When Buckminster Fuller lost his young daughter to meningitis and pneumonia, he directed his grief toward the well-being of others by combating infection with architecture. Fuller blamed his daughter’s death on the unsanitary conditions of high-density urban housing, which was only getting more extreme in the first decades of the 20th century. He reasoned that hygienic shelter had to be made affordable to all, and scattered far and wide to slow the spread of contagion. His solution was to invent a new kind of living unit that could be mass-produced in a factory, hung from a mast, and air-dropped anywhere on the planet by a fleet of zeppelins. He made drawings of these “Lightful Houses” punctuating places ranging from the North Pole to the Sahara, and calculated production numbers in the billions. Not a single tower ever got built.

....

The Lightful House is one of fifty projects in The World as an Architectural Project, an important new book by Hashim Sarkis, Roi Salgueiro Barrio, and Gabriel Kozlowski that surveys some of the most provocative architectural visions from the 1880s to the present, supported by stunning images that give the book the visual richness of a museum exhibition.