Ever heard of R. Buckminster Fuller?

He was an American "visionary." He pioneered terms such as spaceship earth. He was also an inventor. You might have heard of the Dymaxion House, which gained a decent amount of interest. Of course, the Dymaxion House came after the ill fated Dymaxion Car, which was supposed to be some sort of hybrid zeppelin-car-hippie-thing.

Of course, Buckminster was not a total crackpot. Dymaxion houses were actually fairly awesome and, more importantly, extremely cheap and portable. But before he came up with the Dymaxion house, he had another, less successful idea that involved constructing large apartment buildings out of aircraft materials. These apartment buildings were hung around a massive central pillar. How would the pillar be constructed? This is the awesome part: a zeppelin would go over the construction site, drop a bomb, put the pillar in the resulting crater, and then ground crews would come, fill the crater with concrete and erect the building.

Aren't zeppelins awesome?

If your curiosity about Fuller is piqued, check out this 1964 article on him and his vision of American life.