Editorial

Fly's-eye view

Of a future that never came

Few things say more about the past than its vision of a future that never arrived. Consider the geodesic dome, one of Buckminster Fuller's innumerable brainstorms, which included visions of whole cities encased in a single dome and self-driving cars zooming around with loads of passengers. Think of him as the Leonardo da Vinci of his time, only one rattling off ideas at more than a mile a minute. He made Frank Lloyd Wright look like a relic of the past. Now he and various of his visions have moved to the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, Ark., a town which itself has become a vision of the future made real.

Called the Fly's Eye Dome, this geodesic wonder has a diameter of 50 feet, is made of yesterday's miracle substance (fiberglass!) and comes as the answer to any housing shortage that country and the world may someday face. Within its 1,960 square feet, it sports a grand total of 61 acrylic windows, and is meant to be the answer to any housing shortage in the (never) foreseeable future. To quote Dylan Turk, who helps curate exhibits at Crystal Bridges, it "shows that not all architects look at the same problem the same way. Creativity and innovation can happen on so many types of scales and with any type of material and can truly change the world." Like genius, visions of the future can vary up, down and every which way. Buckminster Fuller's own eye happened to alight on picture of a fly one day, and the rest was imagination.

Back in the Seventies, when the world seemed to be returning to what passes as normal after the wild Sixties, Mr. Fuller spun out this idea of a geodesic dome, which by now has inspired hundreds of copies here, there and everywhere else in this constantly spinning world. According to the Buckminster Fuller Institute, the dome is "lightweight and can be rapidly assembled or disassembled, while having enough space to provide shelter to a family or even as emergency housing in the case of natural disasters." Which sounds like just what New Orleans needed when much of it disappeared beneath the waves during its Noahide flood--without a dove bearing an olive branch in sight.

For now this wondrous dome of the future is in storage, its separate components all in clearly marked crates, says Mr. Turk. "His hopes and dreams," he says of Buckminster Fuller, "would be that you could essentially have a kit--the molds and the tools to pour your own fiberglass and make the 134 different pieces and build your own dome." But dreams and theories are one things, rock-hard reality another. The domes never came off some imaginary assembly line because making them was much tougher than imagining them.

"It's just been a lot of research and working with engineers and making sure we do it right," Dylan Turk adds. "We didn't want to announce it and realize it would be another year before anything happened." Now it has happened; the dreamed-of future has become the very present, and in time it, too, will fade into the past. Mr. Turk adds that while the dome seemed "somewhat extreme in its futuristic design and emphasis on 'doing more with less,' it seems considerably less far-fetched." Architectural historian Robert Rubin noted that "most major museums ... can't rise to the challenge of architecture because it's not very 'commercial'" but Crystal Bridges "is in a unique position to fill the void."

In addition to the Dome, which is 36 feet tall and weighs 10,000 pounds in all, Crystal Bridges can boast a file containing its entire history, including letters, models, and drawings. A bulging dossier. Nobody besides Buckminister Fuller or a trusted collaborator had ever walked through one of his domes, but now any visitor to Crystal Bridges should be able to so in the coming year.

The now legendary Dome should be installed after another entrance gives visitors a better way to reach the museum's lush, rolling lawn come spring. "It will draw people out there," Dylan Turk foresees. "It celebrates this new entrance and this whole new experience that's going to be happening at the museum." So make your plans now to see both an architectural and natural wonder of this, the Wonder State.

Buckminster Fuller, Crystal Bridges, and the now fast, simple way to get to both sure beats the old Pig Trail because not everything grand and glorious about this state lies in its past. The future not only beckons at Crystal Bridges; it's on its way here. Like a fast-approaching freight. By all means, stop, look and listen. Be careful out there as well as aware. Ain't old-new Arkansas a grand place? And not just a place to be from but one to head for.

Editorial on 01/09/2017

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