A geodesic dome is an approximate half-sphere formed of connected triangles, a balloon-frame bubble. The structure is more sophisticated and complex than it first appears, but it is both stable and strong, especially in contrast to the traditional cubical shape of domestic structures, which is inherently instable.

The force holding most traditional buildings together is compression, one stone on top of another. The force holding a geodesic dome together is tension. The dome, and its related structure the tensegrity sphere, have an inherent strength and flexibility which is counterintuitive -- more on this in the next chapter. (Actually, Kenneth Snelson made significant contributions to Fuller's conceptions of tensegrity in the 40's, and he is not always fully credited for that work.)

Sidelong criticism of the traditional western housing industries is a recurring theme in Fuller's writings. Consider this, which Fuller composed at Yale as a visiting professor (and quoted most fully in the Robert Synder book, page 153):

There once was a square with a romantic flair
Pure Beaux-Arts, McKim Mead & White,
In the mood that ensued, he went factory-nude --
Mies, Gropy, Corbussy & Wright.

Rome home to a dome, where
Georgian and Gothic once stood;
Now chemical bonds alone guard our blondes
And even the plumbing looks good

Let architects sing of aesthetics that bring
Rich clients in hordes to their knees
Just give me a home in a great circle dome
Where the stresses and strains are at ease

Rome home to a dome
On the crest of a neighboring hill
Where the chores are all done, before they're begun
And eclectic nonsense is nil.

Let modern folks dream of glass boxes with steam
Out along super-burbia way;
Split-levels, split-loans, split-breadwinner homes
No down money, lifetime to pay.

Rome home to a dome
No banker would back with a dime
No mortgage to show, no payments to go,
Where you dwell, dream and spend only time.

It was Fuller's evident intention for the dome to be mass-produced and revolutionize the housing industry. Through the 50's and early 60's that conspicuously failed to happen. But as a result of Fuller's perpetual college lecture tour and the anti-Establishment American Zeitgeist of the 1970's, geodesic domes were eagerly seized on as a likely form for inexpensive, alternative, off-grid housing. This was a bad fit. Many of those seeking such alternative housing were doing so in an effort towards natural (anti-Establishment, if you will) solutions, but Fuller was a technocrat. The domes are not especially easy nor intutitve to build or repair. The geodesic dome is not craftable, as many hoped and many continue to assume, by a single person with a lathe, a saw, and a stack of birch twigs. Promotion of the domes by Stewart Brand in his Whole Earth Catalogs was something that Stewart Brand described as a failure some years later in "How Buildings Learn," --- a massive, total failure, a craze stinking of the American 70's Zeitgeist.

It was not so much a failure as a mismatch. Fuller wanted to promote democratic self-determination through rational industrialization and greater interdependence, and the Whole Earthers wanted to promote democratic self-determination through individualistic off-grid living.

Residential domes, as built to date, tended to violate local zoning ordinances. Subcontractors had never worked on them before. Drywall and plywood come flat. Plumbing line comes straight. Everything nonstandard gets expensive fast. Neighbors, interested in protecting their property values, didn't like what they saw as, at best, a temporary structure.

Once built, the roofs tended to leak, a common complaint. (Roofs are not really a settled issue with flat pitched roofs, not to mention a complex surface like the top of a sphere.) Heat rose to the top of the dome, which tended to be unused space. It was difficult to position conventional furniture or create individual rooms inside the dome. Once built, the domestic dome is a covering over a single space, not the sequence of rooms one thinks of as a house. Without a sequence of rooms, the conventional domestic psychologies (territoriality, the public-to-private gradient, the intimacy gradient) do not work well. It would be subtly frustrating to live in what felt like a single, huge room. Square doors and windows were obviously non-integral to the structure. Nailing them on compromised the structure, introduced a jarring visual note, and created another opportunity for leaks. Even Anne Fuller complained, gently, to Alden Hatch for "Buckminster Fuller At Home," pg. 220: "The bad thing was you could not hang paintings because they would be just sort of dangling out from the curve."

And there was another unexpected inconvenience. When subdividing walls or roofed interior rooms were erected, they typically didn't reach all the way to the ceiling, and an uninterrupted domical shape carries sound in unexpected directions with unexpected efficiency. The psychology of privacy has a lot to do with acoustics. A lack of acoustic privacy is another underestimated frustration.

All that said, though -- it has real possibilities because it was never meant to be a craft industry. As Kiyoshi said in a reply to a mail message, an automobile which was assembled on the same basis as these domes would also tend to have technical problems. It hasn't realized its full potential because the mass-production housing industry never grew up behind it. As of 1995 a few American companies are still actively advertising and building residential domes, apparently with some success. According to Martin Pawley, some 300,000 domes were licensed against the patent from 1954 to 1984 (which of course leaves out all the unlicensed activity).

But where the geodesic dome was a relative flop in the domestic sector, it was not such a big flop elsewhere. The history of the dome as a traditional, monumental building element in traditional, monumental buildings blessed by architects came to some kind of close in Cincinnati. According to Carol W. Condit's "American Building," "The last building in which the dome was consciously adopted for monumental effect is Cincinnati Union Terminal (1929-33)," which has been recently renovated and now houses two municipal museums. It is actually a half-dome. Condit goes on, "Although the dome disappeared as an element in a formal composition, it was to be reborn in a variety of functional designs intended simply to shelter the maximum area at minimum cost. . . The flattened wide-span dome is the only structure that can provide complete shelter without intermediate supports for areas measurable in acres."

It's a bit ironic, but the geodesic dome had market potential for these industrial and commercial applications. The first important dome was a 93-foot aluminum and plastic dome over the Dearborn Rotunda Building, dating from 1952. The United States Air Force next commissioned a number of fiberglass plastic domes for the DEW (Distant Early Warning) line in 1954; the domes fit the requirements of being quickly assembled, invisible to microwave radar, and capable of withstanding brutally cold and windy weather conditions. Henry Kaiser became interested in the possibilities in these years, and another dome went up as the United States pavilion at a 1959 Moscow World's Fair.

In 1958 the engineers Battey and Childs, according to Carl Condit, designed the Union Tank Car Company dome in Baton Rouge, completed in October of that year. "Although the dome is 384 in diameter, with a clear interior height of 120 feet, the steel tubing and connections weigh only 567 tons. The protective covering is a continuous aluminum skin pinned to the underside of the framework." Dymaxion World puts the interior height at 128 feet, a total weight of 1200 tons, two ounces of structural weight for every cubic foot the dome encloses, and about 23 times the volumetric size of St. Peter's dome in Rome.

The Climatron at the Missouri Botanical Garden, built between 1961 and 1962, was the first structural double-dome, and the first geodesic dome with a transparent covering to admit light and heat. It contains a temperature- and humidity-controlled atmosphere for the Garden's tropical plants.

The American pavilion at the Montreal Expo '67 was a big Fuller dome, a 20-story structure constructed on the island of St. Hélène which successfully upstaged both the Soviet Union's pavilion and Frei Otto's West German pavilion, and through which a monorail ran (but did not stop). The Montreal dome's environmental control system is of special interest here, and will be described in a later chapter.

The dome at EPCOT center in Disneyworld is perhaps the most-seen and most conspicuously futuristic, designed (according to the Martin Pawley biography) by a former student of Bucky's named Peter Floyd. The EPCOT dome is a complete geodesic sphere which stands 180 feet tall, is supported on 6 steel legs 15 feet off the ground, and is constructed of a steel frame dressed with aluminum panels. The sphere diameter of 165 encloses 22 million cubic feet of airspace. I believe the dome over the Universal CityWalk entertainment mall in the Hollywood Hills, designed by Jon Jerde, is geodesic. The permanent American base at the south pole is built around a geodesic dome.

And there is still some life in this thing. In 1994 the National Weather Service announced the building of 158 40-foot-diameter domes under a $5 billion modernization program. The Hobby-Eberly telescope in the Davis Mountains of west Texas is 86 feet in diameter. There are a few companies in the U.S. who are devoted to building them, without blessing of architecture. The thing is to take the experience of building and using those. There's little dome tradition to lean on, but there's a little.

The Astrodome, finished in Houston in 1965, has an interior clear span of 642 feet and covers nearly seven and a half acres. It was engineered to sustain steady winds of 135 MPH and gusts of 165 MPH.

Is the Manhattan dome possible with current technology? This is the trick question in a lot of Fuller proposals. Oh, no, you can't build the thing now -- it was only to display the intricacies of my mathematics, or built to point out the lack of effectiveness of the current housing industry. As Hugh Kenner said about the Dymaxion Car, any one of Fuller's inventions was just a small part of a much bigger scheme. And the American Mercury and Apollo space missions are often given as an example of a successful scientific endeavor where the political will came first, and the technology was developed afterward. . . The answer is that I believe the Manhattan dome is possible with current technology.

The question we're heading to, then, is whether this idea of a large-scale dome is a workable one within the present economic organization, whether or not we can 'uninstall' this artifact from Fuller's world-view and make it work in our world.