Although Fuller had already served in the US Navy by the time Le Corbusier wrote the following words in 1923, the question of their influence on him is perhaps open to speculation:
"A seriously-minded architect... will find in a steamship his freedom from an age-long but contemptible enslavement to the past.
"He will prefer respect for the forces of nature to a lazy respect for tradition; to the narrowness of commonplace conceptions he will prefer the majesty of solutions which spring from a problem that has been clearly stated.
"The house of the earth-man is the expression of a circumscribed world. The steamship is the first stage in the realization of a world organized according to the new spirit."
(Corbusier, 1923, p.97)
"Our daring and masterly constructors of steamships produce palaces in comparison with which cathedrals are tiny things, and they throw them onto the sea!"
(ibid., p.86)
Fuller refers in Design Strategy to his "long-held working assumption that a problem adequately stated is a problem fundamentally ripe and potential of solution". (Utopia, p.351)
See Navigation, Architecture.
© Paul Taylor 2001