12 ms·

The Dymaxion Bathroom

188 points by gxonatano 4y ago

MarkusWandel 4y ago
Scrubbable stainless steel surfaces. Only generous radius corners. No tile grout or silicone caulking. And the whole thing cleanable with a hose if necessarily. As a parent of children, I'd totally go for this, style be darned.
xg15 4y ago
Sounds like someone should try to revive this. The "fog gun" should certainly find a lot of supporters today. A bathroom that is specifically designed to be easy to clean might also be attractive for single households. This might actually be more in demand today than when Mr. Fuller originally invented it.
- canadianfella 4y ago
  [dead]
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- mhb 4y ago
  Indeed, the fog gun sounds like magic. Great tech for a dishwasher too, though.
- CrazyPyroLinux 4y ago
  I can't say enough good things about a steam shower
  - 082349872349872 4y ago
    Do you have personal experience with one? Please say a few good things, then.
    - CrazyPyroLinux 4y ago
      Personally I like to take long hot showers to relax and think. (See recent related https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34289138 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34289138 ) This would otherwise be expensive and wasteful of water and energy, but it doesn't take much of either to keep the shower flooded with steam. Plus I'm not drying out my skin while trying to stay warm with too-hot water; cool water in the hot environment feels great for wash 'n rinse. It also feels good to breathe the steam.
- qwerpy 4y ago
  The emphasis on easy to clean and maintain is something that I wish houses today had. To me it seems new houses are optimized for fast and cheap construction, but as someone who actually lives in the house and wants to continue to do so for the next decade or two with minimal hassle, there are so many design problems. Part of the problem is that like clothes, houses and exterior/interior design follow fashion trends which have nothing to do with utility and maintenance. And like the tax prep industry, there is incentive for builders/contractors to make houses fragile and hard to maintain so they always have (expensive) work to do. The HN thing to do at this point is to believe that I, a software engineer, can do better and then fail spectacularly in doing so because building houses is different than writing code. So instead I will sit here, fume about the state of things, and throw money at problems when they arise.
  - pengaru 4y ago
    > The HN thing to do at this point is to believe that I, a software engineer, can do better and then fail spectacularly in doing so because building houses is different than writing code. So instead I will sit here, fume about the state of things, and throw money at problems when they arise. The thing is, you probably can do better, you just can't do it both better and as fast or faster. It's totally worth doing it better for your self to utilize and enjoy. The calculus is entirely different vs. a business effort needing to turn a profit. Most people have plenty of hours they'd otherwise spend unpaid wasting time they could instead be investing in improving their homes while learning new skills.
    - qwerpy 4y ago
      Yeah you’re right, I was just making fun of software engineer hubris. I’m slowly learning some of those skills on my own because it’s fun to learn and not be blocked on finding a dependable contractor. Nowhere near the point where I can do new construction but maybe someday.
  - maxerickson 4y ago
    A lot of building techniques seem hard but are really faster/cheaper/easier than a seemingly more maintainable solution would be. Drywall, mud and paint seems like a lot of work, but imagine making a room 30 feet long where replaceable panels actually looked good and fit well.
- lucb1e 4y ago
  > This might actually be more in demand today than when Mr. Fuller originally invented it. We're also some 4.5× more people if I remember historic figures correctly, and presumably the number of households increased even more. Particularly with urbanization as well as lower transportation costs, might be a lot easier to find buyers even if the per-capita demand were to be equal or lower. I'm intrigued enough to want to try one out if I can reasonably get to it (perhaps as part of a bigger trip), though as someone who doesn't plan to own a home in the next decade or more (I'm 30) I'm not really in the market.
laurieg 4y ago
This seems remarkably close to a Japanese "unit bath" bathroom. The entire room drains into a drain in the floor so you can use the shower head to clean it. It's small, with a tub, sink and toilet. The tap (faucet) for the sink also fills the bathtub. To see images try an image search for 3点ユニットバス
- Jugurtha 4y ago
  > 3点 I understood that visually as a butt being cleaned by a shower head sized bidet nozzle.
  - lofatdairy 4y ago
    In Chinese it's dian3, which is used as a time indicator (i.e. analogous to "o'clock"), and also part of dian3 xin2 (meaning snack, dim sum is the more common form in English but it comes from Cantonese). I'm not sure what it means in this context but this is just to say the pictographic analogy likely doesn't work because it probably is some unit here and not actually referring to the bath itself. That comes from the katakana which reads "Unit bath"
    - userbinator 4y ago
      I think the meaning is "3-point" as in there being a bathtub, sink, and toilet. But "showerhead" is certainly an apt interpretation of that character for someone who doesn't know the language.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    - helaoban 4y ago
      点 means 'point', or 'spot', 'speck', 'tiny thing' etc... The "o'clock" meaning is a derivative, colloquial use of the word 'point'. So here it simply means 3-point, eg "3-point system".
- gillesjacobs 4y ago
  I liked the idea of many space-optimized furniture solutions in Japan. The unit bathrooms I encountered felt very cramped and wet with the toilet getting in the way when drying. I did like the half tub / shower combo and I love the toilets with sinks for reservoirs though.
13of40 4y ago
I like this in theory, but when I've experienced it, I don't necessarily enjoy aggressively pre-fab architecture in a place I'm staying. One example is earlier this year I booked a room at a hotel near CDG so I could spend the night and catch an early flight. For a very reasonable price I got a room with a shower, a bed, a chair, a desk, and a (thankfully soundproof) window where I could marvel at the engineering of the underbellies of planes every few minutes. It was clean and quiet. The problem was that everything was CNC cut plywood or molded fiberglass and put together with exposed carriage bolts, so it had the feel, not even of being on the deck of the Starship Enterprise, but on a cheap plywood mockup of it. In a bathroom you need cupboards to keep your denture glue and hair bands, and surfaces where you can put random toothbrushes and face creams, and you might even want to put a hook in the wall to hang your loofah. You want to be able to look at the random patterns in the shower tiles and imagine faces and puppy dogs and stuff. I feel like if this bathroom was in my house, brushing my teeth or bathing in it would feel like being in a dystopian movie about an overpopulated, resource-barren, industrial earth. But maybe it was just ahead of its time in that regard.
- xg15 4y ago
  > In a bathroom you need cupboards to keep your denture glue and hair bands, and surfaces where you can put random toothbrushes and face creams, and you might even want to put a hook in the wall to hang your loofah. Yeah, the unfortunate truth is that a lot of the ",nooks and crannies" stem from the things we put in a bathroom. A sensible "dymaxion-like" design would absolutely have to incorporate surfaces, cupboards, space for towels and ideally a window. How well this would be reconcilable with the "easy to clean" objective is the question...
- otikik 4y ago
  > an overpopulated, resource-barren, industrial earth Well. I mean. Happy New Year, my friend.
- userbinator 4y ago
  I feel like if this bathroom was in my house, brushing my teeth or bathing in it would feel like being in a dystopian movie about an overpopulated, resource-barren, industrial earth. Indeed. It's basically a "live in the pod" sort of feeling.
perihelions 4y ago
- "with many small and seemingly impossible to clean nooks and crannies prone to leaking and harboring of bacteria" Ahh! I've wondered for a long time why this specific issue doesn't have mass-market solutions. I thought it was intuitively obvious that contaminable surfaces need to be high-radius convex and easy to access, else you're wasting valuable time playing stupid geometry games. Who wants to spend their life cleaning bathrooms? Clearly, the engineers who design these things don't clean their own houses, and don't talk to the people who do.
- NickNameNick 4y ago
  I think it depends on where you put the radius'd corners. They'd be incompatible with vacuum cleaners and Roombas for example. And may pose a challenge for some types of mops.
- mikro2nd 4y ago
  "engineers who design these things don't clean their own houses, and don't talk to the people who do" I have long harboured similar suspicions regarding the design of kitchen utensils. Clearly designed by people who've never washed the dishes and have overlooked (or blatantly ignored) the fact that these things -- made with all sorts of joins and crevices that are hard to clean by any means -- are meant to come into contact with our food!
davidbanham 4y ago
> they were met with resistance from plumbers fearful of losing their jobs Same thing happened to waterless urinals. Those are still making headway due to the waterr saving benefits but it’s been a hard fight.
- lazide 4y ago
  That had nothing to do with plumbers. They stink (and solutions to stop them stinking don’t work reliably), and they plug up plumbing with crystalized urine unless you also do things that don’t work reliably. shrug
  - davidbanham 4y ago
    I believe the fix for that is to chuck a bucket of water through it once in a while. My reference for the opposition to the urinals from plumbers came from this Wired article, iirc. https://www.wired.co.uk/article/the-fight-to-stop-flushing https://www.wired.co.uk/article/the-fight-to-stop-flushing
    - bagels 4y ago
      That seems to make them no longer waterless though, doesn't it?
    - sneak 4y ago
      We already have a technological solution to this problem that obsoletes the manual process of carrying buckets of water to the washroom.
    - lazide 4y ago
      Hah, based on what is being said there, it's not so much plumbers, as the building code agencies and union head. (think Doctors vs American Medical Assoc.). Which hey, that I could believe they'd push back a bit. But the code issues got fixed, and they got installed in a lot of places. But they stink, and do have issues with crystallization of urine, and that's why I saw them ripped out after a year or two everywhere they got installed. Like Buckminster, conspiracy theories are a lot more palatable reason for why your idea got shot down than it just didn't work well in real life.
chrischen 4y ago
“The Phelps Dodge Corporation was to produce the bathrooms but they were met with resistance from plumbers fearful of losing their jobs and so the bathrooms were never produced.” This is why we can’t have nice things.
- Twisell 4y ago
  Welp this is probably to read with a grain of salt, Buckminster had a great inspirational idea with the geodesic dome, a narcissistic obsession for detail with the Dymaxion Chronofile but also fathered deadly and badly executed concepts like the Dymaxion car... While he remain an inspirational figure he was also eager to attribute shortcomings of his inventions to pretty much any scapegoat passing by. It's totally plausible that dodge corporation did some market study and ultimately decided that this was definitively not ready for production. In such scenario Buckminster would probably have quickly invented a more dramatic reason for failure of yet another of his concepts.
  - chrischen 4y ago
    The thing is though prefab toilets are used in Japan… though to be fair I’m not sure why plumbers would be against them.
- m463 4y ago
  smart phones were stalled in the same way for far too long. I remember verizon gimping phones so you couldn't put ringtones on them unless they sold them to you. (and now we've been stuck with user-hostile smart phones for far too long)
  - wyldfire 4y ago
    It's interesting that you bring the smartphone up because Apple broke the mold by offering a product as a one-of-a-kind luxury good that offered far superior style and function. The Dymaxion Bathroom was not sought-after because it would only deliver function parity at lower maintenance cost. And it looks considerably less stylish than the contemporary bathrooms available then.
mumblemumble 4y ago
You can see a real life example of this bathroom (installed in an actual Dymaxion house) at the Henry Ford Museum outside of Detroit. I haven't been to see it in a while, but, as I recall, my general impression was that the bathroom had a bunch of interesting ideas that all came together in a way that sort of nosed out overall livability/ergonomics for the humans who might want to use it. Some of these ideas would seem to live on in the bathrooms of modern sailing boats, but a 12 meter yacht imposes some constraints that mean that sacrificing on comfort in the interest of space efficiency is unavoidable. I also suspect that, much like RVs or the apartments units in the Nagakin Capsule Tower, repairability and modifiability have been compromised in the design. Meaning that the whole thing should probably be considered somewhat disposable: past a certain point, the only reasonable option is to scrap the whole thing and order a new one from the factory. With typical bathroom designs, the initial construction cost may be high, but, later on, if only the toilet is broken, you have the option to replace only the toilet.
- lazide 4y ago
  It’s basically the buckminster fuller style - space age, theoretically interesting, but not actually useful or as good as it seems when you try using it for any length of time. The geodesic houses were the same.
  - TylerE 4y ago
    Sounds a bit like FLW too… amazing design gbs to look at, but by many reports fairly miserable to live in.
    - a9h74j 4y ago
      Said IIRC with FLW or similar in mind: "An architect can like a chair never having sat in it."
    - rmccue 4y ago
      I think it’s beyond just nice to look at, they’re both trying to push the boundaries in really interesting ways, and question the status quo. Only problem is, alpha versions always suck. The good ideas survive though.
bombcar 4y ago
If you go with a wall-mounted toilet and tile with a dividerless shower you can get quite close on the cleanability even now.
- maxerickson 4y ago
  It's not that big a deal to clean any small space.
  - TeMPOraL 4y ago
    Especially if you're not the one doing it.
paulpauper 4y ago
It's like an airplane bathroom.
everyone 4y ago
I don't believe anything in that article. Buckminster Fuller was a bit of a con artist. He lied profusely about his projects, painting them in a flattering light. He also put a lot of effort into setting the record to match his own made-up version of events. Lines like this.. "The Phelps Dodge Corporation was to produce the bathrooms but they were met with resistance from plumbers fearful of losing their jobs and so the bathrooms were never produced." reek of his fiction. I would guess that in reality there were serious practical reasons why the bathrooms were never produced.
- nemo44x 4y ago
  Yeah especially when you look at homes from that era. This thing had no market.
- _yb2s 4y ago
  Fuller wasn’t a con artist. He certainly had a few ambitious projects that went poorly, but he believed in them and made every effort to deliver on them. He was skilled at building hype and publicity around his projects, and directing attention away from negative aspects, but that is the type of skilled PR necessary to succeed in projects like that, and isn’t lying.
  - everyone 4y ago
    Lying is lying. Doing it for the purposes of business might be considered acceptable in many modern societies, that doesnt make it not lying though. A man died in Buckminster's stupid car and he lied about it, blaming and denigrating the victim rather than the true killer: his own negligence. Constant self serving lying, fabricating claims, and so on, seem to be standard practice in business, stuff like "fake it till you make it". That doesn't mean it's not ethically reprehensible however.
    - _yb2s 4y ago
      None of this is accurate, from everything I've read about these events, I haven't found any evidence of him lying or fabricating claims, unless you consider lying by omission, whereby he didn't volunteer negative things during interviews. Some may consider that unethical, but I strongly disagree with that perspective. Nobody has a responsibility to volunteer negative information about themselves when it impedes their own life goals. There is a longstanding legal and philosophical precedent for this- consider for example the 5th amendment. People volunteering negative info about themselves are generally socially dysfunctional and suffering from low self esteem, not being ethical or honest. I see this a lot with people that are serially unsuccessful in both business and dating- they will spew out every mistake or negative about themselves to people they just met, and turn them away before they get a chance to connect, doing themselves a grave injustice. Fuller was doing important work, and he had an ethical responsibility to portray it in a positive light, such that humanity could realize it's benefits. Moreover, your posts seems to be consistent with a recent popular trend to smear the image of inventors of the past with misinformation. I believe this is symptomatic of a terrible cultural trend whereby all accomplishment and success is seen as a type of theft, rather than understanding that it's often contributing real value to humanity. It is my belief that this is driven by a desire to rationalize nihilism and mediocrity.
A_Duck 4y ago
This reminds me of the kitchens in the Barbican* which were based on a boat's galley and manufactured by Brook Marine, a yacht builder. More info: https://www.barbicanliving.co.uk/flats/rooms-and-features-2/kitchens/ https://www.barbicanliving.co.uk/flats/rooms-and-features-2/... Photo: https://www.pinterest.co.uk/pin/69383650494817609/ https://www.pinterest.co.uk/pin/69383650494817609/ *a Brutalist housing complex of 2,000 units in London
- omnicognate 4y ago
  For anybody that, like me, never understood how anyone could see any value in Brutalism, I can highly recommend having a wander around the Barbican Estate if you ever get a chance. Brutalism became associated with cheaply built, rapidly decaying bare concrete hellholes, but the Barbican was an aspirational development and remains so to this day. It's a remarkable place - huge, unique and endlessly explorable.
  - pmarreck 4y ago
    I always liked brutalism for some reason, but I get why others wouldn't. Never heard of this, super interesting!
- 082349872349872 4y ago
  > "where middle and upper income groups are concerned ... the tendency to entertain without the help of servants, greatly influenced the design of the kitchens ..." compare 1960: Is [Chatterley] a book that you would even wish your wife or your servants to read?
- ThePadawan 4y ago
  I find it amazing but frustrating to no end that this much thought went into good design all that years ago, and it hasn't become absolutely standard to do so, like with the three-point seatbelt. In my (rented) kitchen, the dishwasher is next to the refrigerator, which both manufacturers advise you against. The cupboard panels are glossy and face South, so during most sunshine hours, you are slightly blinded by reflections, and can see every single speck of dirt and grease on them. Some of the cupboards don't have handles, instead open by spring when pressing one corner of their door - which only works reliably within an area of around 2cm x 2cm, otherwise they just jiggle in place.
monkeycantype 4y ago
before the pandemic, on a holiday with my partner our kids, we had hired a campervan that was infested with bedbugs - they got in everything, bit us everywhere. After cleaning and obsessively toasting everything in the bryon bay laundromat tumble dryers, my partner went with the kids and I drove the van back to the rental place and walked to Brisbane airport with a clean set of clothes sealed in a plastic bag. When I explained to the gate staff that I might have bedbugs on me and wanted to shower and change before I boarded the plane home, they gave me the key to the pilot's bathroom. It's a dark tiled room, and at the far end of the room is the entrance to a magnificent shower, you step through a rounded rectangle portal into stainless steel balloon, perhaps pressed steel, perhaps, hydroformed, a glorious squircle cube (sphube?), with enough space for a pilot, a co pilot and all the cabin staff to purify and rejuvenate under the monsoons of hot water that torrent from an enormous shower rose at the apex. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Squircle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Squircle https://www.johndcook.com/blog/2019/04/04/higher-dimensional-squircles/ https://www.johndcook.com/blog/2019/04/04/higher-dimensional...
- pmarreck 4y ago
  I don't know if you write, but that was a lovely description
  - monkeycantype 4y ago
    thank you, if I ever finish my book I'll let you know : )
scotty79 4y ago
> many small and seemingly impossible to clean nooks and crannies Honestly I thought this perfect bathroom will have smooth curves wherever two right angle surfaces meet.
paulpauper 4y ago
Aren't these similar to the concrete all-in-one -unit bathrooms in the ADX Florence? Those bathrooms are designed to minimize water waste and cleanup. I can see why it did not catch on.
a9h74j 4y ago
In anonymous congregate housing I can see optimizing for cleanabilty and surface lifetime. I.e., if the common manner is to carry in and out (as in a basket) all personal items with each visit. In such case, nooks and crannies are an antifeature. I could imagine some roommates or even families uniting around such behavior.
jerry1979 4y ago
The human waste composting feature seems like an idea that has not aged well considering the PFAS accumulation and the various medications we take.
dhosek 4y ago
Fuller had some interesting ideas and thought about things that most people don’t consider (e.g., how much does a house weigh?), but the problem here, like much of the Dymaxion project is that it’s a complete break from the status quo in a way that doesn’t really allow for incremental change. It’s an early version of gadgetbahn: https://www.cat-bus.com/2017/12/gadgetbahn/ https://www.cat-bus.com/2017/12/gadgetbahn/
- rob74 4y ago
  It's been a long time since I've seen text with encoding issues on a website, but somehow they managed to produce some there, at least for me: "For some time, Iâ€™ve been meaning to write about German transportation systems like whatâ€™s an S-Bahn or whatâ€™s a Stadtbahn." Still, interesting article!
Magi604 4y ago
Today I learned the term "Dymaxion" and I will endeavor to find ways to use it in my speech and writings from today onwards. "Dymaxion, a portmanteau of the words dynamic, maximum, and tension;[1] sums up the goal of his study, "maximum gain of advantage from minimal energy input."" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dymaxion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dymaxion
smohnot 4y ago
Someone should build Dymaxion houses and put them on Airbnb- they would do really well
LastTrain 4y ago
I like that the article makes out like we’d all be showering in our Dymaxion toilets if it weren’t for the plumbing unions.
c3534l 4y ago
I'm sorry, it shrink-wrapped your poo for you?!
- 082349872349872 4y ago
  ...that does sound remarkably close to our boat's head.
cryptonector 4y ago
I lived in an apartment with one of these sorts of bathrooms in Tokyo. It was made of two molded plastic parts put together: a bottom half and a top half. I had no idea what that was called, but now I know!
Animats 4y ago
Cute. It's the first prefab pod bathroom. Patent #2,220,482. The patent gives a clearer idea of the design. It kind of glosses over how this integrates into the rest of the structure. It can have its own outer enclosure and stand alone, which is probably how it's set up in the Dymaxion house, which is round. Most modern pods have at least two right-angled flat sides, so the thing can be stuck in a corner. It looks uncomfortable and dangerous. An entire bathroom of stamped sheet metal, including the floor. Oh, we'll just corrugate the floor a bit for traction. Right. Electric resistance heating, with 1930s insulating materials. Scary. Nothing in the patent about the "fog gun" for cleaning. Nor does there seem to be a floor drain, which is common in Japan but rare in the US. Making it out of fiberglas, like modern bathtubs, would be much more promising. Which is how most prefab pod bathrooms are made now. Too bad Lillian Gilbreth never worked on this problem. She was the wife of the famous time and motion study guy, and she is responsible for most modern kitchen design. Kitchen counters, all the same height, recessed sinks, not too deep, stove height matches counter height, wall mounted cabinets above the counters, drawers below - all that is her doing.[1] Before Gilbreth, kitchen were uncoordinated tables, cabinets, and appliances.[2] If she'd done a bathroom design, it would have worked. [1] https://slate.com/human-interest/2012/10/lillian-gilbreths-kitchen-practical-how-it-reinvented-the-modern-kitchen.html https://slate.com/human-interest/2012/10/lillian-gilbreths-k... [2] https://clickamericana.com/topics/home-garden/antique-kitchens-from-the-1900s https://clickamericana.com/topics/home-garden/antique-kitche...
- dr_dshiv 4y ago
  Bucky and Lilian Gilbreth—my two biggest design heroes! In 2015, I convinced Brown to digitize her PhD thesis (industrial psychology), which had been lost. More here: https://bobemiliani.com/the-back-story-eliminating-waste-in-teaching/ https://bobemiliani.com/the-back-story-eliminating-waste-in-...
  - tomcam 4y ago
    Holy. Shit. I cannot wait to read this. Thank you for a heroic preservation effort.
- morsch 4y ago
AstralStorm 4y ago
This particular design would actually be real pain to clean, being small and full of curved, occluded surfaces. Allegedly smooth surface notwithstanding - over time even steel gets brushed, bent and the joints damaged.
still_grokking 4y ago
I've clicked on the title and found than this beautiful quote on the front page of that site: “We are not going to be able to operate our Spaceship Earth successfully nor for much longer unless we see it as a whole spaceship and our fate as common. It has to be everybody or nobody.” -R. Buckminster Fuller-
dsr_ 4y ago
In dwelling places and computer hardware and software, I have developed a preference for maintainability and compatible interfaces over performance and shininess. This bathroom is fixed. It is not configurable, which means that it's great if it does exactly what you need and is a problem otherwise. I'm 6'5". At various times, there have been people living in my house ranging from baby-sized up through me. It looks like this is optimized for someone about 5'5" tall. Bucky was 5'2". This bathroom has no ventilation options other than a bizarrely placed under-sink fan. It lacks many affordances - a place for towels, natural light, an electrical outlet for small appliances, any consideration of disability or infirmity - and because of the unified construction, it cannot be changed. It's an interesting design, but the reason people didn't adopt it is that it isn't adaptable.

188 points by gxonatano 4y ago

Scrubbable stainless steel surfaces. Only generous radius corners. No tile grout or silicone caulking. And the whole thing cleanable with a hose if necessarily. As a parent of children, I'd totally go for this, style be darned.

xg15 4y ago

Sounds like someone should try to revive this. The "fog gun" should certainly find a lot of supporters today. A bathroom that is specifically designed to be easy to clean might also be attractive for single households. This might actually be more in demand today than when Mr. Fuller originally invented it.

canadianfella 4y ago
[dead]
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
mhb 4y ago
Indeed, the fog gun sounds like magic. Great tech for a dishwasher too, though.
CrazyPyroLinux 4y ago
I can't say enough good things about a steam shower
- 082349872349872 4y ago
  Do you have personal experience with one? Please say a few good things, then.
  - CrazyPyroLinux 4y ago
    Personally I like to take long hot showers to relax and think. (See recent related https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34289138 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34289138 ) This would otherwise be expensive and wasteful of water and energy, but it doesn't take much of either to keep the shower flooded with steam. Plus I'm not drying out my skin while trying to stay warm with too-hot water; cool water in the hot environment feels great for wash 'n rinse. It also feels good to breathe the steam.
qwerpy 4y ago
The emphasis on easy to clean and maintain is something that I wish houses today had. To me it seems new houses are optimized for fast and cheap construction, but as someone who actually lives in the house and wants to continue to do so for the next decade or two with minimal hassle, there are so many design problems. Part of the problem is that like clothes, houses and exterior/interior design follow fashion trends which have nothing to do with utility and maintenance. And like the tax prep industry, there is incentive for builders/contractors to make houses fragile and hard to maintain so they always have (expensive) work to do. The HN thing to do at this point is to believe that I, a software engineer, can do better and then fail spectacularly in doing so because building houses is different than writing code. So instead I will sit here, fume about the state of things, and throw money at problems when they arise.
- pengaru 4y ago
  > The HN thing to do at this point is to believe that I, a software engineer, can do better and then fail spectacularly in doing so because building houses is different than writing code. So instead I will sit here, fume about the state of things, and throw money at problems when they arise. The thing is, you probably can do better, you just can't do it both better and as fast or faster. It's totally worth doing it better for your self to utilize and enjoy. The calculus is entirely different vs. a business effort needing to turn a profit. Most people have plenty of hours they'd otherwise spend unpaid wasting time they could instead be investing in improving their homes while learning new skills.
  - qwerpy 4y ago
    Yeah you’re right, I was just making fun of software engineer hubris. I’m slowly learning some of those skills on my own because it’s fun to learn and not be blocked on finding a dependable contractor. Nowhere near the point where I can do new construction but maybe someday.
- maxerickson 4y ago
  A lot of building techniques seem hard but are really faster/cheaper/easier than a seemingly more maintainable solution would be. Drywall, mud and paint seems like a lot of work, but imagine making a room 30 feet long where replaceable panels actually looked good and fit well.
lucb1e 4y ago
> This might actually be more in demand today than when Mr. Fuller originally invented it. We're also some 4.5× more people if I remember historic figures correctly, and presumably the number of households increased even more. Particularly with urbanization as well as lower transportation costs, might be a lot easier to find buyers even if the per-capita demand were to be equal or lower. I'm intrigued enough to want to try one out if I can reasonably get to it (perhaps as part of a bigger trip), though as someone who doesn't plan to own a home in the next decade or more (I'm 30) I'm not really in the market.

laurieg 4y ago

This seems remarkably close to a Japanese "unit bath" bathroom. The entire room drains into a drain in the floor so you can use the shower head to clean it. It's small, with a tub, sink and toilet. The tap (faucet) for the sink also fills the bathtub. To see images try an image search for 3点ユニットバス

Jugurtha 4y ago
> 3点 I understood that visually as a butt being cleaned by a shower head sized bidet nozzle.
- lofatdairy 4y ago
  In Chinese it's dian3, which is used as a time indicator (i.e. analogous to "o'clock"), and also part of dian3 xin2 (meaning snack, dim sum is the more common form in English but it comes from Cantonese). I'm not sure what it means in this context but this is just to say the pictographic analogy likely doesn't work because it probably is some unit here and not actually referring to the bath itself. That comes from the katakana which reads "Unit bath"
  - userbinator 4y ago
    I think the meaning is "3-point" as in there being a bathtub, sink, and toilet. But "showerhead" is certainly an apt interpretation of that character for someone who doesn't know the language.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - helaoban 4y ago
    点 means 'point', or 'spot', 'speck', 'tiny thing' etc... The "o'clock" meaning is a derivative, colloquial use of the word 'point'. So here it simply means 3-point, eg "3-point system".
gillesjacobs 4y ago
I liked the idea of many space-optimized furniture solutions in Japan. The unit bathrooms I encountered felt very cramped and wet with the toilet getting in the way when drying. I did like the half tub / shower combo and I love the toilets with sinks for reservoirs though.

13of40 4y ago

I like this in theory, but when I've experienced it, I don't necessarily enjoy aggressively pre-fab architecture in a place I'm staying. One example is earlier this year I booked a room at a hotel near CDG so I could spend the night and catch an early flight. For a very reasonable price I got a room with a shower, a bed, a chair, a desk, and a (thankfully soundproof) window where I could marvel at the engineering of the underbellies of planes every few minutes. It was clean and quiet. The problem was that everything was CNC cut plywood or molded fiberglass and put together with exposed carriage bolts, so it had the feel, not even of being on the deck of the Starship Enterprise, but on a cheap plywood mockup of it. In a bathroom you need cupboards to keep your denture glue and hair bands, and surfaces where you can put random toothbrushes and face creams, and you might even want to put a hook in the wall to hang your loofah. You want to be able to look at the random patterns in the shower tiles and imagine faces and puppy dogs and stuff. I feel like if this bathroom was in my house, brushing my teeth or bathing in it would feel like being in a dystopian movie about an overpopulated, resource-barren, industrial earth. But maybe it was just ahead of its time in that regard.

xg15 4y ago
> In a bathroom you need cupboards to keep your denture glue and hair bands, and surfaces where you can put random toothbrushes and face creams, and you might even want to put a hook in the wall to hang your loofah. Yeah, the unfortunate truth is that a lot of the ",nooks and crannies" stem from the things we put in a bathroom. A sensible "dymaxion-like" design would absolutely have to incorporate surfaces, cupboards, space for towels and ideally a window. How well this would be reconcilable with the "easy to clean" objective is the question...
otikik 4y ago
> an overpopulated, resource-barren, industrial earth Well. I mean. Happy New Year, my friend.
userbinator 4y ago
I feel like if this bathroom was in my house, brushing my teeth or bathing in it would feel like being in a dystopian movie about an overpopulated, resource-barren, industrial earth. Indeed. It's basically a "live in the pod" sort of feeling.

perihelions 4y ago

- "with many small and seemingly impossible to clean nooks and crannies prone to leaking and harboring of bacteria" Ahh! I've wondered for a long time why this specific issue doesn't have mass-market solutions. I thought it was intuitively obvious that contaminable surfaces need to be high-radius convex and easy to access, else you're wasting valuable time playing stupid geometry games. Who wants to spend their life cleaning bathrooms? Clearly, the engineers who design these things don't clean their own houses, and don't talk to the people who do.

NickNameNick 4y ago
I think it depends on where you put the radius'd corners. They'd be incompatible with vacuum cleaners and Roombas for example. And may pose a challenge for some types of mops.
mikro2nd 4y ago
"engineers who design these things don't clean their own houses, and don't talk to the people who do" I have long harboured similar suspicions regarding the design of kitchen utensils. Clearly designed by people who've never washed the dishes and have overlooked (or blatantly ignored) the fact that these things -- made with all sorts of joins and crevices that are hard to clean by any means -- are meant to come into contact with our food!

davidbanham 4y ago

> they were met with resistance from plumbers fearful of losing their jobs Same thing happened to waterless urinals. Those are still making headway due to the waterr saving benefits but it’s been a hard fight.

lazide 4y ago
That had nothing to do with plumbers. They stink (and solutions to stop them stinking don’t work reliably), and they plug up plumbing with crystalized urine unless you also do things that don’t work reliably. shrug
- davidbanham 4y ago
  I believe the fix for that is to chuck a bucket of water through it once in a while. My reference for the opposition to the urinals from plumbers came from this Wired article, iirc. https://www.wired.co.uk/article/the-fight-to-stop-flushing https://www.wired.co.uk/article/the-fight-to-stop-flushing
  - bagels 4y ago
    That seems to make them no longer waterless though, doesn't it?
  - sneak 4y ago
    We already have a technological solution to this problem that obsoletes the manual process of carrying buckets of water to the washroom.
  - lazide 4y ago
    Hah, based on what is being said there, it's not so much plumbers, as the building code agencies and union head. (think Doctors vs American Medical Assoc.). Which hey, that I could believe they'd push back a bit. But the code issues got fixed, and they got installed in a lot of places. But they stink, and do have issues with crystallization of urine, and that's why I saw them ripped out after a year or two everywhere they got installed. Like Buckminster, conspiracy theories are a lot more palatable reason for why your idea got shot down than it just didn't work well in real life.

chrischen 4y ago

“The Phelps Dodge Corporation was to produce the bathrooms but they were met with resistance from plumbers fearful of losing their jobs and so the bathrooms were never produced.” This is why we can’t have nice things.

Twisell 4y ago
Welp this is probably to read with a grain of salt, Buckminster had a great inspirational idea with the geodesic dome, a narcissistic obsession for detail with the Dymaxion Chronofile but also fathered deadly and badly executed concepts like the Dymaxion car... While he remain an inspirational figure he was also eager to attribute shortcomings of his inventions to pretty much any scapegoat passing by. It's totally plausible that dodge corporation did some market study and ultimately decided that this was definitively not ready for production. In such scenario Buckminster would probably have quickly invented a more dramatic reason for failure of yet another of his concepts.
- chrischen 4y ago
  The thing is though prefab toilets are used in Japan… though to be fair I’m not sure why plumbers would be against them.
m463 4y ago
smart phones were stalled in the same way for far too long. I remember verizon gimping phones so you couldn't put ringtones on them unless they sold them to you. (and now we've been stuck with user-hostile smart phones for far too long)
- wyldfire 4y ago
  It's interesting that you bring the smartphone up because Apple broke the mold by offering a product as a one-of-a-kind luxury good that offered far superior style and function. The Dymaxion Bathroom was not sought-after because it would only deliver function parity at lower maintenance cost. And it looks considerably less stylish than the contemporary bathrooms available then.

mumblemumble 4y ago

You can see a real life example of this bathroom (installed in an actual Dymaxion house) at the Henry Ford Museum outside of Detroit. I haven't been to see it in a while, but, as I recall, my general impression was that the bathroom had a bunch of interesting ideas that all came together in a way that sort of nosed out overall livability/ergonomics for the humans who might want to use it. Some of these ideas would seem to live on in the bathrooms of modern sailing boats, but a 12 meter yacht imposes some constraints that mean that sacrificing on comfort in the interest of space efficiency is unavoidable. I also suspect that, much like RVs or the apartments units in the Nagakin Capsule Tower, repairability and modifiability have been compromised in the design. Meaning that the whole thing should probably be considered somewhat disposable: past a certain point, the only reasonable option is to scrap the whole thing and order a new one from the factory. With typical bathroom designs, the initial construction cost may be high, but, later on, if only the toilet is broken, you have the option to replace only the toilet.

lazide 4y ago
It’s basically the buckminster fuller style - space age, theoretically interesting, but not actually useful or as good as it seems when you try using it for any length of time. The geodesic houses were the same.
- TylerE 4y ago
  Sounds a bit like FLW too… amazing design gbs to look at, but by many reports fairly miserable to live in.
  - a9h74j 4y ago
    Said IIRC with FLW or similar in mind: "An architect can like a chair never having sat in it."
  - rmccue 4y ago
    I think it’s beyond just nice to look at, they’re both trying to push the boundaries in really interesting ways, and question the status quo. Only problem is, alpha versions always suck. The good ideas survive though.

bombcar 4y ago

If you go with a wall-mounted toilet and tile with a dividerless shower you can get quite close on the cleanability even now.

maxerickson 4y ago
It's not that big a deal to clean any small space.
- TeMPOraL 4y ago
  Especially if you're not the one doing it.

paulpauper 4y ago

It's like an airplane bathroom.

everyone 4y ago

I don't believe anything in that article. Buckminster Fuller was a bit of a con artist. He lied profusely about his projects, painting them in a flattering light. He also put a lot of effort into setting the record to match his own made-up version of events. Lines like this.. "The Phelps Dodge Corporation was to produce the bathrooms but they were met with resistance from plumbers fearful of losing their jobs and so the bathrooms were never produced." reek of his fiction. I would guess that in reality there were serious practical reasons why the bathrooms were never produced.

nemo44x 4y ago
Yeah especially when you look at homes from that era. This thing had no market.
_yb2s 4y ago
Fuller wasn’t a con artist. He certainly had a few ambitious projects that went poorly, but he believed in them and made every effort to deliver on them. He was skilled at building hype and publicity around his projects, and directing attention away from negative aspects, but that is the type of skilled PR necessary to succeed in projects like that, and isn’t lying.
- everyone 4y ago
  Lying is lying. Doing it for the purposes of business might be considered acceptable in many modern societies, that doesnt make it not lying though. A man died in Buckminster's stupid car and he lied about it, blaming and denigrating the victim rather than the true killer: his own negligence. Constant self serving lying, fabricating claims, and so on, seem to be standard practice in business, stuff like "fake it till you make it". That doesn't mean it's not ethically reprehensible however.
  - _yb2s 4y ago
    None of this is accurate, from everything I've read about these events, I haven't found any evidence of him lying or fabricating claims, unless you consider lying by omission, whereby he didn't volunteer negative things during interviews. Some may consider that unethical, but I strongly disagree with that perspective. Nobody has a responsibility to volunteer negative information about themselves when it impedes their own life goals. There is a longstanding legal and philosophical precedent for this- consider for example the 5th amendment. People volunteering negative info about themselves are generally socially dysfunctional and suffering from low self esteem, not being ethical or honest. I see this a lot with people that are serially unsuccessful in both business and dating- they will spew out every mistake or negative about themselves to people they just met, and turn them away before they get a chance to connect, doing themselves a grave injustice. Fuller was doing important work, and he had an ethical responsibility to portray it in a positive light, such that humanity could realize it's benefits. Moreover, your posts seems to be consistent with a recent popular trend to smear the image of inventors of the past with misinformation. I believe this is symptomatic of a terrible cultural trend whereby all accomplishment and success is seen as a type of theft, rather than understanding that it's often contributing real value to humanity. It is my belief that this is driven by a desire to rationalize nihilism and mediocrity.

A_Duck 4y ago

This reminds me of the kitchens in the Barbican* which were based on a boat's galley and manufactured by Brook Marine, a yacht builder. More info: https://www.barbicanliving.co.uk/flats/rooms-and-features-2/kitchens/ https://www.barbicanliving.co.uk/flats/rooms-and-features-2/... Photo: https://www.pinterest.co.uk/pin/69383650494817609/ https://www.pinterest.co.uk/pin/69383650494817609/ *a Brutalist housing complex of 2,000 units in London

omnicognate 4y ago
For anybody that, like me, never understood how anyone could see any value in Brutalism, I can highly recommend having a wander around the Barbican Estate if you ever get a chance. Brutalism became associated with cheaply built, rapidly decaying bare concrete hellholes, but the Barbican was an aspirational development and remains so to this day. It's a remarkable place - huge, unique and endlessly explorable.
- pmarreck 4y ago
  I always liked brutalism for some reason, but I get why others wouldn't. Never heard of this, super interesting!
082349872349872 4y ago
> "where middle and upper income groups are concerned ... the tendency to entertain without the help of servants, greatly influenced the design of the kitchens ..." compare 1960: Is [Chatterley] a book that you would even wish your wife or your servants to read?
ThePadawan 4y ago
I find it amazing but frustrating to no end that this much thought went into good design all that years ago, and it hasn't become absolutely standard to do so, like with the three-point seatbelt. In my (rented) kitchen, the dishwasher is next to the refrigerator, which both manufacturers advise you against. The cupboard panels are glossy and face South, so during most sunshine hours, you are slightly blinded by reflections, and can see every single speck of dirt and grease on them. Some of the cupboards don't have handles, instead open by spring when pressing one corner of their door - which only works reliably within an area of around 2cm x 2cm, otherwise they just jiggle in place.

monkeycantype 4y ago

before the pandemic, on a holiday with my partner our kids, we had hired a campervan that was infested with bedbugs - they got in everything, bit us everywhere. After cleaning and obsessively toasting everything in the bryon bay laundromat tumble dryers, my partner went with the kids and I drove the van back to the rental place and walked to Brisbane airport with a clean set of clothes sealed in a plastic bag. When I explained to the gate staff that I might have bedbugs on me and wanted to shower and change before I boarded the plane home, they gave me the key to the pilot's bathroom. It's a dark tiled room, and at the far end of the room is the entrance to a magnificent shower, you step through a rounded rectangle portal into stainless steel balloon, perhaps pressed steel, perhaps, hydroformed, a glorious squircle cube (sphube?), with enough space for a pilot, a co pilot and all the cabin staff to purify and rejuvenate under the monsoons of hot water that torrent from an enormous shower rose at the apex. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Squircle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Squircle https://www.johndcook.com/blog/2019/04/04/higher-dimensional-squircles/ https://www.johndcook.com/blog/2019/04/04/higher-dimensional...

pmarreck 4y ago
I don't know if you write, but that was a lovely description
- monkeycantype 4y ago
  thank you, if I ever finish my book I'll let you know : )

scotty79 4y ago

> many small and seemingly impossible to clean nooks and crannies Honestly I thought this perfect bathroom will have smooth curves wherever two right angle surfaces meet.

paulpauper 4y ago

Aren't these similar to the concrete all-in-one -unit bathrooms in the ADX Florence? Those bathrooms are designed to minimize water waste and cleanup. I can see why it did not catch on.

a9h74j 4y ago

In anonymous congregate housing I can see optimizing for cleanabilty and surface lifetime. I.e., if the common manner is to carry in and out (as in a basket) all personal items with each visit. In such case, nooks and crannies are an antifeature. I could imagine some roommates or even families uniting around such behavior.

jerry1979 4y ago

The human waste composting feature seems like an idea that has not aged well considering the PFAS accumulation and the various medications we take.

dhosek 4y ago

Fuller had some interesting ideas and thought about things that most people don’t consider (e.g., how much does a house weigh?), but the problem here, like much of the Dymaxion project is that it’s a complete break from the status quo in a way that doesn’t really allow for incremental change. It’s an early version of gadgetbahn: https://www.cat-bus.com/2017/12/gadgetbahn/ https://www.cat-bus.com/2017/12/gadgetbahn/

rob74 4y ago
It's been a long time since I've seen text with encoding issues on a website, but somehow they managed to produce some there, at least for me: "For some time, Iâ€™ve been meaning to write about German transportation systems like whatâ€™s an S-Bahn or whatâ€™s a Stadtbahn." Still, interesting article!

Magi604 4y ago

Today I learned the term "Dymaxion" and I will endeavor to find ways to use it in my speech and writings from today onwards. "Dymaxion, a portmanteau of the words dynamic, maximum, and tension;[1] sums up the goal of his study, "maximum gain of advantage from minimal energy input."" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dymaxion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dymaxion

smohnot 4y ago

Someone should build Dymaxion houses and put them on Airbnb- they would do really well

LastTrain 4y ago

I like that the article makes out like we’d all be showering in our Dymaxion toilets if it weren’t for the plumbing unions.

c3534l 4y ago

I'm sorry, it shrink-wrapped your poo for you?!

082349872349872 4y ago
...that does sound remarkably close to our boat's head.

cryptonector 4y ago

I lived in an apartment with one of these sorts of bathrooms in Tokyo. It was made of two molded plastic parts put together: a bottom half and a top half. I had no idea what that was called, but now I know!

Animats 4y ago

Cute. It's the first prefab pod bathroom. Patent #2,220,482. The patent gives a clearer idea of the design. It kind of glosses over how this integrates into the rest of the structure. It can have its own outer enclosure and stand alone, which is probably how it's set up in the Dymaxion house, which is round. Most modern pods have at least two right-angled flat sides, so the thing can be stuck in a corner. It looks uncomfortable and dangerous. An entire bathroom of stamped sheet metal, including the floor. Oh, we'll just corrugate the floor a bit for traction. Right. Electric resistance heating, with 1930s insulating materials. Scary. Nothing in the patent about the "fog gun" for cleaning. Nor does there seem to be a floor drain, which is common in Japan but rare in the US. Making it out of fiberglas, like modern bathtubs, would be much more promising. Which is how most prefab pod bathrooms are made now. Too bad Lillian Gilbreth never worked on this problem. She was the wife of the famous time and motion study guy, and she is responsible for most modern kitchen design. Kitchen counters, all the same height, recessed sinks, not too deep, stove height matches counter height, wall mounted cabinets above the counters, drawers below - all that is her doing.[1] Before Gilbreth, kitchen were uncoordinated tables, cabinets, and appliances.[2] If she'd done a bathroom design, it would have worked. [1] https://slate.com/human-interest/2012/10/lillian-gilbreths-kitchen-practical-how-it-reinvented-the-modern-kitchen.html https://slate.com/human-interest/2012/10/lillian-gilbreths-k... [2] https://clickamericana.com/topics/home-garden/antique-kitchens-from-the-1900s https://clickamericana.com/topics/home-garden/antique-kitche...

dr_dshiv 4y ago
Bucky and Lilian Gilbreth—my two biggest design heroes! In 2015, I convinced Brown to digitize her PhD thesis (industrial psychology), which had been lost. More here: https://bobemiliani.com/the-back-story-eliminating-waste-in-teaching/ https://bobemiliani.com/the-back-story-eliminating-waste-in-...
- tomcam 4y ago
  Holy. Shit. I cannot wait to read this. Thank you for a heroic preservation effort.
morsch 4y ago

AstralStorm 4y ago

This particular design would actually be real pain to clean, being small and full of curved, occluded surfaces. Allegedly smooth surface notwithstanding - over time even steel gets brushed, bent and the joints damaged.

still_grokking 4y ago

I've clicked on the title and found than this beautiful quote on the front page of that site: “We are not going to be able to operate our Spaceship Earth successfully nor for much longer unless we see it as a whole spaceship and our fate as common. It has to be everybody or nobody.” -R. Buckminster Fuller-

dsr_ 4y ago

In dwelling places and computer hardware and software, I have developed a preference for maintainability and compatible interfaces over performance and shininess. This bathroom is fixed. It is not configurable, which means that it's great if it does exactly what you need and is a problem otherwise. I'm 6'5". At various times, there have been people living in my house ranging from baby-sized up through me. It looks like this is optimized for someone about 5'5" tall. Bucky was 5'2". This bathroom has no ventilation options other than a bizarrely placed under-sink fan. It lacks many affordances - a place for towels, natural light, an electrical outlet for small appliances, any consideration of disability or infirmity - and because of the unified construction, it cannot be changed. It's an interesting design, but the reason people didn't adopt it is that it isn't adaptable.