40-year-old fairgrounds dome gets makeover

It was in 1973 that longtime Southern Illinois University vice-president Gene Mace worked with the Du Quoin State Fair to construct this geodesic dome--created by architect Buckminster Fuller in the 1940s--on the grounds of the fair. The pavilion has since been used to showcase SIU during the fair and as a picnic pavilion during the days in-between. It became a goal of the fair this year to give the dome--created solely out of triangles--a new roof and a general makeover.

The first dome that could be called "geodesic" in every respect was designed in 1926 after World War I by Walther Bauersfeld, chief engineer of the Carl Zeiss optical company, for a planetarium to house his planetarium projector. Some 20 years later, R. Buckminster Fuller named the dome "geodesic" from field experiments with artist Kenneth Snelson at Black Mountain College in 1948 and 1949. Snelson and Fuller worked developing what they termed "tensegrity," an engineering principle of continuous tension and discontinuous compression that allowed domes to deploy a lightweight lattice of interlocking icosahedrons that could be skinned with a protective cover.

The geodesic dome appealed to Fuller--who later called SIU home-- because it was extremely strong for its weight, its "omnitriangulated" surface provided an inherently stable structure, and because a sphere encloses the greatest volume for the least surface area.