National history museum showcases little-known Wichita artifact

Some think it looks like a flying saucer. Others see a carousel or a giant Hershey’s Kiss. One Beech Aircraft Corp. executive called it a pumpkin. For an Andover family, it was home for four decades.

Today, the Wichita-built Dymaxion House is on display at the Henry Ford Museum in the Detroit suburb of Dearborn, Mich., where 1.6 million annual visitors can take a tour and decide for themselves what the round house built of aluminum, steel and plastic, suspended on a mast like a giant umbrella looks like.

Dymaxion, a term architect and inventor Buckminster Fuller coined, is a combination of the words dynamic, maximum and tension. This is the only example of Fuller’s Dymaxion House ever built.

“We are honored to have it in the museum,” said Christian Overland, executive vice president at The Henry Ford. The museum hired Overland as a graduate intern in 1992 and sent him to Andover as part of a team that spent six weeks taking it down and trucking the pieces to Michigan for restoration and reassembly.

After a $1 million restoration effort, the Dymaxion exhibit opened in 2001. The structure on display includes components from two prototypes, some of Fuller’s individual trial systems and new components fabricated by The Henry Ford.

The Henry Ford is a complex with five attractions: Henry Ford Museum, Greenfield Village, Ford Rouge Factory Tour, Henry Ford Giant Screen Experience and Benson Ford Research Center. The Henry Ford Museum is packed with technological and social ideas and innovations, from exhibits exploring the first 40 years of flight to the bus where Rosa Parks took a stand for Civil Rights to a collection of historically significant vehicles.

The tour

The Dymaxion exhibit is set up to make visitors feel like they are taking a sales tour of a new home in 1946.

A prominent “Beechcraft Aircraft Corp.” sign welcomes them to, “A new way of living for 1946.”

The walls of the hallway leading to the house showcase historic advertising materials touting the Dymaxion’s mass produced parts, efficient systems, modern materials and beautiful styling. A strategy map shows Wichita as the manufacturing hub and explains that homeowners purchase the Dymaxion in their local showroom, the parts are shipped from Wichita to the customer’s lot and then, “It takes 10 men only two days to assemble the house using simple tools and following instructions.” The Dymaxion consisted of approximately 3,600 parts and weighed 3 tons, while a traditionally built home’s average weight was 150 tons.

At the end of the hallway is a short promotional video with a narrator speaking over black and white footage to explain that the key to this corner-less, stainless steel housing solution is partnering with aircraft manufacturers like Walter and Olive Ann Beech and “using the very same materials and tools, even the same workers. Assembly lines can turn them out at a clip never before seen in home construction. A quarter of a million a year in Wichita’s plants, 60,000 at Beech Aircraft alone. A complete house for $6,500 – the price of a Cadillac.”

Around the corner from the video is the main attraction. A platform surrounding the house allows visitors to peer inside the wraparound acrylic window to see a fully furnished living-dining room. A docent takes visitors inside for a tour, pointing out the features of the round house’s foyer, living-dining room, galley kitchen, two bedrooms and a bathroom the size of an airplane lavatory.

Many areas inside the 1,017-square-foot house are exposed so that visitors can see the inner workings of the unique design. Visitors can see the central mast that supports the house and holds bundled utilities. In another area, a wall is cut away so visitors can see the all-in-one kitchen concept that was to feature an integrated stove, oven and sink unit that would have refrigerated shelves and drawers.

As you exit the Dymaxion house, another short video explains why the concept didn’t take off. The bottom line, the narrator explains: “$10 million was needed to get the venture going and it could not be raised.”

According to the Henry Ford Museum, press coverage attracted 30,000 unsolicited orders for the house, and Fortune magazine predicted it would have a greater social impact than Ford’s automobile. While the press wrote about the prototype, the project stalled on design disagreements and financing the cost of setting up the factory for high-volume production.

The history

Wichita businessman William Graham was one of the investors in the Dymaxion project. When it failed, he acquired the prototype and assembled it on his family’s 600-acre farm in Butler County, a few miles south of the Andover Road and Kellogg intersection. He added a basement and other structures, and over the years he modified the round house to meet his family’s needs. It became know as the Wichita House.

The house was abandoned after William’s death and his children donated it to the Henry Ford Museum in 1991. In addition to the standing structure, Overland said, the family donated the contents of a storage unit that contained parts for a complete second prototype.

“They were very happy that there was a museum like ours to preserve the house,” Overland said. “They knew it was special. Their father told them about Buckminster, so they knew it was an important artifact.”

The museum had just updated its mission from a focus of collecting and preserving artifacts to providing “unique educational experiences based on authentic objects, stories and lives from America's traditions of ingenuity, resourcefulness and innovation.” Museum curators felt the Dymaxion House fit the new mission perfectly.

“The house helps tell the story of Buckminster Fuller, and his was a story that was yet to be told in a very significant way,” Overland said. “It is an important story about innovation and an ingenious way of thinking about housing, and also about perseverance and realizing your dreams. We also like it because while it was a commercial failure, there are so many innovations in that house and it led to Fuller developing the geodesic dome.”

Fuller was an engineer, architect and philosopher who had a lifelong pursuit of using technology to revolutionize construction and improve housing. He used his discoveries about balancing compression and tension forces from the Dymaxion House to design and patent the geodesic dome in the early 1950s. According to the Buckminster Fuller Institute, today there are more than 300,000 geodesic domes around the world, ranging from shelters to radar stations.

Fuller first conceived a single-family house with a tent-like roof suspended from a central mast by steel cables in 1927. At the close of World War II, he turned to Beech Aircraft Corp. to help make the house an affordable solution for the post-war housing shortage.

Beech was likely interested in the project because the company had the expertise and needed work to keep the factory busy while it transitioned from producing military aircraft to a post-war economy.

“Beech knew everything about metal fabrication, handling and construction, which is exactly what Fuller needed,” said Edward Phillips, a freelance writer and enthusiast of Wichita’s aviation history.

During this timeframe of waiting for the civilian aviation market to take off, Beech tried a number of sideline ventures: plastic nozzles for hair dryers, parts for automatic dishwashers, aluminum pie pans, corn harvesters and even a car, the 1946 Beechcraft Plainsman concept that never made it to production.

Phillips has a booklet with published comments made on Sept. 28, 1967, by Frank E. Hedrick, then an executive vice president of Beech. Hedrick talked about the “detours” the aircraft manufacturer had tried, including the all-metal, pre-fabricated house he called a pumpkin.

Phillips said building the prototype would have helped Beech learn to put Fuller’s design together and determine how to adapt it to mass production. While the contracts never materialized, he said the Dymaxion is “a fascinating aspect of what Olive Ann and Walter would do to keep the company afloat.”

This story was originally published December 19, 2016 at 2:23 PM with the headline "National history museum showcases little-known Wichita artifact."