TSA Geodesic Dome project 01 1954

TSA Geodesic Dome project 01 1954, originally uploaded by regional.modernism.

Buckminster Fuller (1895-1983) served a six-week term as visiting critic at Tulane School of Architecture in February and March of 1954. Fifth-year students worked with Fuller to create this 18 foot geodesic dome model of a potential shelter or airplane maintenance hangar for the Marines. Here students raise the lightweight yet sturdy model on the quad of Tulane's front campus.

The Tulane geodesic dome model was constructed of cardboard formed into triangles, painted with plastic and joined with tape. According to an article in the April 1954 edition of The Tulanian, the dome was to be packaged and sent to the military base at Quantico, Virginia accompanied by Dean John Ekin Dinwiddie and several students. They would reassemble the model there for military inspection and it would soon undergo mass production.

I am not sure if the geodesic domes ever went into military production. However in 1958 Fuller returned to Louisiana to construct the Union Tank Car Dome outside Baton Rouge. Upon completion the 384 foot diameter dome was the largest clear span structure in the world and the largest structure of its type.

Tomorrow night please join AIA New Orleans and DOCOMOMO US/Louisiana in a free screening and the Louisiana premiere of director Evan Mather's

A NECCESSARY RUIN: THE STORY OF BUCKMINSTER FULLER AND THE UNION TANK CAR DOME

Wednesday September 8, 2010
Reception at 7, Screening at 8
AIA New Orleans Center for Design
1000 St. Charles Avenue

A Necessary Ruin: The Story of Buckminster Fuller and the Union Tank Car Dome

A Necessary Ruin: The Story of Buckminster Fuller and the Union Tank Car Dome, originally uploaded by regional.modernism.

DOCOMOMO US/Louisiana and AIA New Orleans present
"A Necessary Ruin: The Story of Buckminster Fuller and the Union Tank Car Dome" 
a documentary film by Evan Mather
Wednesday September 8
reception @ 7pm, screening @ 8pm
AIA New Orleans Center for Design
1000 St. Charles Avenue


Upon its completion in October 1958, the Union Tank Car Dome, located north of Baton Rouge, Louisiana, was the largest clear-span structure in the world. Based on the engineering principles of the visionary design scientist and philosopher Buckminster Fuller, this geodesic dome was, at 384 feet in diameter, the first large scale example of this building type. A Necessary Ruin relates the powerful, compelling narrative of the dome’s history via interviews with architects, engineers, preservationists, media, and artists; animated sequences demonstrating the operation of the facility; and hundreds of rare photographs and video segments taken during the dome’s construction, decline, and demolition. (Evan Mather, U.S.A., 2009, 29:54)


hand crafted films

The Futurist on Film

Union Tank Car Dome, photograph by Alfred Gebhardt, originally uploaded by anthonyb_chicago.

Yesterday MAKE magazine celebrated Buckminster Fuller's birthday. He would have been 115 years young.

I recently watched Evan Mather's A Necessary Ruin (Handcrafted Films 2009). When the Union Tank Car Dome outside Baton Rouge was completed in 1958 it was the largest clear span structure in the world. This futurist dome was no longer in use and had been abandoned. The Foundation for Historical Louisiana fought for its adaptive reuse, even suggesting that it could be moved to an alternate site. However, the dome was demolished in the secret of night in November 2007, just shy of its fiftieth birthday.

In September DOCOMOMO US/Louisiana will present A Necessary Ruin in a special screening. Date and location to be announced.