Geodesic Dome Cities or Buildings
Historical Timeline and Predecessor Assessment: Geodesic Dome Cities or Buildings
Instructions:-
1.A visual historical timeline that diagram at least three predecessors to the emergent technology
2.An assessment on how these three technologies influenced the development of the current technology
3.In text APA-formatted citations with reference page
Solution
Historical Timeline and Predecessor Assessment: Geodesic Dome Cities or Buildings
Introduction
Geodesic dome cities, originally invented by a German Fuller in 1919, are structural buildings which are spherical or hemispherical in shape, resembling a lattice shell, composed of geodesics or great circles on a sphere’s surface. Architecturally, these geodesics intersect to create some rigid triangular elements. Fundamentally, a geodesic dome is enclosed. These structures support themselves without interior reinforcements. As such, these structures are more appealing for designing buildings such as churches and sporting arenas. This paper transcends a historical and predecessor assessment of geodesic technology. Furthermore, the paper will give a visual analysis of the geodesic structures.
Historical and Predecessor Assessment
Walter Bauersfield (1919)
Walter’s ambition to build a “larger planetarium” led to his mounting of portable projectors within a stagnant dome(Jarzombek & Prakash, 2013). He stipulated a concept that would work better for the much larger planetarium through interior projections. As an employee of the Zeiss Corporation, he was predisposed to the necessary material to coming up with a “Zeiss Planetarium” as shown below in Figure 1
Figure 1: A construction of a planetarium at Carl Zeiss in Jena (Germany) 1922, Walther Bauersfeld’s Plan
Richard Buckminister Fuller (1940s)
Thirty years later, an American architect, Richard Buckiminister Fuller came up with an invention of a similar geodesic structure(Fuller, 1952). His primary objective was to design an efficient and effective house that could be constructed quickly for readymade components. Arguably, in 1953, Fuller acquired a patent in regards to geodesic domes. In this era, 1960s-1970s, the popularity of the cost-effective and environmentally suitable geodesic domes significantly spread across the world(Keats, 2016). As such, Fuller is coined as the father of geodesic technology as he designed a number of structures regarding the geodesic technology.
Figure 2 A Buckiminister and Shoji Sadao’s Design: US Pavilion at the Expo 1967 in Montreal (Canada)
Roman Empire and Geodesic Structures
The basic concept of the geodesic domes or cities originates from the dome building in the ancient Roman Empire. Arguably, during the Roman Empire, the housing structures within their architectural designs contained some elements of the geodesic domes. Notably, the Romans were the first came to a realization of architectural potentialities of the dome structures. This analogy was exhibited in the Pantheon in the early years after the death of Jesus Christ(Yu, Hu, Jagdish, & Hidalgo, 2015). They failed on developing a pendentive- similar to geodesic structures but achieved the Byzantine domes as shown in figure 3 below. Also, this idea had some little contribution to the development of geodesic structures due to the architectural designs that the Byzantine employed in their structures.
Figure 3: The figure above shows a Byzantine design of the ancient domes
The Figure below shows a modern geodesic dome.
Conclusion
Geodesic domes and
cities are now popular across the globe as the technology is being embraced by architectural engineers across America and Europe. As such, authors
such as Steven Bleilier, a fictional
scientist author stipulates the appreciation of domes and geodesic structures
in his book Science Fiction: The Early
Years. Also, Steven Sieden composed a
bibliography of Fuller’s life, and E.B Smith authored The Dome: A Study in History of Ideas
(1975). These publications escalated the need to develop geodesic structures
and have contributed significantly to
such an incredible technology practiced
in many homes in the US.
References
Fuller, B. (1952). Buckminster Fuller. Perspecta, 1(February), 28. https://doi.org/10.2307/1566844
Jarzombek, M. M., & Prakash, V. (2013). A global history of architecture (1st ed.). New York: John Wiley & Sons. Retrieved from https://books.google.co.ke/books?id=HL2I_t_ZyQoC&dq=History+of+Geodesic+dome&source=gbs_navlinks_s
Keats, J. (2016). You belong to the universe : Buckminster Fuller and the future. Oxford University Press. Retrieved from https://books.google.co.ke/books?id=aSt2CwAAQBAJ&dq=Buck+minster+Fuller%27s+Universe:+His+Life+and+Work%22&source=gbs_navlinks_s
Yu, A. Z., Hu, K. Z., Jagdish, D., & Hidalgo, C. A. (2015). Pantheon: Visualizing historical cultural production. In 2014 IEEE Conference on Visual Analytics Science and Technology, VAST 2014 – Proceedings (pp. 289–290). https://doi.org/10.1109/VAST.2014.7042534
