1960
R. Buckminster Fuller
Dome Over Manhattan
SMITH: “How about this dome over New York City that I’ve heard you’re proposing?”
FULLER: “Well, I did invent a way of enclosing space with what’s called a geodesic dome, which is very much stronger and more efficient than other ways of enclosing space.”
SMITH: “I’ve read a lot of your things on it. But one large enough to cover New York City?”
FULLER: “I began to study how big a dome I could build and whether if you made them bigger, the economics of it began to be unfavorable, and I found in fact, the bigger they got, the more favorable they were.”
(Bookstein ed., 321)
R. Buckminster Fuller’s radical proposal to envelop midtown Manhattan under a two-mile diameter hemispherical geodesic dome is often dismissed as an unserious imaginary proposition from a mad scientist or a purely hypothetical critical provocation. To do so is to dramatically underestimate the deeply practical grandeur of Fuller’s mind. The apparent separation from reality, typically evoked by the shocking scale of the Dome Over Manhattan, likely comes from an unfamiliarity with the overall arc of Fuller’s design scientific research — Fuller posited his unique blend of geodesic mathematics and material science as a fundamental advancement in the human technomaterial capacity. When one is constantly considering issues of energy consumption and resource allocation on a global scale, two spherical miles is no longer an unreasonable scale, but rather a logical stepping stone toward massive reduction in energy use by systematically deploying technologies to temper our environment.
Fuller was deeply serious in this regard: “I then did the calculation of the amount of surfaces of the buildings in New York that are being covered by my dome in this theoretical superimposition of it. I found that the surface of buildings which stood below our dome were eighty times the surface of my dome. Which would mean that if you just had the covering out there, you’d reduce heat losses in New York eighty times. We would reduce down to about 20 percent of the amount of energy input you’d have to put in today” (Fuller int. Smith, 323).
The theory checks out; the math works; the economy makes sense; yet midtown Manhattan has continued to remain domeless. As do the other sites of proposals to dome over cities — like the dome over Winooski, Vermont, a project Fuller did not propose, but was consulted publicly about to consider its feasibility of construction (Stanford). In fact, Fuller’s geodesic dome system was never realized at any scale greater than a medium-to-large building. Yet the image of the Dome stretching across midtown persists in the architectural imaginary. The Dome Over Manhattan remains relevant, as it signaled a radical yet attainable shift in our mode of interaction with our environment.
Fuller’s rationally considered advocacy for a technological posture which proposes to wholly tame New York into a mild, subtropical greenhouse — in an energy-saving effort, no less — asserted our ability to safely create and manage the complexity of climate systems. It assumes a technologically moderated environment is inherently better than its unedited opposite. His even-tempered advocacy shifts the ground we stand on.
“But more fundamentally ‘other’ is the approach of a designer like Buckminster Fuller, especially as the architectural profession started by mistaking him for a man preoccupied with creating structures to envelop spaces…The fact is that, though his domes may enclose some very seductive-seeming spaces, the structure is simply a means towards, the space merely a by-product of, the creation of an environment…” (Banham qtd. Hays, 13). Banham recognized the fundamental nature of Fuller’s claims, and the Dome Over Manhattan may be the clearest indication of the will to create whole, total environments. It is nothing but envelope; it theoretically does nothing except envelop and enclose. It could be taken as a reformulation of the architect’s goals, as an opportunity to upturn and reestablish how to achieve their their central task: the provision of shelter.
Obviously, this is a grand project which exceeds, Burnham’s Chicago, Haussmann’s Paris, or Moses’s New York in the capacity for destruction — though not so much in some physical displacement of people, material, or memory, but in casually upturning the notion of what purpose our architecture actually serves. Sanford Kwinter described Buckminster Fuller’s holistic understanding of our field’s agency in the creation of our collective environment as such: “The capacity not only to discern an emerging pattern in economic and productive organization, but also to see it in its relation to the modern bathroom, the fluid atmosphere, and the distribution of energy in the earth’s crust, indeed to see all of these as an interrelated manifold to be shaped and tapped through design intervention, is not rare, it is unique” (Kwinter, 62).
And that was Fuller’s imaginary capacity.
References
Hays, K. Michael and Miller, Dana ed. (2008) Buckminster Fuller : Starting With The Universe. New York, NY.
Kwinter, Sanford. (1997) “Fuller Themselves,” ANY 17, “Forget Fuller? : EVERYTHING YOU ALWAYS WANTED TO KNOW ABOUT FULLER BUT WERE AFRAID TO ASK” New York, NY.
Smith, Howard ed. by Bookstein, Ezra. (2015) The Smith Tapes: Lost Interviews with Rock Stars & Icons 1969–1972. New York, NY.
Stanford University R. Buckminster Fuller Collection. (1980) Segment from National Public Radio’s “All Things Considered” about dome over Winooski
