One of the highlights of our Montreal vacation trip a couple of weekends ago was visiting the Biosphere. Okay, to be totally honest about it, the actual science exhibit part of the Biosphere is a bit on the lackluster side. Not for lack of trying, but because every exhibit was something we’d seen somewhere else. The reason I liked it was because it was an opportunity to get up close and personal with the giant geodesic dome that has been a fixture of the Montreal skyline since the 1967 World’s Fair. The dome was the centerpiece of the U.S. Pavilion during Expo 67 and became the iconic symbol of the fair. Over the years, though, the dome was simply left abandoned and its exterior covering eventually had to be taken off, leaving just the steel gridwork and the building inside. In the early 1990, the Canadian government rehabbed the building and Biosphere was born, but the dome was left open to the air, which is how it remains today.
The dome was the brainchild of R. Buckminster Fuller. Fuller was a philosopher, dreamer, visionary, designer, and sometimes hare-brained schemer who spent his life dedicated to the notion that life could be better for everyone if everyone embraced change and technology. In addition to designing the geodesic dome, he also designed the famed Dymaxion House, which was his vision of the “house of the future” (a very opposite vision of Frank Lloyd Wright’s “Usonian” house design of the same period), the Dymaxion Car, and designs for vast floating megacities.
Later, after his death, materials scientists would honor him by naming the nanostructure of a particular carbon molecule buckminterfullerene because its shaped resembled the geodesic dome. The entire family of these carbon molecules is now called “fullerenes”. And buckminsterfullerene is more popularly known as “Bucky Balls”. Many of the advances of nanotechnology have been made possible through the applied usage of bucky balls. Fuller’s principle of “tensegrity” (the force of objects pushing and pulling at each other simultaneously), which makes the geodesic dome possible, is also used in other applications, such as this new prosthetic foot design.
This week’s New Yorker has a feature story by Elizabeth Kolbert entitled “Dymaxion Man” about Fuller, his work and ideas, and a new exhibit at the Whitney Museum of Art in New York City about Fuller that opens this week and runs until mid-September. I’m hoping that maybe Bridget and I can get down to New York in August while Charlotte is at her grandparents’ house to see this exhibit.
