Chapter 53
When United States officials decided to take part in the 1956 Jeshyn International Fair in Kabul, Afghanistan, just a few weeks before it started, they had no idea what they would build. The U.S arsenal for trade shows consisted of mechanical talking chickens and chatting cows that would somehow suggest the large-caliber munificence the Americans could bring to bear. Promises of things to come had to compete with existing gifts the Soviets had already given the Afghans, including a 100-bed hospital and loans to build grain silos, a bakery, and a flour mill. The Russians were also constructing a Kabul-U.S.S.R asphalt road, a marvel of highway engineering that would eventually include a 1.5-mile-long tunnel bored through the mountains at Salang Pass in the Hindu Kush, a juncture so high—12,100 feet—that drivers had to alter their carburetors to adjust for the shortage of oxygen at that altitude. Whatever the Soviets’ exhibit turned out to be, it would likely be a crown resting on a body of works that had left an impression on Afghans not felt since Alexander built a chain of fortresses that swept across the country almost twenty-four centuries ago.
Stuck in the position of a David fighting a Goliath with a Kevlar vest, air support, and the goodwill of the locals, some U.S. officials essentially raised a white flag, suggesting its exhibits should be housed in a circus tent. But pavilion director Jack Masey wanted the exhibit to be nothing less than a Molotov cocktail that would both inflame Russian fears and blow away Afghan expectations. He approached Buckminster Fuller, whose work he had seen in “Architectural Forum,” to use one of the visionary engineer’s geodesic domes instead. The domes would be tangible symbols, Masey argued, of Yankee know-how and technological bravado.
Devised by Fuller near the end of World War II to alleviate the anticipated housing shortage after millions of servicemen returned home, the geodesic domes, essentially spheres, comprised pyramid shapes with four faces, called tetrahedrons. The world didn’t take notice of the eccentric orbs until the 1954 Milan Triennial. There, at the international fair founded in 1933 to display advances in fields from fashion to architecture, Fuller exhibited a forty-two-foot cardboard dome. With its ability to be assembled from directions printed right on its paper surface, the dome walked off with the fair’s highest award, the Gran Premio.
Courtesy of Jack Masey
After Fuller designed and built the dome for the Jeshyn fair in a mere month, its components were airlifted to Kabul as the Americans’ competitors were putting the finishing touches on their own pavilions. The Chinese constructed a massive golden-calf statue of Chairman Mao, while the Soviets shipped in 200 of their technicians to cobble together their pavilion. The Americans, however, shrewdly paid locals to put up their building: The untrained workers assembled its constituent 480 color-coded aluminum tubes in just forty-eight hours. When it was completed, the 100-foot-diameter, 35-foot-tall structure with 8,000 square feet of floor space also became for a while the largest geodesic dome in the world.
Set against a mountain range and landscape as stark as clean and polished bone, the fair drew hundreds of residents, who admired the various countries’ pavilions, but especially the American vaulted structure that resembled the Afghan culture’s hut-like yurt. The dome’s translucent skin filtered the ambient sunlight, suffusing the interior that included a panoramic photo of the New York skyline, a working television studio, a Lionel train set, and the yakking fowl and talking bovine with a honeyed glow. The dome, like the Eiffel Tower at the Exposition Universelle of 1889, had transcended mere architecture to become a symbol inseparable from its country of origin. An emblem of modernism and hope, Fuller’s domes were used by the United States at similar exhibitions from Bangkok to Istanbul, and from Poland to Morocco.
Masey, who worked for the United States Information Agency from 1951 to 1979, much of it as the agency’s director of design, brought to trade fairs the choreography of a Balanchine and the blockbuster mentality of a Spielberg. A trained architect who also studied graphic design at Yale University, Masey drew on a roster of gifted, even dazzling, notables, ranging from Fuller, to Charles and Ray Eames, and Jackson Pollock to Willem de Kooning, for a number of exhibitions and expos ending with the Expo ’67 and Expo ’70 world’s fairs. He would also bring the same canny showmanship to the 1959 American National Exhibition in Moscow that packed the punch of a suitcase nuke without the radiation.