No, that's not a phalanx of nuclear power plants in Harlem - it's a futuristic housing concept proposed in 1964 by visionary Buckminster Fuller and his student Shoji Sadao. The 100-story residential skyscrapers would hold 45,000 occupants each. Fuller and Sadao also proposed a two-mile wide dome over midtown Manhattan, which would minimize energy loss and maintain a protected, artificial climate inside - the better to preserve the city's aging cultural artifacts.
Have fun at New York's millionth-comment party at the Delancey tonight, Sciblings and readers. I can't be there, but if I were, I'd raise a glass to honor Fuller, who died twenty-five years ago, but would no doubt be perfectly at home in our eclectic blogosphere.
Via Retrofuturo
More on Fuller:
Dymaxion Man by Elizabeth Kolbert
The Fuller Effect by Paul Makovsky, Belinda Lanks & Martin C. Pedersen
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I've so wanted to live under a dome since I've seen it in the Simpson's Movie. http://tinyurl.com/3mkxqu
Why not? Midtown is a theme park anyway!
Dome living is also a characteristic of many SciFi Novels from when I was a kid.
At first I read the title as "Atomic Condors," which also would have been cool.
The world is deeply fortunate that so few of Fuller's ideas were actually realized.
Very interesting. Thanks.
As architectural scale grows larger Fuller's concepts, aesthetics aside, will begin to become more realistic and the advantages more obvious.
As much as I am an admirer of Fuller's vision, when it comes to his architectural design, it lacks something which is essential and the absence of it generates resistance from people in understanding his designs. They are too sterile. Humans have an instinctive aesthetic, an appreciation and even a craving for proximity to an organic landscape that subtley recapitulates the environment in which humans evolved. That hunger for natural beauty can only be denied for so long before people start rebelling, or becoming antisocial and/or genuinely ill and self-destructive, which I think in many ways is what we see in urban cultures in their most dysfunctional expressions. But we are a gregarious species. So, imagine these structures as if they were designed to look like forested mountains, supporting diverse trees natural to the region in which they are built, with waterfalls and pools, instead of looking as they've been protrayed; like identical cooling towers. As well as dramatic cliff faces and spectacular views out over their local region, they could also have areas with a more gentle aspect or with inter-connected hanging valleys and meadows so that people could walk on the outside of the structure travelling among an array of small parks and protected vistas, or travel along promenades within the structure's interior where climate could be controlled and commercial activities and transportation access would be appropriately located and inter-mixed with residential areas.
Come to think of it, a little more like Sir Norman Foster's recent project in Astana, Kazahkstan: a 500 foot tall building featuring a wide curving conical tent shaped structure composed of transparent panels supported by a lattice of reinforced concrete, which, while modest by Buckminster-Fullers visionary scale, will none the less include residences for several thousand families, botanical gardens, public swimming as well as retail and cultural activities all within an efficient climate controlled interior all year long in a sometimes hostile environment, typical of central Asia, where winter temps reach minus 40 and summers that are hot and arid.
As R. Buckminster-Fuller is reported to have said regarding our species depleting resources, that all that is really in short supply is human imagination.
I was actually enamored of domes as a child, John. I had kind of a weird 50's sci-fi, retro aesthetic going on, complete with unicorns in silver space suits. I drew crystal dome cities repeatedly - I have no idea what was up with that! Eventually, doug, I began to find it too sterile, and moved on to an embrace of organic forms and decay - you're definitely on to something there!
But speaking of atomic condors, how do you clean bird droppings off a crystal dome??
Looking at that photograph, I'm not thinking of nuclear power plants; I'm thinking of Bergholt Stuttley Johnson. If you're a Discworld fan (which I'm sure you are) then you'll remember how B. S. Johnson created an ornamental cruet set for Mad Lord Snapcase, but miscalculated the dimensions: "Four families live in the salt shaker, and the pepper pot is used for storing grain."