Archinect - News

Foster + Partners releases Ellison Institute of Technology campus designs in Oxford

2023-10-16T17:09:00-04:00

Foster + Partners has unveiled renderings for a new scientific research and development facility design located in Oxford, UK.

The project to establish a new home for the eight-year-old Ellison Institute of Technology (EIT) comprises a 30,000-square-meter (323,000-square-foot) central research laboratory, oncological wellness institute, and restoration of existing buildings. Its creation positions the institute, which also operates out of Los Angeles, for better collaborations with Oxford University and the city’s biotech and technology industries. The EIT says it will also aid with the launch of its new Ellison Scholars program, which was initiated earlier this year.

Image courtesy Foster + Partners

The scope of its design entails connecting the restored single-volume Littlemore House to new pavilions located at the easternmost edge of the site in order to create a larger C-shape footprint surrounding a landscaped courtyard that’s built over a sunken 200-seat auditorium and culminat...

Architecture students will reconstruct an original Buckminster Fuller geodesic dome at the National Museum of American History this summer

2023-04-14T14:00:00-04:00

A new collaborative project between the Catholic University of America and the National Museum of American History will offer architecture students the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to repair and reconstruct one of Buckminster Fuller’s famed geodesic domes in the hopes of presenting such structures as a viable resilience tool to be used by designers in the ongoing fight against climate change.

Beginning in early July, a group of students from the school’s undergrad and graduate programs will work together on the reconstruction of the more than 70-year-old The Weatherbreak design created by Fuller protégé Jeffrey Lindsay in the museum’s Flag Hall.

Under the guidance of assistant professor Tonya Ohnstad, lead fabricator Lorenzo Cardim DeAlmeida, and museum curator Abeer Saha, the group will explore its potential usage as affordable, resilient housing. This is the first time the structure will be displayed to the public since entering the museum’s collection and represents the first ...

ETH Zurich students construct timber dome entirely from waste materials

2022-10-20T12:00:00-04:00

A group of research students at ETH Zurich has completed a timber geodesic dome constructed from nothing but demolition waste. The research group, led by assistant professor Catherine De Wolf of the university’s Department of Civil, Environmental and Geomatic Engineering, sees the project as a demonstration of the potential for circular economics.

Photo credit: Catherine De Wolf

Photo credit: BuserHill Photography

Work on the project began in October 2021 when the group, titled the Circular Engineering for Architecture lab, gained permission to salvage materials from an old car depot scheduled for demolition. Through dismantling an entire floor of the building, the group salvaged OSB panels, wooden beams, steel girders, and plastic piping for use in the pavilion.

Photo credit: Catherine De Wolf

Photo credit: Anna Buser

According to the group, the decision to construct a geodesic dome from the waste materials was due to the shape’s stable, efficient, and elementary structural properties....

Influential modern icon Bernard Judge has passed away in Los Angeles aged 90

2021-11-24T13:08:00-05:00

Leading modernist Bernard Judge passed away in his Los Angeles home last week at the age of 90.

The LA Times’ Carolina Miranda has an excellent write-up on the man who once designed a home for Marlon Brando on an atoll in French Polynesia.

Judge was in many ways the living definition of a “champion of modernism,” pioneering the geodesic dome form exhibited in his Triponent House and working to restore Rudolph Schindler’s then-eponymous West Hollywood home after taking out a personal ad in the Times in the early 1970s.

Judge was born in New York City to an artist mother and architecture professor father. He went on to study at USC at a time when the school was dominated by prominent residential designers like Gregory Ain and Conrad Bluff III.

Section drawing of Judge's Triponent House project. Source: Southern California Architectural History.

Judge designed a number of resorts and inexpensive and easy-to-construct homes through his firm Environmental Services Group. He was a lectur...

As the Eden Project turns 20, its creators take a look back

2021-03-16T13:51:00-04:00

Our original designs for the biomes – hundreds of hexagonal and pentagonal cells supported by geodesic tubular steel – looked more like Waterloo, but we used ETFE foil, or ethylene tetrafluoroethylene, which was more transparent than glass but extremely lightweight. It uses 1% of the energy and carbon of glass. The difficulty was creating biomes that would interlock across a constantly shifting landscape.

The Eden Project with its famed geodesic biomes opened twenty years ago on March 17th, 2001 in Cornwall, England.

Inside the tropical biome of the Eden Project. Photo: Hchc2009/Wikimedia Commons.

Developer's plans to build condominium complex raise concerns over Buckminster Fuller's oldest extant geodesic dome

2019-01-14T14:17:00-05:00

While Buckminster Fuller and his geodesic domes may have gotten special mention in Jeff Bridges' recent Golden Globes speech, his oldest extant lattice-shelled structure is in the news for a less glorious reason. Now under serious threat, the Dome at Woods Hole and the accompanying Nautilus Hotel—for which it once served as the dining room—have been bought by a developer planning to build a condominium complex on the historic property.

Local developer Longfellow Design-Build, who is looking to build a 43-unit senior living complex, had been in talks about giving control of the dome to a non-profit organization that was created to save and restore the iconic geodesic dome; However, the two have been unable to come to an agreement.

Courtesy of Woods Hole Historical Museum.

The non-profit the Dome at Woods Hole was hoping to secure a long-term lease to refurbish the structure and turn it into a site for artistic endeavors. But, after two years of negotiations, the developer has walke...

Dror envisions second geodesic dome in Montreal's Expo 67 site

2016-04-26T14:24:00-04:00

Originally built as the U.S. Pavilion in the memorable World Expo of 1967, the steel structural frame of Buckminster Fuller's Biosphere remains standing to this day as a sole landmark in Montreal's Parc Jean-Drapeau. In planning for the 50th anniversary of Expo 67 as well as Montreal's 375th anniversary next April, designer Dror Benshetrit of the New York-based practice Dror came up with the idea for adding, what do you know, a second geodesic dome near the Biosphere.

After touring Montreal's Île Sainte-Hélène with the Buckminster Fuller Institute, Benshetrit thought of a second dome as a way to help reinvigorate the seasonally used Expo 67 site grounds and evidently pay tribute to Fuller's landmark. Compared to the Biosphere, which is 76 meters in diameter and 62 meters high, Dror's proposed dome is a 150-meter-wide aluminum latticed sphere with a planted canopy.

The studio describes that its vegetated cover would act as a natural sound buffer and provide an enchanting public enviro...

Buckminster Fuller tells the tale on His Geodesic Life in a mini storybook-style audio interview

2015-03-17T13:40:00-04:00

Quoted Studios — the creators of the acclaimed animated interview series Blank on Blank — introduced The Experimenters, a brand new mini interview series that offers a peek into the minds of iconic figures in science, technology, and innovation. The first episode, which aired today, shines the spotlight on ol' Buckminster Fuller on His Geodesic Life. The other two episodes will feature anthropologist Jane Goodall and theoretical physicist Richard Feynman.

Like a storybook, the short film features a recorded audio interview with Bucky by renowned broadcaster Studs Terkel from 1965 and 1970. "Everyone aware of his work agrees that Buckminster Fuller is one of the original minds of our time," Terkel remarks in the introduction. Colorful animations by Jennifer Yoo accompany Fuller's distinctive run-on conversational style and maintain a sense of charm as Fuller talks about how his own environment — particularly his own personal struggles and painful experiences — catapulted his architect...

A resonant tabernacle

2014-09-06T12:02:00-04:00

the Integratron is a sort of time machine, or at least a time capsule. It is an immaculately preserved artifact of midcentury modernist design, and a totem of 1950s U.F.O.-ology culture — the mixture of Cold War paranoia and occult spirituality that drew true believers to remote reaches of the Desert Southwest in search of flying saucers and free-floating enlightenment.

Judy Rosen reports on a visit to Landers, California in the southeastern corner of the Mojave Desert. There she finds a place of spiritual healing and musical sound baths, designed by an extraterrestrial architectural patron.

Buckminster Fuller's Gold Dome to be preserved

2013-08-16T11:07:00-04:00

The Gold Dome building based on Buckminster Fuller’s geodesic dome will be preserved. TEEMCO, an Oklahoma-based environmental professional engineering firm has purchased the architecturally historic Gold Dome building located on legendary Route 66. As one of the first geodesic domes in the world, the Gold Dome is listed on the National Registry of Historic Places.

It was a dome of many firsts: the first dome to have a gold-anodized aluminum roof, the first above-ground geodesic dome, and the first Kaiser Aluminum dome used as a bank. Due to these forward thinking attributes, the building was billed as the “Bank of Tomorrow.”

Poised For A Comeback? Danish Architects Reinvent The Geodesic Dome

2012-10-12T19:11:00-04:00

In 2011, Tejlgaard built a plywood dome for Denmark’s famed Roskilde Festival (think Scandinavian Coachella) that became the hit of the event. This year, he and Jepsen were invited to build a pavilion to house attendees of Folkemødet, an annual town hall–esque gathering of Danish politicians and voters meant to generate national dialogue. Given the optimism of the event, the duo decided to test a new type of exploded geodesic dome--an icon of optimistic architecture if ever there was one.

Dror's Vision for HavvAda

2012-09-28T13:00:00-04:00

New York firm Dror today unveiled designs for a collosal artificial island to be created right off the coast of Turkey, not far from Istanbul. The project, dubbed HavvAda, is envisioned to rise from the sea by piling up one billion cubic meter of soil carved out of the main land from the construction of the proposed Canal Istanbul, another ambitious mega project currently proposed to run parallel to the Bosporus. Inspired by Buckminster Fuller, six gigantic geodesic domes will lift up artificial hills on the island which will be covered with residences and commercial buildings for a population of several hundred thousand people.

Find a detailed project description and images courtesy of Dror below.

A century after the Republic of Turkey was proclaimed; Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan presents the Canal Istanbul project and offers to re-visit the map of the city. One billion cubic meter of soil may be carved out of the main land in order to create the canal. Turkish deve...

(a) Ball by Donovan Ballantyne

2012-04-20T20:04:00-04:00

Los Angeles architect Donovan Ballantyne has shared with us his thesis project project (a) Ball, a rather unique take on the geodesic dome concept. Along with the SCI-Arc Selected Thesis Award, this project has been selected as an Exhibit Finalist to have a portion of it fabricated for suckerPUNCH's Land of Tomorrow exhibition, and it was also nominated as a Co-Finalist for HD Magazine's Annual Design Awards.