... in courtefy of the author,
Chri*topher Gray
From the New York Times, of April 17, 1994
by Christopher Gray
[Author's Note: I do not have the right character for it, but
Christian Overland's last name is spelling with a slash running
through the "O" from lower left to upper right.]
Are you feeling pretty good that you finally moved ahead on your
kitchen renovation and junked that rusty, dented kitchenette unit
with the strange drawers? Then just skip this story: the Henry
Ford Museum, in Dearborn, just bought one out of an apartment in
Forest Hills - which they value at $80,000 - and they're looking
for another.
This was no New York tourist scam - these out-of-towners paid
earnest money for a kitchen designed by Guyon L. C. Earle, a
Queens developer, of the same type used by Buckminster Fuller for
his futuristic Dymaxion House, a prefab aluminum structure that
the inventor hoped would revolutionize the domestic landscape.
In late 1946, Fuller's Dymaxion Dwelling Corporation built two
prototypes of the flying-saucer-like house that had round,
revolving closets, a giant weather vane/ventilator on
the roof, and weighed only three tons, a small fraction of a
conventional two-bedroom house. According to Mr. Overland, Mayor
Hubert Humphrey of Minneapolis began negotiating for 2500
Dymaxion houses to solve the city's postwar housing shortage.
Although about 30,000 people inquired about the Dymaxion,
internal company disputes prevented actual production and William
L. Graham, one of the investors, bought the prototypes for his
own family in Wichita. In 1992 his family donated their house to
the Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn, which also has a lunar rover,
a collection of locomotives, the Wright Brothers house and
bicycle shop and other exhibits.
The museum is meticulously restoring the Dymaxion house,
scheduled to open in 1995, but Mr. Graham had removed the kitchen
in 1946. Tracing original correspondence, Christian Overland, a
Collection Specialist at the museum, identified Reynolds Metals
as the fabricator and Guyon Earle as the designer.
Earle worked in the family real estate firm, which developed the
apartment house at 6 Burns Street in Forest Hills around 1920,
across from the West Side Tennis Club. In 1939 Earle decided to
update the kitchens in the Tudor-style building with a new idea
he had been tinkering with: the one-piece, all-metal "One-Wall
Kitchen of Beauty, Quality and Equipment."
When closed up it looks like any other bank of kitchen cabinets.
But inside the doors and drawers are oven equipment, towel
racks, a roll-out, gravity-close refrigerator, silver
compartments, vents, concealed lighting, and everything else
you'd need if you became truly modern. The heat from the
refrigerator compressor dried the towels and the dishes, and the
oven was vented behind a warming compartment up through charcoal
filters and back into the kitchen. Some photographs show the
kitchens concealed by a bank of Venetian blinds.
Mr. Overland says that less than one thousand of the Earle
kitchens were actually produced, and in December he began
searching for a duplicate for the Dymaxion House that he knew had
been installed somewhere in Forest Hills. A volunteer at the
Queens Historical Society, James Driscoll, identified the
building as 6 Burns Street and contacted the superintendent,
Jerry DeMuro, who in turn led Mr. Overland to the only surviving
Earle kitchen left in the building, in a one-bedroom apartment
that is going on sale later this year.
The kitchen unit is dingy, dented and painted grey, and it has
lost its refrigerator - the old freezer compartment is now the
liquor closet. The original dishrack, oven, compressor, handles
and other elements are still in place, but even a kitchen nut
might pass it by as yet another pre-fab kitchenette, a trendy
design goal in the World War II period.
Mr. Overland says the Museum will remove the unit in May, and
won't say what they paid for it. But he does say that
reconstructing the original kitchen - which had been their
fall-back position - would have cost "at least $80,000." Back in
Dearborn, a team of conservators will take five to six weeks to
analyze the original paint finish, replicate missing features,
reconstruct the refrigerator and even rebuild and - they hope -
restart the compressor.
Earle promoted his kitchen extensively in the 1940's, hoping to
make a deal to produce it but after the Dymaxion project fell
through it was never published again. But in the late 1940's
Buckminster Fuller, then at work on his geodesic dome design, did
have an apartment at 6 Burns Street.
Mr. Overland recently got a Dymaxion bathroom in Philadelphia and
is looking for a second and maybe even a third Earle kitchen, one
for parts, and another one that visitors can actually handle.
Anyone who wants to move their kitchen remodeling ahead
- fast - should write him with a photograph of their kitchen at
the Henry Ford Museum, 2000 Oakwood Boulevard, Dearborn, Michigan
48121.
end
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