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Recreating the legendary futuristic Dymaxion Car, Foster’s No. 4 version was a lengthy and expensive two year project, but was obviously a labor of love. Buckminster Fuller’s futuristic three wheeled car was brief, with a mere three actually built. Incredibly efficient the streamlined body with long tail-fin averaged 35 miles to the gallon and could achieve 120 mph. The Zeppelin inspired design with a V8 Ford engine was intended to fly as well, Fuller’s vision of revolutionizing how people traveled. 

Buckminster Fuller

Referencing some 2,000 photographs as a starting point, Foster was also able to borrow the only surviving Dymaxion Car (No. 2) from the National Automobile Museum in Reno, Nevada, with the promise of creating a much needed new interior for the car. Recreating the interior for the new car (as well as for No. 2) ended up being more of a historic approximation relying primarily on images of the original Dymaxion Car, tracking down (if any) original components, and building replicas from scratch.

Norman Foster driving his Dymaxion Car

The completed Dymaxion Car was featured in an exhibition of the work of Buckminster Fuller curated by Foster in Madrid last September. Our coverage of the exhibition can be found here.

Foster shared that, “driving the Dymaxion is a revelation. There’s something in that feel as you wind the steering wheel and increase the power. The horizon just kind of spins around the cockpit. It’s quite extraordinary. And it’s a showstopper. Even now, seventy-eight years later, it still has the power to stop people in their tracks.”

© Gregory Gibbons, Courtesy Ivorypress

Metropolis Mag Q&A: Norman Foster and the Dymaxion Car
By Martin C. Pedersen

What inspired you to recreate Bucky’s famous Dymaxion Car?

Bucky is never far from my thoughts. We collaborated on projects for the last twelve years of his life. When I was awarded the Royal Guild Gold medal in London, he gave the talk. At that point we had decided to do houses for each other. So he came over and we talked about the project. He gave the talk and then he left for America, off to see his terminally ill wife, Ann, in the hospital. On arrival, he had a fatal heart attack at her bedside and she died thirty six hours later. Curiously, on that trip to England, he said to me, “You know, Norman, anytime, I can pull the plug.” I guess that’s when he pulled the plug. He got there and realized that his wife wasn’t going to recover.

Why remake the Dymaxion now?

It was an interesting exercise for us. Like everything else he did, the car was pure Bucky. He was a friend of Henry Ford, which insured that he would get Ford parts for 30 percent of their true cost. So he took the flathead v8 engine, the wheels, the steering wheel, the transmission, and turned it 180 degrees. So you can make a like-by-like comparison between the Dymaxion car and Fords from 1913 to 1933. But the Dymaxion was three times the volume. It had the potential of taking up to eleven rather than four. It was significantly faster, and consumed half the fuel. It was truly doing more with less.

In recreating the new car, where did you draw the line between faithfully executing those original plans and drawings, and making improvements to them?

The #4 car is not a replica of the #3 car, but we did replicate the engine, the Studebaker ignition, the Ford wheels and steering wheel. The only thing that’s not completely authentic and original is the hand break. The original didn’t have one, for some strange reason.

I saw the surviving Dymaxion at the Whitney show a few years back. The interior had badly deteriorated. Your team must have done a great deal of detective work to recreate the interior.

Yes, unbelievable. Fortunately, we know the people at Stanford well, where the archive is. And the people we chose to do the restoration work were also extraordinarily incredible at research. We generated a huge body of knowledge. People would email and call in. We developed a great archive and out of that produced a book on the car. The book is tiny, tiny tip of the iceberg on all the material we generated.

It took two years to complete this. How much did the project cost?

I’d rather not talk about that. The true answer is an arm and a leg, a lot of money. It took twice as long and cost significantly more than I had budgeted for it. Of course, that’s everybody’s story with any classic restoration. Everyone underestimated the task. But then, it was a group of perfectionists involved, and it’s an absolutely stunning vehicle.

What is the car’s relevance to automobiles today?

First of all, the maxim of doing more with less is more urgent and imperative today than it’s ever been. In a way the Dymaxion was the classic people-mover before its time. The three wheel configuration caused a lot of debate. Was it a stable configuration? Not withstanding the size. It does produce this extraordinarily dramatic turning circle. There is a vintage movie of Bucky pirouetting the car around this policeman. It just nudges the policeman as it circles around him. I’ve driven it in an airfield and explored exactly that capability. There’s something in that feel as you wind the steering wheel and increase the power. The horizon just kind of spins around the cockpit. It’s quite extraordinary. And it’s a show stopper.

What’s the ride like aerodynamically?

It’s not soft, but it’s amazingly cushioned. It’s more like a boat. Of course it was co-designed with Sterling Burgess, the America’s Cup-winning yacht designer. So the ride is quite remarkable. It has a lot of the characteristics of 1930s cars: the break pressure is quite heavy, but that’s normal for vehicles of that period. It has its British MOT and British plates. It is road legal, but since it has precious value I’m not sure that I’m about to drive it on a narrow country lane.

What can it do on a straight away?

You’d be very conformable on legal road speed limits. Natural caution on my part, possibly a side affect of advancing years, introduces a degree of hesitation.

Would it comfortably do 100 kph [sixty miles per hour]?

Oh, yes. It’s also a precursor to something called the D45. The D45 was an urban car, seating five, with the same three-wheel configuration. But the drawings of that demonstrate that it had better stability at speed because the rear wheel extends out to increase the wheel base. We did a series of studies and developed an absolutely beautiful film. We showed that as part of our Bucky exhibition in Madrid. It is quite amusing. The Dymaxion comes out of a 1930s garage in New York and drives past all these old cars. It goes past the Hearst Building, which of course was still relatively new, then crosses the river and goes into a tunnel. It comes out the other side in present day New York. It still looks like something out of a science fiction movie.

It’s interesting how you and Nicholas Grimshaw and Richard Rogers were all drawn to Bucky in your formative years. What drew all of you into his orbit?

It was his philosophy, his optimism, his belief in friendly clean technology that would enable the species to survive if they used their intelligence. There were other influences during that time. But I never dreamed that a few years later I’d end up being approached by Bucky to collaborate with him on projects and for it to become such a close relationship.

You’ve talked about Bucky to younger audiences. Do his ideas connect with them?

I think they really resonate. He empowered a generation. It’s not too much of an exaggeration to say that he triggered the green movement. Whether anything has made enough of an impact can be debated, but certainly the environmental movement is rooted in Bucky. He has tremendous appeal and relevance to younger generation architects and environmentalists today and in a way, I feel that he’s not recognized the way that he should be. He’s been much more widely understood in Europe. I don’t know how you feel, but I don’t think he’s ever been truly understood in America.

Seadrome 1/300 scale model [1922] by Edward Robert Armstrong

A seadrome, concept developed by Edward Robert Armstrong, is an enormous floating islands of steel and concrete, to cover 100 or more acres and be anchored at intervals across the Atlantic. According to Armstorng’s design, it would be rise 70 feet (21 m) or more above the surface of the ocean by tubular columns that would allow waves to pass underneath. We can read the following description:

A seadrome would be a “floating landing deck,” essentially an anchored, stormproof airport and refueling station. It would ride high above the waves, moored at one end so as to trail the wind [thus always staying in the best position for landings], and be big enough to permit the landing and takeoff of most planes. It would be supported 70 feet or more above the surface by tubular columns that would allow waves to pass through underneath. The columns would terminate in ballast tanks 100 feet below the surface, where they would be stable, since waves are surface disturbances only. Armstrong said eight of them, “anchored to the bottom of the Atlantic, at intervals of approximately 350 miles,” would be enough to reach [from the US to] Europe.

We can see how engineer had influenced the avant-garde and radical architecture. If now we can see proposals to reuse abandoned oil rigs or some other that are based on the idea of recycling ships and marine structures, some of the designs of the 1960s and 1970s were based on this idea of seadromes as floating islands orfloating cities. That’s why we found really provocative to talk about the seadromes and how they have been “adopted” by different disciplines, including architecture.

Floating Ocean Airports [Feb. 1934]. Source: Modern Mechanix

Project Habakkuk. Render. Source: Mondolithic

Time magazine wrote on November 27, 1933:

A perennial gift to Sunday feature editors for the last five years has been the Armstrong Seadrome, vividly imaginative project for a chain of floating airports across the Atlantic. The perfect publicity subject, it offered serious readers masses of data on construction of huge platforms, stabilized high above the waves by means of weighted pillars, on problems of anchorage, navigation, operation, economics.

The seadrome idea was also the starting point of another utopian project, the Habakkuk by Geoffrey Pyke, based on a scheme to assemble an elite unit for winter operations in Norway, Romania, and the Italian Alps, which is basically an aircraft carrier out of pykrete [a mixture of wood pulp and ice]. Pyke envisioned ships as vast and solid as icebergs. But, as we can read at Cabinet Magazine, the Habbakuk was never built anyway. Land-based aircraft were attaining longer ranges, U-boats were being hunted down faster than they could be built, and the US was gaining numerous island footholds in the Pacific—all contributing to a reduced need for a vast, floating airfield.

The idea of the seadrome as a floating island just takes us to analyze how they were part of the inspiration of some floating megastructures. Reyner Banham pointed on his book Megastructure: Urban Futures of the Recent Past that mostly all of the first megastructure designed on the first years of the avant-garde movement were inspired by piers and freight platforms, such as the Scheveningen pier in the Netherlads or the Santa Monica pier in Los Angeles. So we can see that the relationship with the idea of floating cities was there, since the earlymegastructuralist projects.

But talking about more recent projects, we can see the evident similarities from this airport designed by M. Lurcat for the middle of the river Seine, in the midst of Paris in 1932:

To the Megafloat project in Japan, currently under construction:

So, the interesting idea here is to discuss if all this seadromes and floating islands can become new territories to be inhabited. Hernán Diáz recently wrote for the issue Islands on Cabinet Magazine an interesting article called A Topical Paradise. Here he quoted the poem “islands” written by W. H. Auden, pointing:

Auden’s inversions suggests that, wether solid or liquid, an island embodies a focus of difference. Every segment in the circumference of an island ceaselessly insist against its surroundings, exerting a centrifugal force. Not only because “it is as though the island had pushed its desert outside”, as Deleuze writes in Desert Islands, but also because it is repelling the desert that pushes in.

After this reflections, we just think: What will come next… Islands in space inspired by seadromes? It seems that we’re going on that way:

Cloud Base. Source: GoogleImages

“Far off like floating seeds the ships
Diverge on urgent voluntary errands,
And this full view
Indeed may enter
And move in memory as now these clouds do,
That pass the harbour mirror
And all the summer through the water saunter.”
- “On This Island” by W.H. Auden

—–

Related readings:
- Desert Islands and Other Texts (1953-1974) [Semiotext(e) / Foreign Agents] by Gilles Deleuze
- Journey to the end of the night. Article about Seadromes
- The Floating Island. Article about Project Habakkuk at Cabinet.
- Soundtrack: On Islands by New Musik [spotify link]

“I will walk around the island. Look to see if there is something to eat. Build a house from straw and wood. Carve a bow and arrow to hunt wild pigs and tigers. Look for a man to fall in love with. If I don’t find him, I’ll make one from clay and mud [...] I don’t think I will make art on a desert island.”
- Keren Cytter, Cabinet Magazine [2010]

Employing one of [Oppenheim's] characteristic quasi-scientific methods, the piece was created by issuing radio instructions to an aircraft which discharged a liquid nitrogen vapor trail. The aircraft began by flying in revolutions measuring three quarters of a mile in diameter. Subsequently the pilot was instructed to repeat this manoeuver but, with each revolution, he was made to reduce the size of the diameter of the circle and lose height—and it is no mean feat controlling a plane according to these specifications. The operation had to be repeated three times before the desired whirlpool effect was achieved.

In a short story called "The Cloud-Sculptors of Coral D," J.G. Ballard envisions a tropical atoll where the residents have learned to "sculpt" clouds in the sky, listening to Wagner over loud speakers and using specially engineered gliders and flying techniques.

"Lifted on the shoulders of the air above the crown of Coral D," Ballard writes, "we would carve seahorses and unicorns, the portraits of presidents and film stars, lizards and exotic birds. As the crowd watched from their cars, a cool rain would fall on to the dusty roofs, weeping from the sculptured clouds as they sailed across the desert floor towards the sun."

They are part aesthetic object, part weather system.

[Image: "Column" by Anthony McCall, courtesy of Creative Review].

Both of these came to mind this weekend when I read that artist Anthony McCall is planning to create something called "Column" in Liverpool, to coincide with the London 2012 Olympics. It will be "a spinning column of cloud a mile high," as Creative Review describes it, "visible across the North West region throughout the Olympic year."

Made of cloud and mist, this "swirling micro-climate" will be "created by gently rotating the water on the surface of the Mersey and then adding heat which will make it lift into the air like a water spout or dust devil."

We'll have to see how it actually works out, of course, but the idea that cities might soon deploy large-scale specialty weather-effects—that is, permanent climatological megastructures—instead of, say, Taj Mahals or Guggenheim Bilbaos as a way of differentiating themselves from their urban competition is a compelling one.

The future weather-architects of 2050 A.D. In-house climatologists spinning noctilucent clouds above Manhattan.