When Buckminster Fuller Proposed Putting a Dome Over Manhattan (1960)

The nov­els of John Brun­ner have become a niche taste, even with­in his genre of sci­ence fic­tion. A more soci­o­log­i­cal­ly mind­ed ver­sion of Philip K. Dick at his best, he could write with what now looks like a simul­ta­ne­ous pre­science about the civ­i­liza­tion to come and an apoc­a­lyp­ti­cal­ly anx­ious con­cern with the issues of his day.

His undis­put­ed mas­ter­piece Stand on Zanz­ibar came out in 1968, the same year as the late Paul R. Ehrlich’s The Pop­u­la­tion Bomb. Both books deal with the dire con­se­quences of what, at the time, looked like the run­away mul­ti­pli­ca­tion of human­i­ty, though ele­ments of the dystopi­an sci-fi writer’s vision now look rather more cred­i­ble than the pre­dic­tions of the Stan­ford biol­o­gist — apart from the giant geo­des­ic dome cov­er­ing Man­hat­tan, any­way.

In a sense, Brun­ner was actu­al­ly behind the times, since Buck­min­ster Fuller him­self had sug­gest­ed dom­ing Man­hat­tan near­ly a decade ear­li­er. In their ambi­tious pro­pos­al for a “two-mile-wide Dome Over Man­hat­tan” from the turn of the nine­teen-six­ties, Fuller and long­time col­lab­o­ra­tor Sho­ji Sadao “imag­ined a mas­sive archi­tec­tur­al sur­face that would reg­u­late the city’s ecosys­tems,” write Next City’s Janette Kim and Erik Carv­er. How­ev­er out­landish­ly for­ward-think­ing Fuller could be, he nev­er for­got that he need­ed to appeal to the wor­ries and aspi­ra­tions of mid-cen­tu­ry Amer­i­ca.

As a per­son­al­i­ty, he also fit in well with the era’s enthu­si­asm for sweep­ing infra­struc­tur­al fix­es. Why can’t we build a dome over Man­hat­tan to get rid of all this pol­lu­tion, get rid of all the prob­lems of weath­er?” Still, as eccen­tric as he was, Fuller was­n’t delu­sion­al. But “it can hap­pen where you start out in places where ener­gy is a real­ly fan­tas­tic prob­lem.” At the time, the ever-increas­ing demand for resources of all kinds by a rapid­ly grow­ing pop­u­la­tion appeared to be not just a but the fan­tas­tic prob­lem.

Today, once-unfore­see­able devel­op­ments like ris­ing ener­gy effi­cien­cy and an appar­ent­ly inex­orable decline in glob­al birthrates have direct­ed our ner­vous gazes else­where. Yet dat­ed visions of tech­no­log­i­cal utopia and dystopia still strike us as odd­ly famil­iar — and indeed, as strange­ly sim­i­lar to one anoth­er. The Life & Times of Buck­min­ster Fuller’s Geo­des­ic Dome: A Doc­u­men­tary A Brief Intro­duc­tion to Buck­min­ster Fuller and His Tech­no-Opti­mistic Ideas The Eden Project Built a Rain­for­est Ecosys­tem Inside Buck­min­ster Fuller-Inspired Geo­des­ic Domes Bet­ter Liv­ing Through Buck­min­ster Fuller’s Utopi­an Designs: Revis­it the Dymax­ion Car, House, and Map When Frank Lloyd Wright Designed a Plan to Turn Ellis Island Into a Futur­is­tic Jules Verne-Esque City (1959) Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture.

He’s the author of the newslet­ter Books on Cities as well as the books 한국 요약 금지 (No Sum­ma­riz­ing Korea) and Kore­an Newtro. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall. by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Comments (0) | We’re hop­ing to rely on our loy­al read­ers rather than errat­ic ads. To sup­port Open Cul­ture’s edu­ca­tion­al mis­sion, please con­sid­er mak­ing a dona­tion.