Credit: Joseph Kennedy

Chapter 3: First Action First Renovation

Non load-bearing partitions were added between the columns to create spaces for offices and seminar rooms on the east side of the second floor of Rand Hall in 1952. Earlier that year, Buckminster Fuller built a twenty foot diameter geodesic dome with students on the roof of Rand Hall that acted as an inverted planetarium. But what had been intended as a permanent fixture on top of the building was destroyed by vandals on Halloween night. Although the structure no longer exists on top of Rand Hall, it is well documented in the extensive Fuller Archives.

Fuller meticulously recorded nearly each aspect of his life into a diary in 15 minute intervals along with newspaper clippings, sketches and correspondence to preserve for posterity. He motivated to produce such a methodical record because he saw his life as an experiment and believed that future generations could greatly benefit from “everything he knew” down to the smallest detail. Known as the Dymaxion Chronofile, his obsessive behavior proceeded what is now almost common practice with the universal documentation of our personal thoughts and actions facilitated though digital platforms such as Facebook, Instagram and YouTube. The physical collection of Fuller’s life from 1917 to 1983 occupies an enormous 1,200 linear feet of storage at the Stanford University’s archives compared to the size of the hard drives and servers that digitally store a commensurate amount of our personal data today. 

A decade ago Fuller’s life may have been the most extensively documented in human history. Yet as we have created more devices to automatically record and share our actions and personal preferences it seems as though the quantity of information recording the life of nearly any modern citizen of the world will soon surpass that of Fuller Archive. Whether or not we acknowledge it, we are each active curators of our own digitally connected personal archives. With individuals’ increasing willingness to create and share personal data, corporations have become ever more willing to consume and organize our output to target customers with specialized products and identify trends in populations of certain demographics. But while the Fuller Archive has proved invaluable to scholars conducting research into his life and ideas due to his fame and success, the information collected on the average citizen is of questionable academic value when considered in isolation. 

Now that creating and publishing in either a print or digital format is nearly effortless, libraries must contend with organizing vast amounts of information in ways that are both potentially useful and easily navigable just as the value of information is becoming increasingly difficult to quantify.

(Had the Rand Hall geodesic dome survived as planned for more than half a century, it is interesting to speculate whether the structure would have been preserved with the construction of the library’s new roof lantern.)

This is the third part of a series of small essays that recount the history and present of Rand Hall at Cornell University. The first part can be found in the inaugural issue of Ed, "The Architecture of Architecture," available for purchase here. The second part can be found here.