Cross posted by "What if Bucky Fuller married Sir Edward Bulwer-Lytton?"

                  Copyright 1994 The New York Times Company
                               The New York Times

                  April  17, 1994, Sunday, Late Edition - Final

HEADLINE: Streetscapes/The Guyon Earle Kitchen;
A Forest Hills Find for Fuller's Dymaxion House

BYLINE:  By  CHRISTOPHER GRAY

 BODY:
   FEELING pretty good after finally junking that rusty, dented kitchenette
unit
with the strange drawers? Then don't read on.

   The Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn, Mich., just bought a similar kitchenette
that it values at $80,000. The museum found the kitchen in an apartment in
Forest Hills, Queens, and it is looking for another.

    The kitchen purchased by the museum was designed by Guyon L. C. Earle, a
Queens developer, in the late 30's. Buckminster Fuller later bought two for
his
futuristic Dymaxion Houses, prefab aluminum structures that the architect
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 and a giant
weather vane/ventilator on the roof and that weighed only three tons, a small
fraction of the weight of a conventional two-bedroom house.

   According to Christian Overland, a collection specialist at the Henry Ford
Museum, Mayor H. Hubert Humphrey of Minneapolis began negotiating in 1946 for
2,500 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, Kan. One was
to
live in, the other was kept for parts.

   In 1992 his family donated its house to the Henry Ford Museum, which also
includes among its exhibits a lunar exploration module, a collection of
locomotives and the Wright brothers' house and bicycle shop.

   The museum is meticulously restoring the Dymaxion House, scheduled to be
opened to the public in 1995, but it had no kitchen.  Tracing original
correspondence, Mr. Overland identified Reynolds Metals as the fabricator and
Earle as the designer.

   EARLE worked in the family real estate firm, which developed the apartment
house at 6 Burns Street in Forest Hills, across from the West Side Tennis
Club,
around 1920.
     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
refrigerator,
silver compartments, vents and concealed lighting.

   The heat from the refrigerator compressor dried the towels and the dishes,
and the oven was vented through charcoal filters. Some photographs show the
kitchens concealed by a bank of Venetian blinds.

   Mr. Overland says that fewer than 1,000 of the Earle kitchens were actually
produced, and in December he began searching for a duplicate kitchen, which he
knew had been installed somewhere in Forest Hills, for the museum's Dymaxion
House.

   A research analyst at the Queens Historical Society, James Driscoll,
identified the building at 6 Burns Street (where Fuller occupied an apartment
in
the late 40's while developing the geodesic dome) as a likely place to find
one
of the kitchens, and contacted the superintendent, Jerry DiMuro. Mr. DiMuro 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 gray, 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 enthusiast might pass it by as yet another prefab
kitchenette, a trendy design goal in the World War II period.

   Mr. Overland says the museum will remove the unit from 6 Burns Street next
month. He won't divulge the purchase price, but he says that reconstructing
the
original kitchen -- which had been their fallback 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 40's, hoping to make a deal
to
produce it. But after the Dymaxion project fell through it appears he gave up
the effort.

   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
that visitors can actually handle. Anyone with an Earle kitchen for sale may
write him, enclosing a photograph of it, at the Henry Ford Museum, 2000
Oakwood
Boulevard, Dearborn, Mich. 48121.

GRAPHIC: Photos: One of the Earle kitchens in a Forest Hills apartment in
1939.
(The Lincoln Collection, Pennsylvania State University); Modified Earle
kitchen
recently at 6 Burns Street in Forest Hills. (Rebecca Cooney for The New York
Times)