A trip back in time: The Dymaxion House exhibit at The Henry Ford in Dearborn - A true one-of-a-kind house!

Try to imagine what a subdivision of these homes would look like
in your neighborhood :

An inventor named Buckminisiter Fuller started thinking about the design for this
home in the late 1920's, and in the years during WWII the US Army commissioned
him to build and send these homes to the Persian Gulf. Mr. Fuller had bold ideas
to mass produce these homes for returning veterans to help ease the housing
shortage after the war, but his homes never came to fruitiion.

This Dymaxion home has been donated to The Henry Ford museum in Dearborn MI
and was lovingly restored to be exhibited there.

One of the unique (and ahead of it's time) features that I found so interesting was its
inner gutter system to capture rain water for recycling. In the picture below you will
see that the home is wrapped inside with aluminum sheets and has a gutter system
that lays just below those sheets. Any rainwater entering the home was funneled into
those gutters, then drained to a catch-all outside of the home to be reused by the
homeowner for lawn watering or clothes washing.




Imagine, in early 1940 someone was thinking about the environment and how to recycle
and reuse our natural resources!

Unlike the Lustron homes that were produced during the late 1940's, the Dymaxion
homes and the dreams of Mr. Fuller to mass produce these homes never came to pass.
What a shame. I would have loved to see what a subdivision of these homes looked like
in my area. The homes were right around 1000 square feet and had 2 bedrooms and
2 baths. (Unusual during those years to have 2 full baths!)


Below is a photo of what the living room and dining room looked like.





Have the winter blahs? Take a day trip to The Henry Ford museum in Dearborn MI.

The Village is closed now until around April, but the museum is open and is filled with treasures
and exhibits. There are 2 restaurants in the museum, plenty of parking, a coat check area at
the main entrance, and lots of family fun and "oohs and aahhs" to be had!

~Kris Wales~