A Beginning
2In the city of Kabul, capital of the country of Afghanistan, a miracle was taking place.
3 There, on the grounds of the 1956 International Trade Fair, a great domed structure was rising. The men who were rapidly bolting together its aluminum ribs were illiterate Afghans. They knew nothing about the techniques of building construction and spoke only their native language. The single engineer who directed them had issued simple instructions: ‘‘Bolt blue ends to blue ends and red ends to red ends.’’
4 That was all.
5 Two days later, the workmen found to their amazement that they had built a great dome fashioned of aluminum triangles and covered with a skin of nylon cloth. This palatial hemisphere had risen faster than the fabled pleasure domes of Kubla Khan. Completed, it was to be the American Pavilion at the Fair, a structure a thousand times more dramatic than the machinery for show it was to house. Inside and outside the dome men of many nations stood and gazed and wondered.
6 ‘‘What is that strange house?’’
7 ‘‘The Americans call it a geodesic dome. They say all the parts were flown to Kabul in a single airplane!’’
8 ‘‘Can it be true that it was designed and manufactured in less than a month’s time?’’
9 ‘‘They say that the triangle pattern of the dome makes it stronger than larger and heavier square steel buildings. But all those aluminum pieces weigh only ninety-two hundred pounds! Isn’t that much too light for a house that size?’’
10 ‘‘Look how much time we had to spend getting the parts from Moscow and putting our Pavilion together —months!’’
11 ‘‘Who is the architect? What American created this fantastic design?’’
12 The same questions were asked in other great cities of the world, when other huge geodesic domes were flown in and assembled for Trade Fairs. At each Fair, the spherical network of triangles assembled by native workers on the spot in an amazingly brief time drew visitors as apple blossoms draw bees.
13 Who was the architect of the dome? Who had created the design?
14 He was a man who had never graduated from a school of architecture. Nor had he ever been certified as a professional architect. He was an American who had spent most of his life thinking about the ways in which man’s ability to master nature could best be used to solve all the problems of mankind on earth. He had even invented a name for this kind of thinking. He called it World Design Science.
15 His name was R. Buckminster Fuller.
16 WIZARD
17 OF THE
18 DOME