Splendid transitory shelters

  Above is a little page construction built with the intention of quickly explaining the design elements for one specific type of dome.  A physical photograph of this image along with a few other photographs is intended to accompany a disassembled dome kit.  To act as a short explanation and little assembly manual for the dome’s reconstruction.

  Geodesic domes are curious innovations.  The fact that they are strong and can cover a huge volume of space economically, often makes them smartly utilitarian.  They are generally not practical platforms to work with however when considering insulated dwellings like homes or offices.  Materials for modern construction often come in thin, long rectangular shapes or in squarish block forms that resist adaption to curvature.  The chore can be done but details of construction benefiting a personal home like wallboard, cabinetry and trim can become nightmarish for the builder of a proper dome house.  Where domes do shine is in expeditiously enclosing a large volume of internal space while using materials frugally.  As a result most domes are often spacious but thin walled.  Depending upon design and components used they can make good temporary or transportable structures.  Many splendidly large domes have been built in the last six decades but unfortunately, of these many have been torn down.  Some were built as displays for World Fairs or Expos and still survive in a partially changed or re-purposed state.  Other large, pioneering dome examples went neglected and unused until they finally needed to be taken down.  Going back to analyze the biggest or most influential domes led to a re-discovery and investigation of the first great, humongous but temporary greenhouse in history.  The enormous, awe inspiring and refreshingly fanciful Crystal Palace hosted the “Great Exhibition” (the first World’s Fair) almost 170 years ago.

Octagons Don’t Tessellate

  There is a great number of mathematical ways to for the architect or engineer to vary the arrangement of cross-members in the structure of a geodesic dome.  In geometry “geodesic” implies the shortest path between points on a curve.  It takes math to predictably persuade straight building materials to intersect with points on a sphere and still maintain uniformity and structurally rigidity.  You end up using a lot of triangles.  Still, a triangle presents a flat, not curved surface.  In geodesics it is expedient to consider a few regular polyhedrons because they come with polygonal faces and unlike the sphere these 3-dimensional solids are conveniently adaptable to triangulation. 

To expand the plan or size of a sphere or dome it becomes necessary to subdivide polygonal faces into smaller triangles.  This expansion and mapping is called tessellation.  “A tessellation of a flat surface is the tiling of a plane using one or more geometric shapes, called tiles, with no overlaps and no gaps”.  There are only three straightforward “regular tessellations” however, which depend upon three regular polygons (the equilateral triangle, square and hexagon).

  Most geodesic domes constructed will be of Class I type, a much smaller number of Class II and practically none at all of Class III.  It boils down to simplicity and ease of calculating the tessellation.  Only architects, engineers and eggheads like Buckminster Fuller would bother to fiddle with the more complicated constructions.   Buckminster Fuller literally wrote the book on geodesic domes.  He defined criteria and wrote formulae to calculate geodesic dome construction, then sold or licensed this knowledge to architectural firms around the world.  He himself was fond of using the “triacon” (Class II nickname) breakdown for his constructions.  When it comes to the largest domes the triacon offers less confusion for builders than the “alternate” (Class I) breakdowns.  Unlike the alternate, triacon domes or spheres only come in even frequencies but unfortunately these have no great arc equator running down their center-lines.  Importantly the triacon requires fewer different strut lengths; however those lengths may vary a little more.  

* Polygons are 2-dimensional shapes but polyhedrons are 3-dimensional solids.  Both are n-dimensional polytopes.  There is only a handful of “regular” convex polygons but a much larger quantity of irregular, concave and complex polygon types.

* The same holds true for polyhedrons.  You’ve got five regular (even sided, even angled, convex) polyhedrons called “Platonic solids”, thirteen polyhedrons called “Archimedeian solids”, ninety two polyhedrons called “Johnson solids” and then a bewildering number of other possible irregular, stellated / concave polyhedrons that can be considered.  Then for every polyhedron there is a reciprocal or “alter ego” so to speak called a dual.

 

 

*  Within mathematics a whole branch of geometry called “polyhedral combinatorics” can find an absurd number of ways to twist and contort the polyhedra, and it has the notation to describe them all.

  This following picture shows only Class I dome examples and begins with the basic icosahedron which has a frequency of “1” and who’s “Schläfli symbol notation” is {3,5 +}1,0.  The alternate breakdown or tessellation continues to be used as the frequency is increased. 

Unfortunately now one must open; close and then reopen a thumbnail a 2^nd time; to view the enlargement properly. 

* This picture above and the 1’st image of this post were concerned with constructing a portable dome from 3/4” EMT (Electrical Metallic Tubing).  In America this galvanized conduit is sold in 10 foot lengths.  That size and length cut in half (5′) is almost strong enough to support the weight of a normal person climbing around upon the dome, without one of its cross-members bending.  For economy of material the dome heights and diameters in this picture are consequent to the longest possible strut (pipe) length being no longer than 5 feet.

* From the picture: the 5/8ths version of a 3v dome is practically as tall as the 4v version that conveniently does have an equator.  However when jumping to 4v the number of different strut lengths doubles, which can significantly complicate the chore of assembly.  It should take at least 2 people assisting one another to assemble a 3v 5/8ths version and at least 3 people to move it because the completed construction would be ungainly and would weigh about 360 lbs. when made out of pipe.

* For the 5v and 6v versions a ludicrous 9 separate strut lengths are required.  Concentration will be required to assemble such a puzzle correctly.  Additionally, working 23 ft. above ground will necessitate the use of scaffolding, a crane or mechanical hoist.

 

Distinguished dome examples

 

       

In 1967 the World’s Fair or “Expo 67” was held in Montreal, Quebec, Canada.  A group of architects and designers known as the Cambridge Seven Associates, Inc. were tasked with the responsibility for creating and furnishing the United States pavilion for that exhibition.  For the structure they decided upon a large geodesic dome.  Fuller & Sadao Inc. (Buckminster Fuller and Shoji Sadao) were hired to plan the sophisticated shell.

     

The dome’s geometry has been described as being a combination of a 32- frequency regular triacon (Class II, method 3) and a 16-frequency truncatable alternate (Class I, method 3).  Below; at the top left of the modified photo the only, easily discernible pentagon in the image is tinted red.

Originally this historic dome was enclosed by transparent acrylic panels. This <7:24 minute video> by Cambridge Seven eloquently documents many details about the historic pavilion.  The dome caught fire in 1976, which destroyed the acrylic but didn’t melt the steel frame.  ‘Environment Canada’ acquired the structure in 1990 and turned it into what is now a museum called the Montreal Biosphere.

 

  

_ Shareable images of Kaiser Aluminum domes are rare on the Internet.  Above is an unexceptional photograph of an aluminum dome, which functions as the community center for Borger,Texas.   Around 1956 the famous industrialist Henry J. Kaiser and Buckminster Fuller joined together to start a company that manufactured and sold aluminum domes like this one.  Several examples still exist – here and there around the globe.  Even today lightweight, economical and corrosion resistant aluminum seems to be the most practical material with which to enclose a large dome.  Erection of these particular domes sixty years ago was very quick because the polygon shaped prefabricated metal panels just bolted together.  This surviving example in Borger, Texas has served as community center for more than half a century.  An identical or kindred example also in Texas, survives as a popular and continuously used theater near Fort Worth.  Two more of these Kaiser aluminum domes (not pictured) long lasted as concert auditoriums.  The Virginia Beach dome was erected in 1957 and taken down in 1994.  The Hawaiian Hilton dome in Honolulu was also erected in 1957, was aluminum, acted as a auditorium with good acoustics and was taken down only in 1999 to make space for a newer building.

   

_ Better copyrighted pictures exist but above are some allowable public domain images of what was at one time – the largest “clear span” building in the world.  It was designed by Thomas C. Howard of Synergetics, Inc. and owned by the Union Tank Car Company.  The dome was built in 1958 near Baton Rouge, Louisiana.  It measured 384 feet in diameter and was 128 feet (> twelve stories) high.  When the real estate was purchased by another company the dome went abandoned and neglected for a couple of decades.  Unfortunately it vanished in 2008.

   

_ In 1964 New York City opened the only Registered (Universal) world exposition to be held without BIE (Bureau International des Expositions) approval.  “Expo 1964” ran for 18 months; three times longer than normal.  A dome large enough to seat 2,100 people was designed by Thomas C. Howard of Synergetics, Inc. and built as a pavilion.  This building later housed the Winston Churchill exhibit in 1965.  After that the dome was dismantled, moved and the frame (only) re-erected to serve as an aviary for the Queen’s Zoo (NYC).  While the dome is not particularly tall, it is a generous 175 feet in diameter.  These few “free to use and share” licensed images above don’t quite do the structure justice.

   

_ Between 1971 and 1973 the United States Naval Construction Battalion (the Seabees) erected a dome at the Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station.  The NSF (U.S. National Science Foundation) only expected to get 10 to 15 years of service life from the structure but it lasted until 2009 before it was taken down.  There were vent holes in the crown of the dome to bleed off excess heat.  Temperatures above freezing would have allowed the structure and its contents to sink deep into the snow. At least the dome blocked the fierce Antarctic winds.  Designed by Temcor Inc. the dome is said to have been based upon a Class-II frequency 14 triacon breakdown.

_ Temcor was absorbed by CST Industries Inc. somewhere around 2009.  The company creates the largest domes in existence and is probably the biggest dome manufacturer and installer in the world.  As of 2009 they’d already installed something like 7,500 aluminum domes or dome shaped roofs, in 72 different countries.   In Long Beach, California a huge Temcor dome sits close to the Queen Mary.  That dome was initially built to house the famously large “Spruce Goose”.

 

The Crystal Palace

_ Quickly assembled buildings providing vast open interiors, did not begin with geodesic domes.  The grandest example of such a building was created six or seven generations ago.   It took only sixteen months from start to finish to design, manufacture and erect the modular Crystal Palace, on site.  It would sit upon some of the most valuable ground in the world.  The humongous and airy glass building was then filled with eight miles of tables, for fourteen thousand promoters which displayed more than one hundred thousand different exhibits.  The Great Exhibition opened May 1, 1851.  It was a grand success.  And profitable.  In the five months before the exhibition ended more than six million paying customers would walk through the Palace’s doors. Then this biggest building in the world at the time was itself sold off,  removed from Hyde Park and reassembled in another location of London.

_ Many great and energetic minds joined to make this well engineered spectacle a possibility.   More credit belongs to one person perhaps than to anyone else – Prince Albert, Consort to Queen Victoria.   Once his notion caught traction with private investors, then the government pitched in and a Royal Commission was appointed to mount the Exhibition.   Meanwhile a separate Building Committee comprised of the most respected engineers and architects in the Empire was formed – to oversee the design and construction of the exhibition building.  Among their demands were that the building be temporary, cheap to build and fast to erect.  After entertaining planning submissions from all over Europe in 1850, they received and discarded some 245 submissions before choosing one.  It was partially by luck that Joseph Paxton’s plan was picked.  Iron and glass “hot houses” (conservatories or greenhouses) were new and fashionable novelties during this Victorian period.  Paxton was certainly not the only adventurist architect that built them.

   

Monkey Closets in the “Retiring Rooms”

_ To “Spend a Penny” was to become a long lived euphemism for going to the toilet.  It all started with the Great Exhibition and the exciting, first ever public toilets.  It cost one penny to rent a Monkey Closet.  Back then a penny was worth considerably more than today; remember Britain had the lower half penny and farthing (¼ penny) denominations of coin.  But a penny here bought a cleaned toilet seat, a small towel and a shoe shine.  By the end of the Exhibition no less than 827,280 adventurers availed themselves of this luxury.

*  Thumbnail above: this was from a magazine or brochure that was printed for the Great Exhibition. The illustration depicts a sampling of bronze cast candelabras, figurines and sculptures which would have been for sale at the event. The first real “Cylopaedia” (Cyclopædia: or, An Universal Dictionary of Arts and Sciences) had already been printed more than a century earlier (in England and in 1728).)

_ In its initial configuration the conservatory resembled a huge rectangular flat topped box, having only one lofted transept at its center.  Still this open building was more than one-third of a mile long and more than 2.5 American football fields wide.  In places it was built over and around full sized trees.  Its structural components consisted of ten million square feet of heavy flat glass plus unknown tons of cast iron columns, trusses and trellis girders and unknown tons of wood planking for the second story floor. 

_ The railroad and steam locomotives that brought this material in were new ideas themselves.  Portland cement was new and economical flat glass was new.  It was the diminutive size of the architectural glass itself that ultimately determined the shape and size of the whole building.  The largest plate glass that could be efficiently made at the time measured 10 inches by 49 inches and today it would be referred to as cast plate glass.  Production cost was substantially lessened and construction was simplified because Paxton’s plan was drawn around using millions of these identical panes of glass.  Other parts were mass produced also and some served multiple functions.  The posts and girders came straight from the foundry and could be bolted together to form free standing modules in no time.

_ The building only stayed in Hyde Park for five months but it was to exist for eighty four more years in another location across town.  There, it probably outlived everyone that ventured through it in 1851.  Once it was moved to a more prepared location the Crystal Palace (a nickname coined by a newspaperman) would acquire two more transepts, additional wings and running fountains both inside and out.

_ The photo above is dated 1854.  Photography was very much in its infancy at that time.  Daguerreotypes had been around since 1839 but the collodion process wasn’t announced or published until March 1851.  This image (by Philip Henry Delamotte) could be from an Ambrotype (a positive image on glass).  The American Civil War photographer Mathew Brady studied his craft in Europe and actually displayed some of his portraits at the Great Exhibition in 1851.

        

_ There were two new water towers built at the new location, only the one at the South end of the Palace is seen here, above left.  Impressive in their own right from an engineering perspective, at 280ft tall the towers were not quite as tall as the Statue of Liberty and its large pedestal combined.  A painting of a Royal Navy ceremony-dated 1917 is the center thumbnail.  The third picture is of a naval gun, dated between 1920 – 1924.

_ These last photographs are presented as thumbnails mainly because they are bandwidth hoggish and would slow down the web-page otherwise.  The first photo below shows the Central and North transepts, the North water tower and North wing – which normally held new agricultural and industrial implements on display.  This excellent picture must have been made before 1866 because that’s the year that the North transept caught fire and burned up.  In 1871 the world’s largest saltwater aquarium took its place.  In the next photograph the North transept is clearly missing.  This aerial photo had to have been taken sometime before 1936 because that is the year when the whole Crystal Palace was destroyed by fire.  The two water towers survived the fire but were deliberately destroyed shortly later in WWII to deny German bomber pilots a visual fix from such an established landmark.

_ Over its eight decade long lifespan the Crystal Palace attracted and hosted a broad assortment of eccentric and eclectic attractions. Year after year it hosted performances, concerts and public festivals.  In this doctored photograph below, taken somewhere between 1887 and 1889, some blocks of about 100 people are colored in. This particular photo is said to show a Handel Festival taking place at one end of the big central transept. The Grand Orchestra of about 4,000 musicians surrounded the organ.  The Great Organ in the back of the photo had 4,500 pipes, some obviously out of sight.  There was only enough room left to seat 4,000 spectators in the audience.  One wonders what these orchestras sounded like.  Did they produce magnificent awe-inspiring sounds or did this many musicians produce a very loud cacophony?

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*added April, 16, 2021

Unfortunately one must now open; close and then reopen a thumbnail a second time, to view a WordPress enlargement properly.

  Between the Great Exhibition (1851) and the “Centennial Exposition” in Philadelphia (1876) there were four other World Expos (in Paris, London, Paris and Vienna respectfully).

  For the 1876 fair in Philadelphia’s Fairmount Park, some 200 buildings were erected, but now only four remain.   The “Main Exhibition Building” became the world’s largest building (in area), by enclosing 21.5 acres of space.  Its construction incorporated prefabricated sub-assemblies and it was disassembled in 1881.  Another temporary building erected for the same exhibition was the 558,440 sq. ft. “Machinery Hall”.

  Another building built for the expo was expected to be permanent however.  The 73,191 sq. ft. “Horticultural Hall” was built to resemble architecturally – the twenty-five year old Crystal Palace in London.  However a hurricane tore the building apart in 1954 so its remainder was demolished.  Another Horticulture Center was built on the site in 1976.  Two etchings with slight differences, from the same vantage point, are shown below.

 

————————————->added May, 12, 2021

 

  This picture above left, is from an engraving done by W. E. Hodgkin; of The Palace of Art and Industry – during the 1862 Exhibition, in London.  This picture has been modified under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.  The 3.35 MB original is provided by the “Wellcome Library, London”.

The structure was altered 19 years later (but 140 years ago), and now the site is occupied by the Natural History Museum and the Science Museum in South Kensington, London.