Fuller loved tetrahedrons. Also spheres. The “theory of spheres” that came to him in his Chicago epiphany was an ersatz physics based on a vision of bubbles: “All matter in unforced state is spheroidal not cubistic, and these spheres are expanding for the life of their existence at a fixed rate.” This was nonsense, but it turns out that if you assemble rods in rigid triangles and arrange them to approximate the surface of a sphere, you really have something: a lightweight structural network that distributes load without any need for supporting columns. Fuller arrived at this in 1948. First he called it the “Atomic Buckalow.” Later he borrowed the word geodesic from geometry: a geodesic line is a segment of a great circle on a sphere, the shortest distance between any two points on the sphere’s surface.
Decades earlier a German engineer, Walther Bauersfeld, had designed just such a dome, and it served as the roof of the Zeiss Planetarium in Berlin. Fuller apparently didn’t know about Bauersfeld, and he patented the geodesic dome in 1954. As he spent more time lecturing to students on college campuses, the simplicity and ingenuity of his dome made it irresistible. It went viral. Students could and did build their own, using readily available materials. Fuller’s first public triumph was a spectacular dome roof for the Ford Rotunda in Dearborn, Michigan, built in 1953 from 20,000 aluminum struts framing fiberglass triangles. Life magazine suggested that it might be resistant to atomic bombs. Actually, it leaked in the rain. (In 1962 it collapsed in a fire that broke out while workers were trying to seal leaks with tar.) For a while, though, the geodesic dome seemed unstoppable.
With loans from his wife, Fuller started yet another company, Geodesics Inc. The US military used its designs to build “radomes” enclosing radar stations in the Arctic Circle. Fuller almost persuaded Walter O’Malley, the owner of the Brooklyn Dodgers, to build an aluminum geodesic dome for a new baseball stadium, but O’Malley moved the Dodgers to Los Angeles instead. In 1957 the Kaiser Aluminum company built a forty-nine-foot-high dome in Honolulu for a hotel auditorium. Perhaps the most famous of Fuller’s domes is the Biosphere made for the 1967 Montreal Expo, two hundred feet high, which still survives as an environmental museum.
