GEODESIC DOME

GEODESIC DOME, a type of building invented by the American engineer R. Buckminster Fuller in the late 1940s. Geodesic domes are composed of triangles of various sizes that are assembled into roughly hemispherical structures. They are exceptionally lightweight, strong, and require no interior supports. Geodesic domes first came to prominence in the 1950s, when they were used as radar shelters in the Distant Early Warning line and for exhibit pavilions in international trade fairs (most notably the Montreal Expo in 1967). These uses helped

solidify Fuller's reputation as a visionary yet practical thinker, and domes likewise became symbols of American ingenuity and the strength of Cold War capitalism. In the 1960s, domes were embraced by the counterculture, and thousands were built for use as homes, especially in rural communes. For these dome builders, domes were symbols of an ecologically friendly, pacifist, and anticorporate lifestyle—the rejection of precisely those values the dome embodied in the 1950s. The dome faded as countercultural architecture in the 1970s; since then, domes have principally been used in industrial applications requiring wide-span structures.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Kahn, Lloyd, ed. Domebook 2. Bolinas, Calif.: Pacific Domes, 1971.

Pang, Alex Soojung-Kim. "Whose Dome Is It, Anyway?" American Heritage of Invention and Technology (spring 1996), 28–31.

———. "Dome Days: Buckminster Fuller in the Cold War." In Cultural Babbage: Technology, Time, and Invention. Edited by Francis Spufford and Jenny Uglow. London: Faber and Faber, 1996.

Wong, Yunn Chii. "The Geodesic Works of Richard Buckminster Fuller, 1948–1968 (The Universe as a Home of Man)." Ph. D. diss. Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1999.

AlexSoojung-KimPang

See alsoArchitecture .