Whose Dome Is It Anyway?

WE ALL TEND TO JUDGE NEW TECH nologies by what we suppose to be their political ramifications; just look at how people respond to the Internet, the Human Genome Project, or nuclear power. But how does a new technology acquire the political meanings that so define it? And are they really immutable, or can a single technology have at different times different and even contradictory politics? At least one technology has had its politics turn 180 degrees and mean clearly opposite things: the geodesic dome.

Most people associate geodesic domes with communes and the late 1960s. Hippies embraced domes as natural, spiritual, and ecologically sound, the perfect place for communal living. They built thousands of them from salvaged plywood, old car tops, and other cast-off materials. Buckminster Fuller was exalted as an inspiration for The Whole Earth Catalog and Earth Day. But a decade earlier, in the 1950s, the dome meant exactly the opposite. It was used mainly by the Strategic Air Command and the Marine Corps and in international trade fairs, where it stood as an emblem of American military power and capitalism. Fuller was known then as a hardheaded Cold War intellectual. That contradictory history says much about technology and political meanings.

The dome was associated with the military almost from its beginnings. An early prototype was built in the garden of the Pentagon in 1949, and within a few years it could be found literally at the front lines of the Cold War. Thousands were built as radar shelters for the Distant Early Warning line in the 1950s; they can still be seen today at some commercial airports. Fuller worked with the Marine Corps on developing domes as combat-zone hangars for fighter aircraft, a project that excited him though little came of it, and he even gave his architecture students prototype-construction assignments for that program. Meanwhile eight geodesic domes were used repeatedly as pavilions in international trade fairs. Trade fairs were ideologically charged events at the time, and American exhibits were meant to show off the very fruits of capitalism.

Fuller believed that his collaboration with the Marine Corps was yielding a tool for victory in both war and peace, a high-tech product for combat areas that could also be made into mass-produced factories, power systems, schools, and hospitals and parachuted into friendly but impoverished Third World countries to create First World industrial powers overnight. He told one major in the corps that they had created a “double-barreled Geodesic weapon that could win both hot and cold wars.” The U.S. Commerce Department, in a 1956 press release, pronounced the dome “U.S. Exhibit #1” and said it called “dramatic attention to American technological progress.”

Journalists described the dome as an embodiment of American vitality, a symbol of the American way. One writer hailed it as being “as typically and individually American as the Model T Ford car, the simplest and best way to be a difficult thing,” exemplifying “the continuous American revolution of fresh, untrammeled thinking.” And at one trade fair a guide announced, “The very dome which houses these exhibits is a further demonstration of the degree of industrial progress attained in the U.S.” By 1960 fifty million people in Africa, Asia, and Eastern Europe had seen the domes at a hundred exhibitions.

AND THEN, SOON AFTER ITS FINAL big international-fair appearance at the 1967 Montreal Expo, the dome was suddenly known mainly as the home of hippies in communes, a tool for building a new way of life that rejected capitalism, consumerism, and militarism. It represented the renunciation of everything it had stood for in the 1950s.

Communes had begun using domes in the mid-1960s; around 1969 and 1970 dome building really took off. Commune dwellers gave several reasons for liking them: Their sparse use of materials theoretically made them environmentally sound and easy to disassemble and carry around, and their design seemed well suited for group living. One commune chose a dome because “we wanted our home to have a structural bias against individualism and for communism.” A dome’s interior seemed both infinitely malleable and hard to subdivide; it also could easily be considered a spiritual space, reminiscent of a church, mosque, or temple dome.

Though the Marines had bought and consumed domes the way they did other military supplies, hippies often built theirs from scratch, and they saw the experience of erecting them as an education in craftwork and self-sufficiency. Whereas in the 1950s domes had been popular because they could be mass-produced and then put up by untrained crews, now they were championed by people who reveled in the accomplishment of completing them. The Domebook pair of how-to manuals called dome building “an exercise in expanded awareness. … If you can ride with it for a while, you’ll learn a fantastic amount about yourself, and others.”

In fact, the team effort of erecting a dome came to be seen as a kind of group initiation rite, making a commune stronger and more close-knit. The Red Rockers, a Colorado commune, built a large dome for all their members to live in, and after it was completed, they declared, “All the Red Rockers are domebuilders [making] domes and Revolution together.” Indeed, the revolution began in the labor of construction. For a generation taught that all modern work, whether in a factory or in an office, was soulless, dome building was a vivid alternative, personally uplifting while socially useful. It marked the start of a new world in which all work would be educational, spiritual, and purposeful.

Finally, domes were popular because of their association with Buckminster Fuller. In fact, almost everyone who organized dome buildings did so after hearing Fuller speak. His books were very hard to read, but he was a spellbinding lecturer, and his young listeners in the late 1960s heard a kindred spirit, a rebel who had “dropped out” in 1927 and dedicated himself to preaching the coming revolution that technology would bring. Even non-dome builders saw Fuller this way. The 1969 Whole Earth Catalog , for example, stated, “The insights of Buckminster Fuller initiated this Catalog.”

This view of Fuller hardly follows from his defense-related work in the 1950s or his more grandiose ideas of the 1960s, which included a proposal for Tetra City, a million-”passenger” floating-pyramid metropolis. But then, the dreams of the dome builders didn’t come true either; many communes fell apart almost as soon as the highs of building their domes wore off. Some of the domes’ biggest supporters became disillusioned with them and Fuller. Lloyd Kahn, the editor of the Domebooks , decided after five years that domes and many of Fuller’s other ideas were “smart but not wise.”

STILL, THAT HEADY IMAGE OF THE DOME lives on, while its previous career in the military and trade fairs stays largely forgotten. And Americans across the political spectrum continue to see their political and social hopes and fears reflected in the technologies they encounter. The Electronic Frontier Foundation declares that the Internet is good because it makes information free, gives voice to those who are excluded from traditional media, is bottom up rather than top down, and cannot be controlled by corporations or special interests. Political conservatives see in the Internet a future of wireless town halls, a new Jeffersonian democracy populated by yeomen armed with computers and cellular phones instead of plows and muskets. And critics of the Internet complain that it will create opportunities only for those wealthy enough to afford untrammeled access.

Believing that technologies have politics the way they have mass and volume leads us to imagine that we can engineer political order by choosing among technological options. But as the history of the geodesic dome teaches, people create the politics that they think their technologies embody, and those politics can easily change, sometimes very dramatically. Even in today’s high-tech world, politics is always still a completely human matter.