The building is Epcot's icon, representing the entire park.įor the 1986 World's Fair (Expo 86), a Buckminster Fuller inspired Geodesic dome was designed by the Expo's chief architect Bruno Freschi to serve as the fair's Expo Centre. The building and the ride inside of it are named with one of Buckminster Fuller's famous terms, Spaceship Earth, a world view expressing concern over the use of limited resources available on Earth and encouraging everyone on it to act as a harmonious crew working toward the greater good. On October 1, 1982, one of the most famous geodesic domes, Spaceship Earth at Epcot in Walt Disney World Resort in Bay Lake, Florida, just outside of Orlando opened. In 1975, a dome was constructed at the South Pole, where its resistance to snow and wind loads is important. These structures may have some faces that are not triangular, being squares or other polygons. In the 1970s, Zomeworks licensed plans for structures based on other geometric solids, such as the Johnson solids, Archimedean solids, and Catalan solids. The structure's covering later burned, but the structure itself still stands and, under the name Biosphère, currently houses an interpretive museum about the Saint Lawrence River. This dome is now used as an aviary by the Queens Zoo in Flushing Meadows Corona Park after it was redesigned by TC Howard of Synergetics, Inc.Īnother dome is from Expo 67 at the Montreal World's Fair, where it was part of the American Pavilion. The dome was introduced to a wider audience as a pavilion for the 1964 World's Fair in New York City designed by Thomas C. Another early example was the Stepan Center at the University of Notre Dame, built in 1962. The 1958 Gold Dome in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, utilized Fuller's design for use as a bank building. Tests included assembly practices in which previously untrained Marines were able to assemble a 30-foot magnesium dome in 135 minutes, helicopter lifts off aircraft carriers, and a durability test in which an anchored dome successfully withstood without damage, a day-long 120 mph (190 km/h) propeller blast from the twin 3,000 horsepower engines of an anchored airplane. A 30-foot wood and plastic geodesic dome was lifted and carried by helicopter at 50 knots without damage, leading to the manufacture of a standard magnesium dome by Magnesium Products of Milwaukee. Marines experimented with helicopter-deliverable geodesic domes. The dome was soon breaking records for covered surface, enclosed volume, and construction speed.īeginning in 1954, the U.S. and specialty buildings such as the Kaiser Aluminum domes (constructed in numerous locations across the US, e.g., Virginia Beach, Virginia), auditoriums, weather observatories, and storage facilities. The dome was successfully adopted for specialized uses, such as the 21 Distant Early Warning Line domes built in Canada in 1956, the 1958 Union Tank Car Company dome near Baton Rouge, Louisiana, designed by Thomas C. The geodesic dome appealed to Fuller because it was extremely strong for its weight, its "omnitriangulated" surface provided an inherently stable structure, and because a sphere encloses the greatest volume for the least surface area. The oldest surviving dome built by Fuller himself is located in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, and was built by students under his tutelage over three weeks in 1953. popularization of the idea for which he received U.S. Although Fuller was not the original inventor, he is credited with the U.S. Twenty years later, Buckminster Fuller coined the term "geodesic" from field experiments with artist Kenneth Snelson at Black Mountain College in 19. A larger dome, called "The Wonder of Jena", opened to the public in July 1926. A first, small dome was patented, constructed by the firm of Dykerhoff and Wydmann on the roof of the Zeiss plant in Jena, Germany. The first geodesic dome was designed after World War I by Walther Bauersfeld, chief engineer of the Carl Zeiss optical company, for a planetarium to house his planetarium projector. Science World in Vancouver, built for Expo 86, and inspired by Buckminster Fuller's Geodesic dome