If Expo’67 represented the world as an idealised microcosm, then its two most celebrated buildings may be considered as the highest expres- sions of those ideals.As propositions, they both pose questions about late Modern capitalist society from their own angles and articulate its challenges differently. In the years following Expo’67, the human and environmental costs of the progress Roy so confidently placed her faith in exploded onto the popular agenda.The efficient use of materials and energy suddenly took on a moral dimension.
When I invented and developed my first clear-span, all-weather geodesic dome, the two largest domes in the world were both in Rome and were each about 50 metres in diameter.They are St Peter’s, built around A.D. 1500, and the Pantheon, built around A.D. 1. Each weighs approximately 15,000 tonnes. In con- trast, my first 50 metre geodesic all-weather dome installed in Hawaii weighs only 15 tonnes — one- thousandth the weight of its masonry counterpart. 11
photo in Martin Pawley, design heroes: BUCK-
MINSTER FULLER, Harper Collins Pub- lishers, London, 1992, p. 117 (all the illustrations in this book are copyright to the Buckminster Fuller Institute, 1743 South La Cienega Blvd., Los Angeles, California 90035, (213) 837-7710).
Not only were Fuller’s domes stronger, cheaper and lighter — they were far more versatile. In spite of the fact that applications for spherical structures hadn’t actually expanded that much in the past 20 centuries, Fuller’s visionary ingenuity shone when it came to figuring out what to do with them (see note #5). As part of the cold war fixation with emergency systems, he developed domes in the fifties as portable shelters that could be packed into small containers. The super-light, super-strong structure suggested other possibilities though. In 1962 Fuller published the now famous proposal to cover a section of Manhat- tan spanning 50 square blocks. He calculated that a fleet of helicopters could assemble the 3.2-kilometre structure in about 6 months. An even more grandiose scheme called Cloud Structures proposed full spheres built to enormous scale. The geodesic structure had such a low weight to strength ratio that at 16 kilometres in diameter, the sun would heat the air inside to the point where the whole ensemble, along with thousands of people, would simply rise into the air of its own accord. The cloud structures would be perpetually aloft, riding air streams around the world, or be anchored to mountaintops. Application was always an issue with the domes, and what exactly to put inside was never really resolved. They were after all, hollow shells. From a formal perspective they were already complete, and any actual function that might be applied seemed to merely sully their perfection. The interior structure of the American pavilion at Expo’67 for example does its job of providing functional platforms at various levels, but there is no necessary or organic relationship between the interior structure and the geodesic structure. The two aren’t even physically connected — they are in fact two separate, independent buildings.
11 Buckminster Fuller (Inventions, 1983) quoted in Martin Pawley, Design Heroes: Buckminster Fuller , HarperCollins Publish- ers, 1992, p. 115.
32
O n S ite review
W eight
I ssue 10 2003
Made with FlippingBook interactive PDF creator