On page 8 of the January-February 1968 issue of an IBM-published magazine called Think appeared an article written by Buckminster Fuller called "Why Not Roofs Over Our Cities?"

"Those who have had the pleasure of walking through the great skylighted arcades, such as the Galleria in Milan, Italy, are familiar with the delights of covered city streets. They can envision the effect of a domed-over city, where windows may be open the year round and gardens bloom in the dust-free atmosphere. From below, the dome would appear as a translucent film through which the sky, clouds, and stars would be visible..."

This "dome project" is sketchy at best. The Think article is not that nourishing. The first half is on the dome; the second half is an irrelevant proposal for a personal transportation system on the principle of a monorail-ready containerized shipping unit. The uncredited illustrations are surely not Fuller's work: the dome hovers above traffic level at an evident height of 25 stories in one drawing, 70 stories in another; the guttering is plainly unworkable, and the dome has a diamond pattern like the base of a 1969 Holiday Inn lamp.

A closer look proves that the Think article is an edited version of an earlier piece. In 1965 "The Case for a Domed City" showed up as part of a St. Louis Post-Dispatch special supplement on the future of mankind ("Challenges and Choices"), which itself was likely a reprint from another source. From the tone of the article, one would think that careful calculations had been done. Those calculations are nowhere to be found. Even more tantalizing is a photo caption, from "The Dymaxion World of R. Buckminster Fuller", which goes this way:

"Design for a hemispherical dome 2 miles in diameter. This dome could enclose a large part of New York City, as illustrated. Weighing about 80,000, it could be assembled in 5-ton sections by helicopters in three months and would cost about $200 million dollars. It is believed that the savings to the city in such items as air-conditioning (dome provides its own natural air circulation), street-cleaning, snow removal, and lost man-hours from colds and other respiratory ailments would soon repay initial investment. A synergetic surprise feature of such very large structures is that the thickness of the enclosing shell could be of occupiable dimension -- for living not only under but in dome covering."

Right. It's this photograph, though, that really sparks the imagination. It's a photomontage of a clear, plastic bubble like a soap bubble sitting over a portion of central Manhattan. It's that winsome, provocative photograph that gets me. The perfectly elegant solution for a problem nobody had. . .

There's a sketchy, jokey angle to this thing. It's not hard to imagine that photograph flying over Bucky's transom at Carbondale, the gift of a student with access to the photo lab, Bucky says, "Let me see that. . . " For whatever reason, it hasn't been treated exactly like a joke. Architectural jokes are so seldom funny anyway. This photograph of the imaginary Manhattan dome gets reprinted from the Post and from Think, appearing in the popular Time profile of Bucky from January 10, 1964 (with the equally winsome caption, "Why not?" ) It becomes a little like Kilroy. It reappears in a couple of Fuller's subsequent books like Critical Path, reappearing in collections of unbuilt architecture, in Charles Jencks' "Architecture 2000", in "City Planning in the Twentieth Century" by Magnago Lampugnani, and other works that deal with urban planning and futuristic architecture, there's something appealing captured in that photomontage, whether it's appealingly brilliant or charmingly foolish.

Winter in New York should be optional. The natural hardships of winter and summer kill some people outright, damage a lot of other people, and helps to destroy & corrode the urban infrastructure every year. It's unpredictable and mean. Why not decrease the number of physical dangers in the human environment? Why not do something about it?

It's an idea that is likely one of two things: pretty smart, or transcendentally lamebrained.

The 1965 publication of a proposal for roofed cities came in the context of a trend in world architecture that Fuller, directly or indirectly, reacted to in the late 60's.

Unluckily the context of this trend is not all that complementary for the dome.

Beginning roughly with Courbusier's Radiant City and "A Contemporary City for Three Million" drawings in the 20's, through the drawings of Francisco Mujica, the Hugh Ferris drawings and the popularly influential Norman Bel Geddes General Motors Futurama exhibit at the New York World's Fair of 1939, a vision of the urban future developed in which the skyscraper got bigger and bigger. In the renderings, these 120-story monstrosities were typically surrounded by one of two things: undulating parks to which the population would presumably escape once in a while, or a tangle of 16- or 24-lane superhighways. It's no wonder. It was fewer than 25 years between the building of the Flatiron building and the Empire State Building. It must have seemed to many that the only logical urban direction was up. This towers-in-a-park model remained potent enough to change the old wedding-cake zoning incentives in the 1916 NY zoning to the 1961 Zoning Code which, in the pattern of the Seagram's Building, allowed taller buildings in exchange for public plazas at street level.

These huge buildings were to contain entire cities, and would consolidate commercial, industrial and residential areas. One could live one's entire life inside one building. A densely populated 3-D beehive city allows urban 'service-maintenance-bureaucratic' functions like waste treatment, climate conditioning, food production, police and fire services, energy distribution, to be consolidated and therefore to achieve enormous economies of scale. In effect, it's a gigantic apartment building with a gigantic service core. Such a structure would house its citizens in a fraction of the space normally occupied by a city. The leftover land would be reclaimed for agriculture or revert back to wilderness. The service-maintenance functions could be highly automated.

With one exception, megastructures were a figment of theory, only paper architecture. The Manhattan dome can be seen as probably the perfect example of paper God-chitecture of the kind that was popular in those years. Mocking and insolent at worst, speculative at best. The dome is separable from this bunch of stuff because it has nothing to do with style; Fuller was not an architect; it is a technical proposal.

They are single, huge, compacted structures, a total urban design solution, a truly comprehensive and self-contained environment, which were a sort of feverish trend among paper architects in the 60's and 70's. The drawings all strongly resemble each other. The mother of all megastructures was probably the Radiant City. (For more on this, see Reyner Banham's book, Megastructure.)

Fuller contributed at least three of his own designs for self-contained, megastructural cities. In "Critical Path" he writes that he developed a design for a permanently docked, floating tetrahedronal city for an unnamed Japanese patron in the early 60's. This patron died in 1966, and the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development asked Fuller to complete the design, which was reviewed and accepted by the Navy as the Triton project. The project died with Nixon's election in 1968.

Another of Fuller's large projects in the urban-renewal days of the late 60's was the Old Man River's City project meant for East St. Louis Illinois. This project would have been an entire crater-shaped city, covered by a massive geodesic dome, terraced on its inside edges for community and industrial use, and terraced on its outside edges for housing for 25,000 families. Old Man River's City was evidently mostly the work of a Washington University professor of architecture named James Fitzgibbon.

There was a third -- only a sketch, as far as I know, called the Harlem River Project of 1964. Produced by Fuller and Shoji Sadao. Harlem dominated by 15 massive, circular 100-story beehives arranged in bowling-pin fashion. They look like cooling towers and they were reportedly able to accomodate 40,000 citizens. It is an inhumane image at best especially because instead of the undulating landscape surrounding the towers, there is only the old Harlem cityscape remaining. How seriously we can take these projects, I don't know.

I believe the death of the megastructure as a viable fantasy came with the failure and demolition of Pruitt-Igoe in St. Louis, a housing project which was only emblematic of a wider and deeper failure of the public housing erected in 20 or 30 cities during the Johnson administration's war on poverty. These plainly are not megastructures, not in size nor in intent. But they resembled megastuctures so closely, that configuration of housing-towers-in-featureless-plain as seen from an aerial photograph, that the conclusion was easy to draw. And the designers of these projects displayed the same sort of paternalistic disregard for their clients that Courbusier, Soleri and their ilk display for their potential users. Darst-Webbe and Cabrini Green are mini-megastructures. We can't lay complete blame at the designers' feet. It's impossible to say whether the concept was bad, or the implementation; whether the fault lay with the building design, the government, the occupants, the administrators or whoever else doesn't matter anymore. Whatever the reason, this concentrated-housing-in-a-tower creates strong antipathies these days. Even looking at one of those buildings leaves a bad taste in your mouth.

The one exception, the one holdout, is Paolo Soleri. Out in Cordes Junction, Arizona, where the land is cheap and the sun is bright, Soleri is building the best known and most complete actual megastructure. Soleri was born in Turin in 1919, briefly apprenticed to Wright in the late forties at Taliesin West, and started Arcosanti in the desert around 1970. Soleri himself has estimated that its completion will require $500 million and twenty more years of labor. Arcosanti stands about 4 to 5% completed on labor donated by students and other interested parties who remain there temporarily. And yet Arcosanti is not designed as an arcology, only as a base camp for the five or six hundred laborers who would build the 5000-person arcology proposed for the site.

Soleri is the furthest along in working out how the megastructure would actually function. But it's hard to even begin talking about the obvious, radical social changes necessary for an arcology to work. Millions of people must be willing to live in a beehive. In Soleri's vision, the 'savings' accomplished by the consolidation of the service core functions would call for a re-definition of work. There's not only a streak of half-baked social revolution in Soleri's vision -- the disappearance of the car and money, the banishment of democracy along with the banishment of class structure, no privacy -- but the whole question of social space like allocation of living quarters has been left out of the equation. He just doesn't talk about people. It's as if Soleri wants humankind to check its habits at the door. (A democractic, capitalistic Arcosanti might at least be able to attract some capital.) Stress and disease in such a hyper-populated space are left unaddressed -- much much much less the local haptic psychological effects of space like ceiling height and access to windows.

For me Soleri represents the worst tendencies among those architects: an emphasis on style rather than substance, a disregard for how his buildings will feel haptically as opposed to how they look sculpturally, and no real sympathy for the ultimate users. Except in Soleri's case he personifies these faults at 300% life size and his feelings toward the ultimate occupants of these buildings must have blossomed into a contempt the size of Courbusier's. (A wonderful example of the power of a few drawings to cloud men's minds.) Of course our whole way of life is wrong. How silly of us not to notice! Sign me up for a room on the 384th floor, not too near the sewage pipes if you don't mind, and I'll sell all this old furniture to an unbeliever.

The thing that annoys me about these megastructures is that there are no realistic constraints. Soleri is particularly blithe about ignoring human behavior and preference. It's as if you're a prosperous dairyman, and you hire a man to build you a barn. He seems to be full of good ideas. He comes back to you a day later, with a bewitching set of blueprints, and says, "Look, you'll love what I've done. But your cows are most inconvenient. So I've redesigned them too. Your cows are now square, which frees up the floorplan enormously, and I've reduced their size. They no longer require food or drink, they give milk on demand, and when they're asleep, we stack them in the corner."

Unfortunately Fuller shares Soleri's disregard for political reality and there are thoughtful people who will say that the dome could well have been designed by Soleri, Courbusier, Speer or the Archigram group, and that the dome is in common with these other megastructures: a big, ambitious urban structure which is more like an act of architectural will than a practical thing.

But it's not. The dome is not a megastructure. The dome is the opposite of a megastructure. (I frankly don't really know what was in Bucky's mind when he brought forth those East St. Louis and Harlem projects.) The megastructure tower is a ponderous, arrogant, anti-individual replacement of the existing landscape; the dome awning is a light, witty, human modification to a real live city. The tower-in-a-park presupposes an unlikely social revolution of one sort or another, scrapping the entire social and architectural reality, an act only a totalitarian government is likely to accomplish. The Manhattan skybreak on the other hand is an act of managing a community, a deft, relatively minor modification to a city which doesn't assume an overhaul of human society as a whole.

Another example of an age-of-megastructures architect is the German Frei Otto, whose work is parallel to some of Bucky's. Frei Otto was the son of a German sculptor who became a glider pilot during WWII. Captured in 1945 and sent to a POW camp near Chartes, France for two years where he became the camp architect. The camp had construction needs which had to be solved under primitive conditions and a lack of materials. His professional specialty as an architect became the LTS (lightweight tension structure) -- something like permanent tents, really, with biomorphic curves. LTS's can take a wide variety of forms: saddle-shaped, corrugated, arch-supported (supported by ribs), or point-supported, single or multiple points. The high point of his design career was probably the West German Pavilion at the Montreal Expo '67, a 2-acre point-supported cable net which suggests mountains and valleys. Otto also succumbed to megastructure-fever with designs for giant bubble-cities and cities for the Arctic. The 1980's saw major works for the Saudis (a perfect fit!), and Otto was still alive and active as an architectural critic as of 1992.

Otto's work comes quite close conceptually to geodesic domes. Both systems cover space with a complexly geometic tension envelope. Otto was creating domes -- lattice domes, with a square grid system instead of an omnitriangulated grid system -- beginning around 1960. It is impossible that they weren't aware of each other. Both served as visiting professors at Washington University in St. Louis in the 50's. Otto created a model for the St. Louis Botanical Garden Climatron structure in 1958, two years before Buckminster Fuller's design for the same building was built. Otto's important building, the West German Pavilion in Montreal, went up on the same campus as Fuller's geodesic dome.

But there's a basic difference, and it goes to the basic difference between Fuller and the rest of architectural history, the difference between architecture and engineering. It's an underlying theme of Buckminster Fuller's career, and the reason why the architectural community treats the geodesic dome like a freak. Bucky's intent was to steer the housing industry onto a track of continuous improvement, the house as a perfectable artifact, a machine for living. The architectural community insists on seeing it as just another style. Fuller was unconcerned with form as an emotional expression, and pointedly did not associate himself with any modernistic style or any style in architecture. Some architectural historians classify him as a constructivist, along with Malevich and the steel-happy Russian avant-garde. That classification misses the point entirely.

Fuller saw his structures as having transcended all talk of form, beauty, style, and composition in the building art, replacing those aesthetic criteria with the engineering criteria of weight ratios, costs, efficiencies. For Fuller, creating space was a technical problem. Frei Otto, on the other hand, was and is very much concerned with formal beauty. His LTS structures are more efficient in some regards, and were outside building tradition in their exterior shapes, but it was the shape that counted. His soaring, sweeping, plastic covers now seem very much a part of the 60's Zeitgeist, and it's really a short step from Otto to Christo.