseeing. For in its widest implication the Dymaxion house is rather a frightening phenomenon. It threatens the architectural aesthetic round on an accumulative tradition, of Roman, Romanesque and Renaissance design. It dispenses with contracting engineers, with servants, with such domestic appendages as laundries, custom built furniture, electric light bulbs, carpets. It threatens the present economic system of centralized control of natural resources. It may mean the dissolution of the suburbs, the population of seemingly inaccessible parts of the earth. Personal independence of drudgery, allowance for a doubled leisure, a more civilized manner of existence, all depend on the Dymaxion House. Mr. Fuller has created the possibility of a new civilization, a new world of people, one only wonders with Shaw what man would do with his new found leisure.

Indeed Mr. Fuller has reinvented all the appurtenances of worksday life. The only thing left for him now, is the discovery of that elixir, by which man can double his span--so that he may satisfactorily enjoy the inevitable Millenium.