“If there is one thing I want my art to be, it’s geometrically sound.” That’s what my friend said last weekend after we stepped out from under the geodesic dome that someone had put up on frozen Medicine Lake as part of the Art Shanty Projects west of Minneapolis. The tarp-covered dome was empty and unoccupied, so it’s unclear if the point of the dome was to demonstrate the dome itself, or if it just wasn’t being used at time.
Are geodesic domes by themselves art? Maybe, maybe not, but they are interesting enough to me, which is why I’ve been posting locations for some of Buckminster Fuller’s domes in our art and design category. Other people might just see the structures that Fuller popularized as nothing more than purely functional buildings, but I’m glad there is an effort to preserve, as some part of the world’s cultural heritage, most of the first domes he built.
Here’s a brief history of a few of Bucky Fuller’s domes:
He built a dome to cover the stacked-gear design of the Ford Rotunda in Dearborn, Michigan in 1952. The Rotunda had been part of the Ford exhibit at Chicago’s 1933 World’s Fair, and after the fair, it was transported to Michigan and rebuilt across from Ford’s Central Office Building. A conventional domed roof would have crushed the building, but Fuller’s geodesic dome that covered the courtyard weighed only 18,000 pounds. The Rotunda was one of the top five tourist destinations in the country in the early 1960s before it burned to the ground after maintenance workers accidentally caught the dome on fire in 1962.
One of his earliest commercial domes, built in the 1950’s for a restaurant, still exists in Woods Hole, Massachusetts.
The Russians liked the geodesic dome he built in Moscow for the American National Exhibition in 1959 so much that they purchased it so it could stay in Moscow’s Sokolniki Park. On a side note, this exhibition was also where Charles and Ray Eames debuted their film “Glimpses of the USA.”
The dome that he lived in while teaching at Southern Illinois University from 1959 to 1972 is being renovated with plans for a museum.
The three-quarters geodesic sphere that he designed for the United States Pavilion at the Montreal World’s Fair, Expo ’67 is currently an environmental museum. It caught on fire in 1976, burning away its plastic shell but leaving the steel structure intact.
In 2007, rather than go through the trouble of preserving one of Fuller’s first domes, Kansas City Southern destroyed the dome he designed to cover the Union Tank Car Company’s rail car repair station in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. They did this quietly, one year before it would have been eligible for the National Register of Historic Places. The second dome that Union Tank Car built due to the success of the first one still exists near St. Louis.
Probably the most well-known geodesic structure, the geodesic sphere at Disney World’s Epcot, isn’t one that Fuller designed, although it is called Spaceship Earth as an homage to Bucky Fuller’s name for the planet that we all ride on.
Karl Hartig has a great collection of geodesic dome photos on his website if you want to see more.