Old Man River's City
A mile-wide terraced crater under a transparent dome, proposed for one of America's poorest cities -- and met with the reply, "We don't need domes, we need jobs."
Old Man River's City was Buckminster Fuller's proposal for a domed city in East St. Louis, Illinois, unveiled in late 1971. The design was a circular, moon-crater-shaped, terraced cone under a geodesic dome -- not tetrahedral like Triton City, but a concentric inward-sloping amphitheater. The structure called for a one-mile base diameter, a half-mile rim-to-rim dome rising to 1,000 feet, with the rim itself standing 500 feet high and the interior descending another 500 feet below the rim line. Fifty inward-sloping terraces would serve communal life, while fifty outward-sloping, tree-planted terraces would house private dwellings, each terrace separated by ten feet vertically. A transparent quarter-sphere umbrella dome overhead would preserve unobstructed sky views. The plan allocated 2,500 square feet per family and a total capacity of 125,000 residents.
The key human connection was Katherine Dunham, the world-class dancer and choreographer who had retired to East St. Louis and, like Fuller, taught at Southern Illinois University. Dunham connected Fuller to the community and advocated for the project as a vehicle for urban renewal in a city ravaged by white flight, industrial collapse, and political neglect. But the community response was blunt: residents told Fuller they needed jobs, not domes. Fuller responded with characteristic utopian rhetoric about a post-employment future in which technology would liberate humanity from wage labor -- a vision that failed to address the immediate, grinding poverty of East St. Louis.
Attorney Wyvetter Younge, who became a state House Representative in 1974, took up the cause and introduced supporting legislation in the Illinois General Assembly every year until her death in 2008. The bills never passed. Republican legislators derided the project as the "solar rib pit." The estimated cost was $700 million in 1971 dollars with no identified funding source, and East St. Louis's population continued its long decline from roughly 70,000 to under 27,000 over the following decades. The supporting nonprofit eventually dissolved quietly, and Old Man River's City joined Fuller's catalog of visionary proposals that illuminated a possibility without finding the political or economic ground on which to stand.
See Also
- R. Buckminster Fuller -- designer of Old Man River's City
- Geodesic Structures -- the dome technology underlying the proposal
- Triton City -- Fuller's parallel proposal for a floating community, using tetrahedral geometry
- Criticisms of R. Buckminster Fuller -- the gap between utopian vision and community needs
- Design Science -- Fuller's framework for comprehensive anticipatory design
- Cloud Nine -- another unbuilt Fuller proposal for enclosed habitation at urban scale
- Geoscope -- Fuller's data-display globe, also connected to SIUE
Sources
- Fuller Visionary Proposals: Geoscope, Cloud Nine, and Old Man River's City