The car had great publicity value, despite these accidents, and marked the beginning of Fuller’s evolution into a brand: a futurist and innovator whose projects drew coverage in magazines and newspapers, and who could (most important to Fuller) attract funding from patrons who would allow him to do as he pleased with their money. While conducting “independent research” for the government in World War II,Fuller invented the Dymaxion map: a cartographical innovation that could preserve the continents’ relative sizes, even when presented in two dimensions. The map used a unique projection onto an icosahedron—a 20-faced polyhedron—which then unfolded to lie flat, looking more like a partially finished patchwork quilt than the familiar, distortive Mercator projection. The map became the subject of a story in Life magazine, which celebrated its novelty and included a version of the map printed on a pullout section on thick paper, which readers could cut and fold into a three-dimensional object.
But it was in 1948 and 1949 that Fuller perfected the idea of the geodesic dome, and his career as a talker and influencer—the most successful of his jobs—really began. The dome was a response to the U.S. wartime and postwar housing crisis, which began when men left the building trades for the service, and continued as they returned home, and the population, scattered for years, shifted and reconfigured itself across the country. Fuller saw the dome—so lightweight that its materials could be quickly flown by airplane to building sites; so simple that it could be put up quickly, with minimal labor needed; and so energy-efficient that it would save homeowners from high electricity bills, and the nation from wasting precious energy—as a possible magic bullet for this postwar housing crunch.
The design reflected Fuller’s idea that human life was tending toward “ephemeralization,” or the tech-enabled tendency to (as he often repeated) “do more with less.” The idea that human activity was moving from the physical to the abstract turned out to be prophetic, and is responsible for some of Fuller’s continuing popularity among those who credit him with extraordinary foresight. But the dome would become Fuller’s visual legacy. With its science-fictional roundness and fly’s-eye paneling, it looked nothing like a colonial, a Craftsman bungalow, or even the more modern ranch house, the silhouettes of which made up the landscape of the American neighborhood. While some of Fuller’s past inventions—the Dymaxion house and car—were cool-looking as well, they were much more difficult to reproduce and disseminate. The dome, on the other hand, presented a ready-made symbol of postwar American society.