It's just a winsome photomontage. It shows a mammoth, clear, shiny giant bubble covering midtown Manhattan. But once it appeared with a profile of Buckminster Fuller in a 1964 Time Magazine (with the equally winsome caption, "Why not?"), it seems to have taken on a life of its own. Like a futurist equivalent of a Rorschach test, it's been reprinted in any number of collections about unbuilt architecture, about futurism and urban planning. For a joke, even a provocative and elegant joke, it's gotten a lot of attention.

From Bucky's tone you would think that careful calculations had been done about the feasibility of doming Manhattan. He says somewhere that it would reduce the heated and cooled surface area of Manhattan by a factor of 84; he says somewhere else that the Manhattan dome would weigh 80,000 tons, be assembled in 5-ton sections by helicopter in three months, and it would cost $200 million. If those calculations were ever done, they were never published.

Either way, Bucky's technocratic style was to keep mum about how this dome would affect Manhattan socially, economically or environmentally. Among the people who have taken it a little bit seriously they always say, well, even if it was technically feasible, which it's not, the technical and social challenges make it unworthy of any consideration. Your view of the dome-- as a blueprint for a dystopian nightmare, as an empty provocation, as a cool idea, as an act of megalomania, a threat to your lifestyle, or all of those at once -- depends on what you bring to it.

But whether it's politically possible depends on the potential benefits, which have never been seriously explored. My intent here is to put forward the idea that doming Manhattan could be a fairly reasonable one, and in this article I want to skim the surface of what I see as some of the likely social, architectural and psychological repercussions of this idea, that's either flat brilliant or transcendentally lamebrained.

To fully appreciate the oddity of the Manhattan dome proposal, which saw the light of day in a St. Louis Post-Dispatch Sunday supplement in 1965, you first should understand the oddity of this near-madman Richard Buckminster Fuller.