Buckminster Fuller’s Floating City (1968)
Over the years, numerous visionaries have imagined the creation of floating offshore cities. In the early 1960s, architect and inventor Fuller developed plans for an aquatic metropolis to be built in Tokyo Bay. After the death of his Japanese patron stalled the project, it was picked up by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, which commissioned Fuller to do a design and economic analysis for an American version. Fuller saw the idea as having myriad advantages. "Floating cities pay no rent to landlords," he wrote. "They are situated on the water, which they desalinate and recirculate in many useful and nonpolluting ways." Fuller’s "Triton City" concept employed an ingenious combination of tetrahedronal, or pyramidal, shapes to achieve the largest possible exterior space for its size. "Its sloping external surface is adequate for all its inhabitants to enjoy their own private, outside, tier-terracing garden homes," Fuller wrote. Inside the structure, Fuller planned to put shopping centers and other communal spaces. Unfortunately for Fuller and his floating city, President Lyndon Johnson, who apparently liked the idea so much that he took a model of it back to Texas for his presidential library, left office in 1969. He was replaced by Richard Nixon, whose administration was cool to the idea — according to Fuller, because the first proposed floating city was to be built in the Chesapeake Bay, just outside Democratic-controlled Baltimore.
START OVER
>>
