Cities Under Glass: the Dream of Domed Cities

For some reason, the recent successful test of the SpaceX Falcon Heavy Rocket has prompted a bit of thinking about domed cities.  If we're going to take Elon Musk's suggestion and found a colony on Mars, after all, it will likely need to be under some kind of dome or grouping of domes, in order to deal with issues of radiation, climate control (Mars is cold, averaging -67 degrees F.) and food production. Domed cities have been around in science fiction for awhile, and in 1960 inventor and visionary R. Buckminster Fuller proposed covering central Manhattan with a giant dome.  At least he thought Manhattan was salvageable; Frank Lloyd Wright would've preferred replacing the whole thing with something more like his Broadacre City, with one-acre plots each occupied by a horizontally-themed, Usonian ranch house. Fuller thought verticality was fine, and noted that his city would make the task of conditioning air easier, as the surface area of the dome was roughly 1/80th the total area of the buildings it enclosed...

Fuller's proposed Manhattan dome was just under 1.9 miles in diameter.  Among questions it left unanswered were how it would be financed, how many access and egress points would be included, and how that giant heating and air conditioning system (which would replace all the systems in the enclosed buildings) would operate, and as Fuller admitted in an interview, what this innovation might do to the legal concept of air rights...

But never mind.  Like Wright's proposal a few years earlier for a mile-high building to replace most of downtown Chicago, it attracted attention and got people talking.  Combined with the Fuller-invented geodesic domes which had begun to appear at military installations and on university campuses (and in a few cases, as habitations), the domed city concept ran parallel with the push to explore space and the perceived need to experiment with self-contained, self-sustaining environments.  This led to Fuller's assignment to design the U.S. Pavilion at the 1967 Montreal World's Fair, Expo 67.  The steel-framed, acrylic-paneled icosahedron was nearly 250 feet in diameter and 203 feet high.  Internal shading devices were devised to control heat gain.

The steel structure survived a 1976 fire, and Environment Canada bought the site in 1990 and began the task of repurposing the structure on Saint Helen's Island as a water museum, with the help of architect Eric Gauthier.  His arrangement of rectilinear masses opened to the public in 1995 and provides a visual counterpoint to the enclosing dome. It now houses an environmental museum, renamed Biosphere in 2007...

Around the same time as the Montreal dome was being reconstructed, an American research team gathered in southern Arizona to explore the idea of a self-sustaining closed ecological system, and to synthesize conditions which might be encountered colonizing other planets. Biosphere 2 has been employed twice for its original purpose; these two tests were from 1991 to '93 and again for 7 months in 1994.  The extensive interior environment included a rain forest, "ocean", wetlands, grassland and farming areas. Problems encountered included premature "die-off" of some flora and fauna, as well as interpersonal friction between some of the 8 human inhabitants...

Around 2010, a Russian effort was announced to construct a city called Mir under a glazed dome in the huge conical depression formed by an abandoned Siberian mining operation. Color renderings and section drawings illustrated the vastness of the scale and the task at hand. Photos of any completed Mir environments or happy inhabitants have not, however, surfaced since then...

One guesses that the Mars colonization would be an even more expensive project than this city under glass.  One recent estimate for the Mars initiative was 7 trillion dollars, or just over 1/3 of the U.S. gross domestic product in 2016 ($18.57 trillion, in case you're wondering). One wonders if it wouldn't be more cost-effective to just take that money and spend it on a more focused, determined effort to solve our problems here on Earth.  After all, we'd be starting out already knowing where the water is, and where the soil can support plants.  And on that long flight to Mars, we'd likely be exporting all the human foibles which have led us to make a mess here on our own planet. 

Photo credits:

Top:  R. Buckminster Fuller, found at treehugger.com

2nd:  Expo 67, the Montreal World's Fair

3rd thru 5th: parcjeandrapeau.com

6th:  wikimedia

Bottom:  scifiideas.com