Buckminster Fuller at The Whitney
Saturday, September 13, 2008 at 04:20PM
Above: My family's dome, Vermont, 1972, and a short video from the Whitney about Buckminster Fuller Buckminster Fuller is currently, in fact, being touted as one of the "Greatest Visionary of the Twentieth Century" by the Whitney Museum here in New York. I actually know very little about Fuller, even though his work has had a relatively profound effect on my family. Just after my sister and I were born, my parents built a geodesic dome based on Fuller's designs and theories. It was a brave and revolutionary thing to do, especially considering the building site, which was at the top of a mountain surrounded by a thousand acres of wilderness in northern Vermont, with nothing but dairy farms and small towns for 60 miles in every direction beyond. I remember very little, but do recall very clearly the feeling of waking up inside that huge space, which was not divided by walls, and looking up into that vast kaleidoscope of a ceiling to the clear panel at the very top of the roof. I also remember spending a lot of time scampering around on its platform through the summer when it was being built, in my underpants, playing with nails. I think we only lived there for a year or so. There was eventually a small fire, I think, and then maybe a failure of part of the structure, a cold winter, a period of poverty, a Vietnam war, a lack of jobs, maybe the dome itself worked but the world around it just didn't, maybe it was the other way around, its hard to remember or know exactly. When we did abandon it, we didn't go far. The land still belonged to my family, my uncle lived at the bottom of the hill in the stone house that he had built and the old farmhouse at the end of the road filled up with our cousins every summer, with their mothers who drove shiny station wagons and their tennis racquets and their gainfully employed fathers. Among that summerhouse circle, The Dome quickly became our storied but ruined homeland. Our cousins came from Bethesda and Brooklyn, Land of Excellent Public Schools and Ballet Classes, we came from The Dome, Land of Shoeless-ness, Unplanned Kittens, and Head-Lice. It stayed with us for a very long time. I could tell by the way my cousins used the term "The Dome" that their parents had always doubted it. And while I admit feeling awkward and different because of it, I also remember something else. I remember feeling brave. For fifteen years or so after we left the dome we could still see it clearly from my uncles house, Its bare skeleton of big beams rising up among an increasingly overgrown meadow. Eventually the trees around it grew, and its beams were salvaged and used for something else. Even the cleared patch of meadow around it and the flat expanse where my mother's vegetable garden was has now been completely overtaken by a young forest of birch and maple. I hiked around up there a few years ago and found nothing left. I wasn't even sure I was in the right spot until I found, gleaming white on the forest floor and surrounded by thick moss, the big porcelain double sink that had once stood in our kitchen. Had it not been such a surreal thing to find in the middle of the woods, and had it weighed less than fifty pounds, I would have carted it back with me. Not just for the sake of nostalgia, mind you, but because it was a beautiful sink. It was the kind of sink that, if I came across it at the 25th street flea market, I would have paid a fortune for it, found a way to drag it home ten blocks, and redesigned my kitchen around it. Removing it from it's natural habitat, however, had seemed like a barbaric thing to do. Anyway, the Fuller exhibit was wonderful. TC was moved especially by the large scale models of the pre-fab homes, and the never-realized plan for floating cities that might have hovered over the earth in cloud-like spheres. I found myself standing very near the room-sized geodesic dome that had been constructed from a cardboard kit, wondering where I might purchase such a thing, and asking myself how long it might stand in a New England field next summer before being beaten down by rain and absorbed by the ground beneath it. and more pictures of our dome....
Reader Comments (18)
lol
God bless the reeses cup!
Hi Heather.
I'm afraid that your "churchy" friend knows beans about Jesus, repeating common cliches that try to define him as a "revolutionary', etc, more in Marx/Lenin/Stalin company of leftist fellows who tried to change the world but made a few ("a few") mistakes on the way.
Buckminster Fuller? OK, sure. He was pretty harmless.
Agnieszka
PS. On the second thought, I think it's pretty awesome of that lady to mention Jesus at a party where His name probably sends shivers down everybody's spine!
Kind of like Wallace Carothers who invented nylon and paved the way for neoprene, but ended up killing himself with lemon juice and cyanide before he could ever see the effects his inventions had on the world.
Can you imagine where we would be as a society without synthetics? We wouldn't have gone to the moon. Or the deep oceans, either. Interesting...
Great story, great photos, great parents.
What a great story!
And I love that quote... if there aren't people who push the boundaries out... there wouldn't be any room for all of us!
How wonderful to come across your story of "The Dome".
I went to a marvelous community school in Diamond Creek in Melbourne Australia. The Art teachers were an inspiration and part of the curriculum was to build a geodesic Dome within the school grounds. It must have been 1974 and 'The Dome' gradually took shape. It shaped our lives at the same time and has given me a lifelong love of architecture and creativity.
Reading your post made me realise how rare it is to find people writing about those times of bare feet and headlice. I felt proudly 'Other'.
Thanks for writing about this special time.
Just happened to come across this too. xx
http://www.inhabitat.com/2008/09/12/sustainable-homes-from-easy-domes/
oooo, very cool link! I love the clothesline between the two!
Heather, Thanks for reminding me. You're from a tribe of dome-builders and dreamers. People who take ideas and bring them life. We are proud of you.
wow -what a priviledge to have parents willing to do the unconventional! No doubt where all your creativity comes from. Is it your mom on the bottom photo? great legs too!!
what an incredible story. brave + beautiful.
What a great story. It reminds me of my childhood in the weeds, riding ponies bareback and eating tomatoes straight off the vine.
My husband grew up in deepest Urbanurbia, where rebellion was refusing to edge your lawn. His family acts like I was raised on Mars. e never built a dome, but we did live off the grid for a while. It was like a camping trip that never ended. We loved it.
Ooooh, this is why you are so creative and courageous to experiment; your parents were visionaries! I think you were very lucky, unplanned kittens, head-lice and all.
Beautiful post.
As a parent on the fringe of normalcy, unschooling my underwear clad children (at best) off the grid (at times), I am inspired. We often walk that line of what is acceptable (be it how/where we birth, or what we eat). Hooray for the risk takers! As an aside, I just stumbled into your blog and am a long time lover of your work. Bless your parents for the inspiration that laid in your lap.
I loved reading this story. Such a clear picture you paint!
I love this story. How awesome your parents were!!
Lovely! My little family is currently livng in a yome (cross between a yurt and a geodeisic dome) in SE Tennessee, while we build a house out of earthbags. I hope one day my son remembers life here the way you do :)
Heather, I love your posts, but this one spoke to me. We were the "divorced" children - always feeling different. Who among us had two bookbags, two favorite blankets and two holidays every year? We knew when voices dropped to whispers at our appearance that there would be a false smile and directions to "go on outside and play". Play with cousins who were fascinated by our double lives. Two bikes! The luxury! We did feel different and while I never ended up feeling brave as you did, I felt strong. Perhaps they aren't so far apart, but I realized that everyone else worried about how my sisters and I were handling the "divorce", I simply struggled to be normal. And the time spent alone at reunions, summers away from friends because of court proceedings and the constant travel between two addresses has made me into an awesome mom who knows how to pack light, loves to road trip and doesn't worry about what anyone thinks of me. Bravo for taking your past and creating something beautiful out of it. :)