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IN 1969, Buckminster Fuller developed elaborate plans to encapsulate midtown Manhattan in a sprawling geodesic dome -- as if Manhattanites weren't already living in a bubble. The fiberglass dome would be two miles in diameter, enclose midtown Manhattan in a temperature-controlled environment, and pay for itself within ten years from the savings of snow-removal costs alone. The proposal, submitted at the height of the Cold War, appealed to those who felt the structure could shield the city from enemy attacks, but Bucky saw it more as an experiment in energy and climate control. As with many of his other proposals, Bucky was laughed out of town, but it was a fascinating application of his breakthrough invention -- the lightest, strongest, most cost-effective, and easily assembled structure ever devised. A geodesic dome is shaped like a piece of a sphere and made of an interconnected pattern of triangles. (On a curved surface, the shortest distance between two points is called a geodesic line.) The dome is able to cover more space without internal supports than any other enclosure, and becomes proportionally lighter and stronger the larger it is. It may never be used to cover entire cities, but it is a uniquely futuristic building technology as we move toward an era of energy-efficient building, and, if you believe in doomsday scenarios, toward the need to control the environment of massive spaces. Heating and cooling the dome is more efficient than with any other structure because there are no corners where heat may be trapped -- which also means the overall air flow in a dome is substantially better than in a cubic structure. Today there are over 300,000 geodesic structures around the world: Plastic and fiberglass "radomes" house delicate radar equipment along the Arctic perimeter and withstand winds up to 180 mph; corrugated metal domes have given shelter to families in Africa, at a cost of $350 per dome. The U.S. Marine Corps hailed the geodesic dome as "the first basic improvement in mobile military shelter in 2,600 years." -- Amanda Griscom
 Share your thoughts on the grandeur and squalor of cities, and on Feed's "Street Level" special city issue, in the Loop. |
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