¶ Dymaxion House
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Back in 1929 Vilhjalmur Stefansson arranged for me to have a dinner meeting with an engineer from the Soviet Amtorg office in New York. The Soviet engineer was in this country to arrange for a party of some 50 of his colleagues from Russia to visit the Ford Plant at River Rouge.
The engineers told me that the soviet managers thought very well of my Dymaxion House. He said they were very familiar with it, but they had concluded that it must be kept secret from the Russian people for 50 years. The sacrifices of the people for the Five Year Plans were so great that the people must not know of the house as they would like it intuitively and they would all want it.
At this time there was a world competition for the architectural design of the Palace of the Soviets. Corbusier would have won it but he would have introduced untenable standards for the use of new materials-- as would the Dymaxion House. Ergo, the managers decreed that the Palace of Soviets and all Russian Architecture must be classical in style and be made of wood or stone. They had to use metals for more critical purposes than housing. No information would be allowed to come in and disturb this strategy.
