Walt Lockley

Bucky's Own Dome

Originally published in Dome, Fall 1995

When Bucky Fuller began his relationship with Southern Illinois
University at Carbondale in 1960, he moved into a geodesic dome at
the northeast corner of Forest and Cherry. In the intervening thirty-five
years Bucky's own dome has largely escaped notice.

But now it's being rehabbed by Kim and Pete Depaoli,
Chicagoans who have decided to return to SIUC. You couldn't find a
nicer couple of capable people. Their aim was to make the place
liveable without making major alterations, and live there as renters. One
Saturday in May, responding to their cries for help on the internet, I
drove down to give them a hand.

The dome is a surprisingly small structure on a surprisingly
small, but lush, rectangular lot. If you've seen that photo of Anne Fuller
reading with Bucky sitting in the background, reprinted in Ideas and
Integrities among other places -- well, that photo is a little deceptive.
The dome itself was put up in 1960 by an Ohio company, Pease
Plywood, as an $8000 standard design. It may not have been the
world's first residential dome and it was certainly not Bucky's custom
design. But it still carries special significance as one of the oldest domes
around, and as its inventor's home for eleven years.

The dome is a 40' diameter, 3/8 plywood isocahedron on a
simple concrete pad. Three of the five dormers have sliding-glass
doors. Downstairs, the main room faces south, towards the yard.
Going clockwise, then, is the kitchen area, the bedroom, closets and
two bathrooms side by side. If the dome is surprisingly small, the
bedroom is amazingly, uh, cozy. The main interior floor was concrete
tiled with cork, with nine water pipes embedded in the floor for heat.

A narrow staircase in the center of the dome leads to the
upstairs library. All rooms except the main room are covered by this
platform. Upstairs is where Bucky kept his books in a long, semi-
circular perimeter bookshelf, and scooted back and forth up there on a
rolling chair. Unfortunately the ten rectangular translucent skylights near
the apex have been covered. Although it seems natural to set up the
bedroom upstairs, Kim tells me that code prohibits that -- the ceiling is
too low.

The defender of the Fuller faith in Carbondale is William Perk, a
former professor at the design department at SUI, a former collaborator
of Bucky's, and a current board member of the Buckminster Fuller
Institute. Bill came by to say hello, discuss the future of the dome, and
to share some anecdotes.

The yard was designed and furnished as an outdoor room,
partly to compensate for the size of the interior. The yard is entirely
enclosed by a privacy fence. Anne Fuller evidently spent a lot of time
outside working on her garden or by the meditating pool, and her tree
collection -- black walnut, spruce, mulberry, and others we couldn't
identify -- has matured beautifully. The privacy fence runs completely
around the property and is well overgrown with vines and ambitious
groundcover. This fence was Bucky's design. It's built of five-foot
vertical redwood slats, built into a series of large frames; the slats are
V-shaped and nested to allow wind through without compromising
visual privacy. After these 35 years many of the redwood slats were
disconnected, partially rotted, etc, and this sad state was one of the
city's immediate concerns.

The dome had leaks, not from around the apex but from above
three of the dormers. At some point the dome was shingled, the weight
of which must have forced the structure down relative to the
doorframes. The outside areas above the doors were not sloped
properly and water was allowed to stand and work its way in,
damaging the interior triangular plywood panels. The structure seems
sound but is visibly flatter at some joints, pointier in others. All in all,
though, holding up pretty well for an inexpensive, experimental, 35-
year-old plywood thing which has been not exactly cherished.

As small as the dome is, you can really get a sense of Bucky
having been here and worked here. It takes no leap of imagination to
see him scooting around on his rolling chair or dashing out the door on
his way to Malaysia.

The dome is owned by Mike Mitchell, who bought the dome
from Bucky in 1972 but who has lived in California for some time as an
absentee landlord. It has been periodically vacant and half-heartedly
fixed up. One rumor says a woman who lived here 13 years lost her
sense of smell and wasn't able to detect her terrible mildew problem.
The dome, as an obviously historical structure, a landmark, an attractive
nuisance and a longtime mess, has proved difficult to assess and difficult
for the city to know what to do with; the situation is not helped by the
circumstances of Bucky's departure from SIU.

While globetrotting, famously 'to-and-froing', and contributing
little of tangible value to the university, Bucky drew a salary, and a full
professorship, and a downtown office over a travel agency with as
many as twenty-five students on the college payroll. When SIU
President Delyte Morris stepped down in 1970, in the context of a
conservative backlash against any radical elements -- which Bucky
certainly was -- Bucky's odd arrangement ended and he withdrew his
archives.

You can see this situation many ways (Bill Perk said, "Have you
ever seen Rashomon?") but the result in 1995 is that Fuller's name is not
any more famous in Carbondale than it would be in any other
midwestern college town. There's not as much detectable civic pride
or sense of the range of his contributions as their should be. But that's
likely to change during the Fuller centennial celebrations.

On my latest visit, Kim and Pete had passed their city
inspection with flying colors and had moved in. The municipal Historical
Commission was surprised and pleased that they'd gotten the dome into
shape for about one-tenth of the previous estimates (estimates no doubt
based on the cost of contractors unfamiliar with domes). They say it's
acoustically peculiar, and it's not a house for kids, but they'd made
themselves at home. Their cat likes to climb to the top of the dome and
one of their dogs has seen a spectre, they think. Kim said, "We have an
empty chair for the dead person of the day to rest in."

Kim and Pete have graciously expressed a willingness to
welcome living visitors too, and they'll probably get 'em. "We were way
overdue for some craziness in our lives," Kim said, "and boy we got it."