Buckminster Fuller made the geodesic dome famous, but a German planetarium came first
Geodesic domes are usually credited to Buckminster Fuller, yet the first one was designed after World War I by a Carl Zeiss engineer to shelter a planetarium projector in Jena. Fuller coined the name two decades later, and his triangles went on to cover radar stations, zoos and Epcot.
A geodesic dome is a thin shell built from a lattice of rigid triangles. Because each triangle passes stress to its neighbours, the whole structure carries very heavy loads for its size. Walther Bauersfeld, chief engineer at Carl Zeiss Jena, designed the first; a small version went up on the company's roof, and a larger one, nicknamed the Wonder of Jena, began welcoming visitors on July 18, 1926.
Fuller arrived at the term through experiments alongside an artist, Kenneth Snelson, at Black Mountain College across 1948 and 1949, and received a US patent on 29 June 1954. He liked the form because it was immensely strong for its weight, its surface of triangles was inherently stable, and a sphere encloses more volume for less surface than any other shape.
Practical uses followed fast. Canada got 21 domes for the Distant Early Warning Line in 1956. From 1954 the US Marines tested domes carried by helicopter, flying a 9.1-metre wood and plastic model at 93 kilometres per hour without damage, and untrained Marines assembled a magnesium dome of that size in 135 minutes. A dome housed a bank in Oklahoma City in 1958, another became a pavilion at the 1964 New York World's Fair and now serves the Queens Zoo as an aviary, and the frame of the American Pavilion at Expo 67 in Montreal survived a fire to become the Biosphère museum.
Harsh settings suit the shape. A dome built at the South Pole in 1975 had to shrug off snow and wind, and EcoCamp Patagonia, a sustainable dome hotel opened in 2001, borrowed from the dwellings of the Kaweskar people to cope with fierce gusts. The best-known example is probably Spaceship Earth at Epcot, opened on October 1, 1982 and named after Fuller's phrase for a planet whose crew must share limited resources. Builders now frame domes in wood, conduit, aluminium or concrete panels, and some are even produced by giant 3D printers.
Source: Geodesic dome
