Buckminster Fuller - Practical Achievements

Practical Achievements

Fuller introduced a number of concepts, and helped develop others. Certainly, a number of his projects were not successful in terms of commitment from industry or acceptance by most of the public. However, more than 500,000 geodesic domes have been built around the world and many are in use. According to the Buckminster Fuller Institute, the largest geodesic-dome structures are:

• Seagaia Ocean Dome: Miyazaki, Japan, 216 m (710 ft).
• Multi-Purpose Arena: Nagoya, Japan, 187 m (614 ft).
• Tacoma Dome: Tacoma, Washington, USA, 162 m (530 ft).
• Superior Dome: Northern Michigan Univ. Marquette, Michigan, USA, 160 m (525 ft).
• Walkup Skydome: Northern Arizona Univ. Flagstaff, Arizona, USA, 153 m (502 ft).
• Poliedro de Caracas: Caracas, Venezuela, 145 m (475 ft).
• Round Valley High School Stadium: Springerville-Eagar, Arizona, USA, 134 m (440 ft).
• Former Spruce Goose Hangar: Long Beach, California, USA, 126 m (415 ft).
• Formosa Plastics Storage Facility: Mai Liao, Taiwan, 123 m (402 ft).
• Union Tank Car Maintenance Facility: Baton Rouge, Louisiana USA, 117 m (384 ft), destroyed in November 2007.
• Lehigh Portland Cement Storage Facility: Union Bridge, Maryland USA, 114 m (374 ft).
• The Eden Project, Cornwall, United Kingdom

Other notable domes include:

• Spaceship Earth at Disney World's Epcot Center in Florida, 80.8-meters (265 ft) wide (Spaceship Earth is actually a self-supporting geodesic sphere, the only one currently in existence.)
• The Gold Dome in Oklahoma City, formerly a bank and now a multicultural society and business center.
• Downtown Vancouver, British Columbia, is a geodesic sphere hosting the Telus World of Science, a science centre (formerly called Science World), that was originally the Expo Centre built for Expo 86.
• The dome over a shopping center in downtown Ankara, Turkey, 109.7-meter (360 ft) tall
• The dome enclosing a civic center in Stockholm, Sweden, 85.3-meter (280 ft) high.
• The world's largest aluminum dome formerly housed the “Spruce Goose” airplane in Long Beach Harbor, California, USA.

However, contrary to Fuller's hopes, domes are not an everyday sight in most places. In practice, most of the smaller owner-built geodesic structures had disadvantages (see geodesic domes), including their unconventional appearance.

A spin-off of Fuller's dome-design conceptualization was the Buckminster Ball, which was the official FIFA approved design for footballs (association football), from their introduction at the 1970 World Cup until recently. The design was a truncated icosahedron – essentially a "Geodesic Sphere", consisting of 12 pentagonal and 20 hexagonal panels. This was used continuously for 34 years until replaced by the 14-panel Teamgeist for the 2006 World Cup.

Fuller was followed (historically) by other designers and architects, such as Sir Norman Foster and Steve Baer, willing to explore the possibilities of new geometries in the design of buildings, not based on conventional rectangles.