One of the few to appreciate his work consistently was Banham who, in The Architecture of the Well-Tempered Environment got it just right, citing: “Paul Valery’s contrast between Eupalinos, the architect, and Tridon, the shipwright. The former was preoccupied with the right method of doing the allotted tasks, and deploying the accepted methods of his calling, and seemed to find a philosophical problem in every practical decision. Tridon, on the other hand, applied every technology that came conveniently to hand, whether or not it was part of the shipbuilding tradition, and treated the sayings of philosophers as further instruction on the direct solution of practical problems.” Bucky — who early imbibed a nautical tradition and whose late project for a floating Habitat was called “Triton City” — fits this description to a T. This made it tough for the profession to internalize him as one of its own.
The cool reception surely also stemmed from the fact that Bucky authentically delivered on Modernism’s promises, that he pulled its chestnuts from the fire, revealing its product to be far less than it claimed. In Theory and Design in the First Machine Age (1960), Banham deploys two telling visual comparisons, the first between Corbusier’s villa at Garches (1928–30) and Bucky’s Dymaxion House (1927–30). Corb’s familiar work embodies its Modernity via entirely representational means — through its starkly planar composition, its free plan, its slim pilotis hoisting it above the ground plane. Fuller’s house, on the other hand, is authentically radical in its suspended construction, its use of light, nontraditional materials, and its organization around a premanufactured mechanical core — form following function to the point of defamiliarization. On the very next page, Banham contrasts a design by Gropius for the body of the 1930 Adler Cabriolet with Bucky’s Dymaxion car of 1933. The Adler looks thoroughly antique with a few minor modifications around the margins; Bucky’s car looks, and acts, like the future.
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