Buckminster Fuller's Proposal to Build a Giant Floating Tetrahedron in San Francisco Bay

Buckminster Fuller, the architect most famous for inventing the geodesic dome, once proposed building giant floating cities shaped like tetrahedrons. In his book Critical Path, Fuller explains why this structure would have been ideal:

In the early 1960s I was commissioned by a Japanese patron to design one of my tetrahedronal floating cities for Tokyo Bay.

Three-quarters of our planet Earth is covered with water, most of which may float organic cities.

Floating cities pay no rent to landlords. They are situated on water, which they desalinate and recirculate in many useful and nonpolluting ways. They are ships with all an ocean ship’s technical autonomy, but they are also ships that will always be anchored. They don’t have to go anywhere. Their shape and its human-life accommodations are not compromised, as must be the shape of the living quarters of ships whose hull shapes are constructed so that they may slip, fishlike, at high speed through water and high seas with maximum economy. […]

The tetrahedron has the most surface with the least volume of all polyhedra. As such it provides the most “outside” living. Its sloping external surface is adequate for all its occupants to enjoy their own private, outside, tiered-terracing, garden homes. These are most economically serviced from the common, omni-nearest-possible center of volume of all polyhedra. […]

All the shopping centers and other communal service facilities are inside the structure; tennis courts and other athletic facilities are on the top deck.

The tetrahedronal city in Tokyo Bay was never built. Fuller attributes that reesult on the death of his patron in 1966. So he took his idea to the United States and refined his design. It was to be almost 2 miles wide and float in San Francisco Bay. Robert Kronenburg describes it in Architecture in Motion: The History and Development of Portable Building:

This earthquake-proof building had 20,000 apartments gathered in the wall of a giant tetrahedron. In 1968, the US Department of Housing and Urban Development financed a detailed study for Triton City, a series of neighborhood-sized floating communities between 3,500 and 6,500 persons. The structures would also be self-sufficient by the use of wave power and solar energy.

Would you want to live in one of these floating cities?

-via American Digest | Image: unknown