Would You Live in This $110k Spaceship House?

Dearborn — The Dymaxion house was a dream of abundance, a home manufactured at scale that two men could pop up on any patch of level ground in two days.

Given the giant size and shocking sticker prices of new builds, it’s high time we revisit this wild idea.

The Dymaxion House is sort of like a yurt, but with separated rooms and futuristic materials. And with two bedrooms, a full kitchen, rotating shelves and closets, and a revolving roof ventilator for climate control, the Dymaxion house had all a young family needed.

The spaceship house was the creation of Buckminster Fuller, one of the more eccentric characters of the 20th century. After being expelled from Harvard twice, Fuller served in World War I and returned home to focus on how to build homes more efficiently.

A bit of an odd bird, Fuller once tried sleeping in several short spurts and kept an extremely exhaustive scrapbook of his life that could fill a small library.

Bucky, as he was known, was a maverick, and he had a vision for houses built out of airplane components at industrial scale. Though he had been ruminating on the idea for over two decades, he finally got Beech Aircraft to produce his first prototype in 1945.

The prototype was called the Wichita House, and after its debut, orders poured in. Fuller’s idea was that the whole house would be shipped in a 16-by-4.5-foot metal cylinder and transported anywhere by a standard truck. That sure would beat the wide-load pre-fab homes taking up two lanes of traffic to get to their site.

Fuller’s pie-in-the-sky vision even included his homes being delivered by blimp.

Crazier yet? He wanted to sell these for $6,500, roughly the price of a Cadillac in those days. Adjusted for inflation, that would be about $110,000 in today’s money. Instead of being tied to a 30-year mortgage, Fuller envisioned a five-year loan for the Dymaxion house.

If you wanted to buy a home for $110,000 today, your prospects are pretty grim. You’re looking at Flint, Youngstown, Ohio, and Gary, Indiana. And that’s for a decaying older home. A Dymaxion House would be brand-spanking new.

There would be drawbacks, to be sure. Fuller had no plan for air conditioning, though it did have a ventilation system, and if you had more than a couple kids, things would get pretty tight in your personal spaceship. But as a starter home? It’d be perfect.

And it wasn’t a yurt. It featured aluminum siding, windows all around, electricity, laundry, storage, and a galley kitchen. Frankly, the Dymaxion house has twice the amenities of my old New York apartment.

Another tricky thing is that its circular design meant that you had to walk through all the rooms to get to the others. Stepping on Legos in the kids room could be a frequent trauma. But for $110,000? You’d learn to live with it.

So why aren’t we all living in our own little spaceships today? Retooling factories to produce these after World War II would have cost Fuller and his investors more than $10 million, which they couldn’t scrape together.

So the first couple homes served as novelties and were put together and housed at the Henry Ford in 2001 to show the world that we once had a space-age vision for housing.

I, like so many other homeowners out there, wish that future had come.