Oh, yeah, I remember that control panel. It was conspicuous, near the main entrance, and inspired by the name 'Climatron' I was always dying to flip the switches and see what would happen. Climatron. What good is technology if you can't play with it? Of course I liked gumball machines, pinball machines, vending machines, the kind with the hard pull-out handles, control panels with blinking lights, and the forbidden slot machines most of all. My earliest memories of the Climatron are mixed up with the Jewel Box in Forest Park, but the Climatron became my favorite because it was jungly and humid inside and smelled funky, had huge trees with enormous leaves inside, and because it had a pool with a tunnel. I remember the sound of rushing water, was there a waterfall?

Although 'Climatron' sounds like revolving orientable playground equipment, I never thought you could climb on it. I was never that stupid, but I did always want to see if the gigantic lily pads in the reflecting pool out front would bear my weight.

I don't remember being impressed with its futuriosity. I was a kid, accepting every rainforest-in-a-geodesic-dome experience as normal. The Climatron's look-and-feel fits right in with a number of other important engineering-intensive 1960s landmarks in Slide Rule City: the elongated-caternary stainless-steel Arch, the revolving Stouffers, the boxy Belgian buildings at Monsanto Headquarters linked by tunnels and a pedestrian skyway, the white hyperboloid of the Planetarium like a big vase, the main terminal building at Lambert which is a Saarinen copy-cat knock-off with 1960s arches, and the mysterious engineering-intensive buildings lit up with the science-fictiony McDonnell Douglas logo.

Yes, it's a geodesic dome. Or was.

Buckminster Fuller and one of his students, Ken Snelson, invented the geodesic dome in 1947 in the back yard of Black Mountain College in North Carolina. Fuller took out the patent and collected the revenue. He was a genius, not an angel.

What's the deal with geodesic domes? They're structurally smarter than anything we had before. Very strong for their weight, inherently stable because their structure includes triangles, geometrically efficient because spheres efficiently enclose volumes, creates free-span spaces underneath because the surface is the structure. No supports necessary. Fuller essentially figured out how to build a soap bubble out of durable materials. They have eerie properties: the bigger they are the stronger they get. At some point in the construction process they sort of begin standing up by themselves.

So, okay, brilliant. Far superior to traditional right-angle post-and-beam construction techniques, which are wasteful, far heavier, inherently unstable, and rely on gravity to stand up! The building history of mankind looks sick by comparison! Great! Let's have everything in geodesic domes then!

Right!

Wrong!

All the other structural engineers in the world (except for idealistic students and except maybe for Frei Otto) said, uh, wait. And then they said, no. The whole history of architectural structural engineering was based on traditional right-angle post-and-beam construction techniques, and understanding tension (the strength of a taut rope) and compression (the strength of a pile of bricks) as separate forces. In a geodesic dome, tension and compression are hopelessly mixed up together. To this day the stresses in different varieties of geodesic structures is not well understood. The math is wicked. Traditionally trained engineers couldn't, and can't, guarantee their behavior under load conditions or their safety.

So the engineers said, we're not going to re-learn our jobs just because you say so, and besides, what was the problem? Is weight really an issue? Were buildings too heavy before? Are we crushing the Earth? You know how sarcastic structural engineers can be.

Fuller had high hopes for using geodesic domes to provide a quick strong cost-effective housing solution for eveybody on the planet. As of 2005 that hasn't happened yet, for reasons having little to do with structural engineering. (I mean, it's not the lack of food that causes world hunger, is it.)

Many counterculture types were attracted to the idea of building cheap geodesic domes in the woods and smoking marijuana inside. This idea worked for those hippies who happened to have technological aptitude, who were patient and industrious and who could... well, you get the idea. There were some. But disappointingly you can't build one of these in an afternoon out of birch twigs and a handsaw while your girlfriend rolls one for you.

Meanwhile the architectural profession is also looking over, observing this scene, and checking out what Bucky Fuller is up to. They said, uh, whut, wait. And then they said no way. You're not getting any major commisions from the establishment if we can help it. The architects really didn't know what to do with Fuller: they insulted him and called him a crank and a (gasp) functionalist.

And that was ironic. Everybody knows the architects were in the deathgrip of Modernism for decades. It was like a long sickness. Back in the 1920s (and before) Modernism began as an effort to return to first principles, and let the look of the building fall out from decisions about its logic and function, not by imposing a traditional style. The resulting structures tended to be shockingly simpler, flatter, and lighter than their older neighbors. Their functionality and nakedness looked as honest as an airplane fuselage.

And then a recognizable Modern vocabulary began to develop. And then in 1931 Philip Johnson comes back from Germany and Americanizes it, makes a style out of it, makes the style 'safe for millionaires' as he puts it, catering to people's expectations, and in that very moment Modernism became what it was born to destroy – it became a traditional style. The geodesic dome was judged Not Acceptable because it didn't square up with what honest structure 'should' look like.

Underdog Fuller said, okay, pffft on all of you.

The technological advantages of the geodesic dome were so compelling that Fuller got a bunch of them built out in the 1950s and 1960s despite all of this unnecessary pissing and moaning.

At first, mainly for industrial applications and exhibition buildings and auditoriums and for the Air Force and stuff like that. The dome was soon breaking records for covered surface, enclosed volume, and construction speed. The industrialist Henry J. Kaiser was one of Fuller's first licensees, and Kaiser mass-produced panel domes out of his Oakland, California aluminum works. The first one went up in Kaiser's Hawaiian Village development in Waikiki in 1957 within a matter of 22 hours. Kaiser flew out for the construction but it was already finished by the time he arrived. It's 145 feet in diameter. Martin Denny started his bird-call-lounge-music career at the Hawaiian Village and recorded his first big album, "Exotica", in the dome to take advantage of the echo.

By the end of 1958 Kaiser had completed eight large pre-fab panel domes, one of which is the Casa Manana in Fort Worth (weirdly right across the street from Louis Kahn's Kimbell Museum), one of which is the recently renovated Gold Dome in Oklahoma City, and one of which is a doomed former bank in Tempe Arizona.

So all this goes to explain why there was a flurry of geodesic-dome-building activities in the late 1950s and through the 1960s and not now. And all this leads up to the construction of the Climatron.

It's the Climatron because it's a climate-controlled....a-tron, 175 feet in diameter and 70 feet high, construction cost of $700,000.

The idea of a geodesic rainforest greenhouse where you could maintain and manipulate multiple local temperatures and humidity conditions under the same big roof belonged to Frits W. Went, director of the botantical garden at the time. Although Fuller taught down the street at Washington University in 1955 he appears not to have been directly involved in the project.

Using air-conditioning Went hoped to create four climates in four different sections of the building. "In the southeast sector both day and night temperatures are high. In the northwestern section both day and night temperatures are lower, corresponding with a tropical mountain climate. In the south-western section the days are relatively cool and the nights warm, comparable to an oceanic climate, and in the north-eastern sector the days are warm and nights are cool, comparable to a dry tropical climate." (Went, Plant Science Bulletin, June 1962)

This was brave.

"A bank of 24 floodlights, revolving at night in 5-minute cycles, simulates noon light on one side of the dome and moonlight on the other. Climate ranges from Amazon to Hawaii and Java to India..... the Climatron is the world's first completely air-conditioned greenhouse and the first geodesic dome to be enclosed in rigid Plexiglass panels. The broad climatic range within the dome (from the Amazonian rain forest to the cool uplands of India) is achieved by sophisticated controls instead of conventional partitioning." (HABS data sheet on the building, 1983)

Also note that it's a double-dome. There are two patterns of hexagons, and actually three 'layers' of shells: two structural aluminum layers connected with struts, and the inner layer of triangular plexiglass panels in a frame, suspended under the outer layer.

Did this work? Only temporarily.

After only 28 years, the triangular plexiglass panels had discolored and warped to the point that it was a problem. The 1990 renovation (which made the Climatron ADA-compliant, by the way) replaced these plexiglass panels with laminated glass, which is much, much heavier, four times as heavy.

Somebody made the judgment that the old structure couldn't safely bear the weight of the new glass, and an entirely new interior layer was required.

Really? Knowing what we know about the strength characteristics of geodesic domes, that's kind of a surprise. Maybe somebody did the analysis and found that the aluminum outer frames had weakened over the years. Or that the quarter-sphere doesn't have the same load-carrying characteristics. Or that the engineers said what, and then they said no, we're not going to spend the money to find out if this is safe or not. Or that the project lead said, shut up, the key problem isn't structural efficiency, the key problem is identifying and exhausting the client's maximum budget, so we're going to have a new spaceframe!

One of my sources says, "The existing structure was unequal to the resulting increase in load and the new glazing is supported by a network of conventional aluminum skylight mullions inside the building envelope. The old structure remains in place, but plays no part in supporting the glass -- a kind of high-tech ruin enclosing its more efficient but less evocative replacement."

Key word there: conventional. So is the new interior spaceframe at the Climatron geodesic or not? I don't know. I don't know. If you know, please email me and tell me. I can't tell by examining the photographs if the interior layer is omnitrangulated and truly geodesic.

If the answer is 'geodesic', then hooray, the maverick underdog and his supposedly crank idea survives.

If the answer is 'conventional' then okay that's just another blow in the architectural history of geodesic domes.

Either way, though, every source agrees that the new interior glass layer is high-tech and self-supporting, and the old exterior aluminum double-layer of hexagons is just no longer necessary. Then why keep it? Because it's historic, because it looks cool, because that's what the Climatron looks like, catering to people's expectations. That's dishonest. Geodesic domes began as an effort to produce a building without a style, to be honest about logic and function. So now it's a style. So that puts us right back where we started. Once again.

On Jan 14 2006 I asked dome expert Jay Baldwin about the Climatron. Here's the question and answer:

Would you comment on the Climatron dome renovation / replacement in St. Louis a few years back? I knew the building well, as a kid, and I'm intrigued to see that the interior layer of Plexiglas panels was replaced by an entirely new dome, a new structure with glass panels that made the old supporting outer-layer structure redundant. (They kept it anyway.) I wonder if the new interior layer is a true self-supporting geodesic dome, or if it's conventionally braced somehow. And if it is a 'real' dome, is it structurally any different than the ones built in 1960?

Cheers,
Walt

Answer from Jay Baldwin:

My only reliable experience with the Climatron is based on vists before it was renovated. At the time that dome was designed, it was not yet realized why geodesic domes tend to leak. That being the case, the Climatron was designed with troughs built into the interior of the framework, deflecting any leaks to less annoying, presumably more useful locations. This technique of managing leaks was one of the principal features of Bucky's "Wichita" house which deliberately premitted water to freely enter along the edges of all 96 "Cowling Gores" (tapered aluminum roof panels: Bucky purposefully avoided carpenter terms in that structure) where it was caught in the concave top surfaces of the supportinhg "hat-section" ribs which then channeled the water to a circumferential collecting ring and thence to a cistern (never built) under the house. The cowling gores were held in place by powerful tensioning hardware, yet they could accommodate the extremes of expansion and contraction in the wide temeprature range found in rural Kansas. I have found that geodesic structures leak geodesically due to expansion and contraction forces unevenly affecting the structure, allowing distortion to fracture seals and even actually pump water indoors!

Having discovered this phenomenon, I designed my Pillowdomes to accommodate expansion and contraction without affecting or fatiguing the sealing — especially around windows and doors. It works well, and keeps working. Because it worked well, I proposed that the Climatron be re-skinned in transparent pillows fashioned from DuPont's Tefzel®, one of the very few plastics that is not destroyed by sunlight. They did not respond to my proposal, which would have beenm much lighter and cheaper than what was done. Regarding that matter, I cannot comment because I have not yet seen the new skin arrangement—much less in a storm—and so do not know if it is rain-tight. Glass does not expand and contract as much as does acrylic (the original skin), so I would expect the problems might have been reduced somewhat. Another problem with that the original skin attracted green slime molds. My Pillowdomes have had that problem, too, but are made in a way that is relatively easy to clean. JB