BUCKMINSTER FULLER’s 1933 Dymaxion, a streamlined pod on three wheels,is one of the lovable oddballs in automotive history. Three were built,fawned over by the media and by celebrities, but the car pretty muchdisappeared after one crashed, killing the driver.nly one of the cars survives, and New Yorkers will get a chance to see it this summer in an exhibition opening June 26 at the Whitney Museum of American Artin New York called “Buckminster Fuller: Starting With the Universe.”The car, a nonrunning shell, has been lent by the National AutomobileMuseum in Reno, Nev.The Dymaxion was the zenith of the first wave of semi-scientificstreamlining,” said Russell Flinchum, a design historian. It showed upin newsreels and magazines, along with teardrop designs drawn by NormanBel Geddes, the futurist. It helped lead to public acceptance ofstreamlined cars like the 1936 Lincoln Zephyr. TheDymaxion appealed to the era of the Depression, when people dreamed ofradical new technological solutions to solve overwhelming problems. “Thereis a real fascination about Fuller,” said K. Michael Hays, adjunctcurator of architecture at the Whitney and one of the curators of theshow. Hugh Kenner, the literary critic, rated Fuller with James Joyce and T. S. Eliot and wrote a book about him. Fullerwas neither architect nor engineer, but a philosopher and preacher, aman more in the tradition of Emerson and Thoreau. His houses and carswere arguments, not products. He made up the word Dymaxion, combiningdynamic, maximum and ion, and used it as a personal brand. The architectural firm of Norman Foster, the Pritzker Prize winner who once worked with Fuller, is planning to build a replica Dymaxion. “TheDymaxion car was a thing of great beauty, and it was made at a timewhen creativity was at the fore in automobile design,” said DavidNelson, senior executive head of design at Foster Partners in London,who is directing the re-creation. Fuller was born inMassachusetts in 1895 and died in 1983. He was admitted to Harvardtwice, and twice expelled. He went from job to job until he was broke.After illness killed his young daughter, he had a revelation. Hedetermined to make his life “an experiment to find what a singleindividual can contribute to changing the world and benefiting allhumanity.”The Dymaxion car was one of the many experimentsmaking up that big experiment, along with his geodesic dome andDymaxion house. Fuller sketched the vehicle in 1927 under thename 4D transport, part aircraft, part automobile, with wings thatinflated at speed. In 1932, Fuller asked the sculptor, Isamu Noguchi,who was also a drinking buddy, to prepare sketches. They show a carshaped like an elongated teardrop with a rear third wheel that wouldlift off the ground and a tail fin that unfolded. Fuller foundan angel to invest in the car. Philip Pearson, a stockbroker who hadgotten out of the market just before the 1929 crash, put up enoughmoney to get the project off the ground. Fuller promised the car wouldhave a top speed of more than 120 miles an hour and gas mileage of 30miles a gallon. He took over the closed Locomobile factory inBridgeport, Conn., and hired Starling Burgess, a builder of racingyachts, to build the Dymaxion. Fuller opened the plant in March 1933.Despite Fuller’s talk of borrowing construction methods from theaircraft industry, Burgess built the car using many of the nauticalmethods applied to a racing boat. The chassis was aircraft-grade steel,but the body was an ash wood frame with aluminum tacked to its sidesand a roof of taut, painted canvas. The crude suspension was made up ofa Ford beam axle and leaf springs turned sideways. The tail wasomitted. By July, the first car was rolled out to an eagercrowd It was sold to Gulf Oil, which showed it off at the Century ofProgress exposition in Chicago. But in October, that car turned over,killing its driver, Francis T.
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