DOME OVER MANHATTAN
Richard Buckminster Fuller, 1968
The Ultimate Dome, Covering Part of New York City in a Diaphanous Skin
The 1960s was not only an era of optimism, youth culture, pop, hippies and new technology, but also a challenging time when Europe was still trying to rebuild after the Second World War and the USA faced social issues such as housing shortages. Could new technologies offer solutions to some of these problems? Some people such as American engineer and designer Richard Buckminster Fuller thought that they could. Bucky Fuller, as he was widely known, was a master at coming up with ingenious, left-field solutions to contemporary problems: for example, a streamlined car with a body like an aircraft fuselage; a circular factory-produced house that could be erected at speed; and a ‘living package’ containing all the furniture and utensils you would need for your house. Most of these ideas were too far-out (or, as Fuller’s friends said, too ahead of their time) to catch on. But they were nothing compared with his biggest idea of all – his 1960s’ plan to build a vast, 2 mile- (3.2km-) wide dome covering most of midtown Manhattan.
Fuller was fascinated by domes and their structural properties and advantages. A dome can enclose a very large volume with a minimum of materials. The walls of a dome can be relatively thin but still strong, just as a sheet of paper gets stronger when rolled into a cylindrical shape. If the walls of a dome are very thin, then it takes less steel or concrete to build, and this keeps the cost down.
Fuller realized that one particular kind of dome magnified these advantages. This was the geodesic dome, a structure strengthened by a rigid framework of straight lines. The classic geodesic dome is a curved form made up of many triangular surfaces. A framework of tubes or rods forms the sides of the triangles – this can be made of steel, aluminium tubing or wood. The triangles are filled in with some flat material – it could be sheet metal, glass, plastic or plywood. The result is a structure that is very light in weight and relatively strong.
The geodesic dome was not Fuller’s idea – it had been invented by Walther Bauersfeld in Germany in the early 1920s. Fuller latched onto the notion about twenty years later, and patented it in the USA. As geodesic domes are inexpensive in relation to the volume they contain and are not difficult to construct, he saw them as a cheap way of addressing the postwar housing shortage. For various reasons this didn’t work out (for one thing, most people don’t want to live in round houses), but in the 1950s and 1960s domes found roles fulfilling all kinds of needs, from exhibition buildings to concert halls, storage facilities to defence early-warning systems.
By the 1960s, Fuller was designing really large domes, and discovered in the process that the bigger the dome the bigger the savings of materials and cost. So he started to speculate about whether it might be possible to build a whole city under a gigantic curving shelter – or even to erect a dome over an existing city such as New York.
Looking at a map of Manhattan in c.1960, he saw that at 42nd Street the island was about 2 miles (3.2km) across. What would be the effect of constructing a dome 2 miles (3.2km) in diameter over this part of New York City, stretching from the East River to the Hudson, and from 21st to 64th Street? Working with his architectural partner Shoji Sandao, he calculated that the surface area of such a dome would be around one-eightieth of the surface area of the New York buildings that it sheltered. Buildings leak heat through their walls, windows and roofs, so by reducing so dramatically the surface area that was exposed to the elements the dome could cut heat loss to a tiny fraction of what it had been. There would be vast energy savings, as well as a reliable, comfortable interior climate.
Fuller and Sandao knew that the chances of building their dome over Manhattan were minimal. It was not so much the scale of the project that daunted Fuller – he worked out that you could pay for the dome in ten years with the money you saved on snow clearance. The vested interests of the various owners of land and buildings, the arguments between supporters and objectors, the politics – these would be the factors that would make such a project impossible.
Fuller did not work out exactly how the dome would be built. He did, though, suggest that the covering could be wire-reinforced, shatterproof glass, and that this could be mist-plated with aluminium so that glare would be cut down without cutting out the light. From the outside, the surface would be like a vast, glinting mirror. The environment inside would be pleasant. As Fuller says of another geodesic dome: ‘From the inside, there will be uninterrupted visual contact with the exterior world. The sun and moon will shine in the landscape, and the sky will be completely visible, but the unpleasant effects of climate, heat, dust, bugs, glare, etc. will be modulated by the skin to provide a Garden of Eden interior.’
With the mirror-like surface in mind, Fuller presented his idea using an aerial photograph of New York, with the dome painted over it using an airbrush. The effect is totally bizarre – a structure with no visible means of support, and so diaphanous that it looks as if it could puncture, like a balloon. Perhaps this did not do the idea any favours – it’s easy to dismiss this image as hare-brained. And yet, like so many of its inventor’s ideas, it was based on reasonable arguments and assumptions.
Other potential advantages of a structure such as this, although unlikely to be felt in Manhattan, might be useful elsewhere. In places with a rainy season, most of the rain disappears into storm drains – the precious water is never used and cannot be stored for the dry season when water is short. With a dome, a system could be built to take away the rain and store it in a reservoir. The climate-control possibilities even meant that it might be able to use huge domes to accommodate people in the Arctic and Antarctic. Such bold and ambitious schemes never came to fruition. But big geodesic domes on exhibition sites and in industrial parks remain, as does scientists’ name for a carbon molecule with a geodesic structure – Buckminsterfullerene – to remind us of Fuller’s influence, on both large and microscopic scales.
