Wired Magazine (November 19, 2009)
"Buckminster Fuller's geodesic domes have reached new heights: as tree houses for the rich and famous. Arboreal architect Dustin Feider is installing them all over the Los Angeles area. Producer and writer Mark Levin has two in his backyard. The LA County Museum of Art has exhibited one. And the nest shown here belongs to Doors guitarist Robby Kreiger...."
(from Brent Humphreys, via Wired Magazine, used w/o permission)
Looks like the geodesic dome is cool again. I remember, back in the sixties, if memory serves, when dome homes were going to be the Next Big Thing in domestic architecture. There's one northeast of the small central Minnesota town I live in, and another off the Interstate between here and Fargo, North Dakota.
After being a prominent feature in 'house of the future' articles and science fiction stories, people noticed something about dome homes. Cool as a geodesic dome looks, and efficient as it is in encompassing a given volume with the least materials, that round shape is hard to divide into rooms. Rooms that people can use easily, anyway.
For applications like radomes, auditoriums, railroad roundhouses, and other buildings where you want a building that's essentially one huge room: geodesic domes are great. And, as Disney World Florida demonstrated: they look really cool.
I think the elite of Los Angeles have found a splendid new way to use Buckminster Fuller's geodesic dome. The spherical shape and recurring angles are, I think, a fine aesthetic match for the shape of many urban trees.
And, as usual with a design using Fuller's geoids, they look cool.
More about Buckminster Fuller's geodesic domes:
- "Geodesic Dome History - Invention of the Geodesic Dome"
The Great Idea Finder
No comments:
Post a Comment