This is a decent idea when starting a city from scratch on, say, Mars. But in the middle of a pre-existing city? I can just imagine the disruption to infrastructure, logistics, and transportation, not mention how many properties would need to be bulldozed to make room for thing
Or in incredibly distant areas on Earth, like a few in Antarctica or in the middle of the desert. If it could be designed to float and have docks, you could even have them act as giant ocean cities. You could use the underwater points that could be used for ocean clean-up. With current reactor designs, you could even completely remove the need for diesel generators. Using the methods for desalination that military ships use, you can both cool and make clean water. You could also use a secondary line with filters to clean plastic and chemicals from the water. You would be able to slowly fix the ecology of the oceans. They could even mine the water for things like mercury and other metals to help keep city cost down. For waste, I'd use a bio cast system kept in its own dome. This would allow for internal recycling and keeping cost even further down. With a mix of aqua, hydro, and areoponics it could even keep food cost down and maybe even export some.
@@cordellpatrick9517 You could also make it a geodesic sphere that is half above and half under the water. It would need balllasts to keep it stable and level, but a geodesic sphere would make the ideal superstructure for a ''seastead'' (settlement in international waters in which alternate governance structures could be tried out), as the dome would protect against the worst storms.
I know you mean plans but now I am wondering how 9/11 would have happened if the dome was their. Not saying the dome would stop a bad lane but if a plane did hit the dome it would be catastrophic.
@glike2 well the twin towers where designed to survive a hit from a plane, just at the slower landing and takeoff speeds expected from an accident at nearly airports
@Kishanth.J Actually, they did an analysis on a Geodesic dome hit by a jet. It punches a hole in the dome but B.F.s design is remarkably tough. You'd need dozens of aircraft crashing into the dome to collapse it.
in my younger days, 50 years ago I was so into domes. My final speech in speech class was on Buckminster Fuller and dome houses. I wanted to build a domed city in the desert
I don't know if deserts are a good place for transparent dome cities. That sounds like a very big solar oven. They would make a lot of sense on Antarctica however, where the passive heating for half the year would be a feature rather than a bug.
Three billion in the late 60s would be about 27B today. The Manhattan Project cost 33B (adjusted) and the B-29 program cost even more. This dome is still a daft idea for a hundred reasons but the price was within comprehension if not reason.
@@jackryan4313It’s the equivalent of a few dozen highway expansion projects, particular in urban areas. Or a single decent sized tunnel a few miles long like the Channel Tunnel in the UK. It would have been difficult for New York City to fund it by itself, but it definitely could have gotten a loan from the US government, state of New York, IMF, international banks, or some combination of all that if the idea made financial sense and the project was likely to go through. I certainly have questions about whether New York spends enough on plowing snow to pay for the dome in only 10 years, especially as preventing it from acting as a greenhouse during summer would not be cheap.
Buckminster went against his own philosophy by wanting to build his dome over existing city. all the objections would disappear by building a new city under a dome as opposed to a dome over a city
There were proposals both in Minnesota and Alaska to build them from scratch. Both went nowhere. Well probably have to wait for the time when futuristic things become cool again.
Just like the anime "The Big O". The core of the city is covered in domes where the well-off live, and the poor live in the remains of the city outside. Who would have gotten to live under the Manhattan dome?
it's a great idea! for a science fiction novel, but not for real life. the first issue that came to mind is birds, and then all the subsequent animals that live in or migrate to new york. the city already pretty famously has a problem with birds crashing into windows, imagine that one a huge scale. then there's the issue of storm resistance. as this plan was conceived of in the 60's i can't really fault him for not considering the worsening storms due to climate change (the public wasn't super aware of it yet), but new york did still have storms. what would happen when a nasty hurricane hit? or like mentioned in the video, a fire? there's interruptions to transit, public and private, green house affect cooking people inside the dome, or conversely; people getting illnesses like vitamin d deficiencies from lack of true sunlight. (trust me it doesn't take a lot, i got it from working in a warehouse for a few months.) But i think worst and most glaring of all is how it would create a new socioeconomic bubble, literally! if this dome somehow had come to be reality, i can see it very quickly developing that area of new york into a "desirable" place to live, drawing in resources and attracting (read only allowing) wealthier individuals and businesses to be there. Segregating the rest of the city outside. it would be horrendous.
There were too many obstacles to make this project viable, but I like the imaginative and innovative thinking, that's something we lack today. I think building a city under a dome is more feasible, especially somewhere cold like in Siberia or northern Canada.
Toronto, Canada still has the Ontario Place domes on waterfront islands which was build in the late 60s or early 70s. The Cinesphere was one the earliest domed amphitheater's in NA.
I see kilotons of potential for domed towns in the open ocean, Antarctica (though you'd have to get past the UN first), in lunar lava-tubes, craters on Mars, etc.
If only they proposed to place this over low-town Manhattan... Small price to pay for having the luxury of being able to forget what happened on September, 11th.
I think "fail" is too strong a word for a conceptual project designed to get people thinking about heating and cooling costs and the dome's potential. Fuller came up with a lot of such projects, as architects tend to do. Old Man River City is one of my favorites. The funnel-shaped pillars shown as dome-related were from another project, for Harlem, consisting of towers interconnected above street level. Lets not forget the Geoscope lit up with global data, outside the UN. All of these got people thinking, which was his intent.
i agree, to think of this concept as an actual plan is to mistake its intention. it was a thought experiment, decades ahead of its time. i still find the fact that, at the time, the reduction in surface from the many large and small boxes and towers to one overarching dome would be around eighty percent! This was Bucky's way of telling folks that we needn't be dependent on energy to burn the world to have our needs met when we could, in fact, shift to synergy, using the shapes and structures of spacetime wisely. this has only increased in relevance over time, although it's still silly to think Bucky actually wanted to realize this 'plan'. he chose Manhattan for this example because of the good fit of scale and relative presence in people's experience. it was sort of in your face, but that was the point. no subtleties... also, as cute as the ai generated images are, it would help to have them clearly marked as such. besides that, the collection of various different patents, models, images and more to illustrate this particular project is somewhat confusing if not misleading. regardless, bringing Bucky back into the general public awareness is great and incredibly timely, although I wish he wasn't introduced as a "crackpot". that's truly unfair as time has shown clearly that his 'crazy' ideas where lucid and relevant, while the continuation of 'conventional wisdom' in the capitalist and other 'civilized' frames of mind, ongoingly, brings destruction and crisis upon our kinship Eairth. the CEOs of fossil and war industries are the actual crackpots...
I wonder how this would’ve effected the social-economics of the city. Would the people living under the dome be richer? Would the poor be slowly pushed out?
Still is, in certain circles. A few math teachers share about his unit edge unit volume tetrahedron and how that anchored his approach to spatial geometry. I'm one of them.
@@kirbyurner Sorry, I didn't mean to be dismissive. I meant more in terms of his utopian futurism rather than his contributions to mathematics and geometry.
@@valmarsiglia even there, his ideas for integrating the global electrical grid have been popular in China. Washington DC turned its back on the guy because he wasn't into making enemies of China and Russia. There's been an uptick in anti-Bucky propaganda since he died.
1:44 "The dome would have been 200 feet tall at its highest point..." My man, that dome is not 200 feet tall, most of the buildings in New York are taller than that...
"scary to think how many trillions that would be today" "affect air traffic" so what you're saying is, it could've saved $10 Trillion on the iraq and afghan wars?
Given that new yokr is slowly sinking under its own weight, a dome wouldn't be feasible either. A dome over city is most likely just a concept of a future vision.
"The cost of removing snow would pay for the dome.." ? Did he think of the snow on top of the dome?.. will NYC stay in the dark until the snow melt? lol
1:45 *2000 meters, not 200!* If not how could you even fit a Empire State or Rockfeller well inside it? It would have not even structurally worked for a second up with that diameter, by the simple principle that higher is the dome compared to it's diameter, more it stands up by itself. And under a certain ratio height/diameter it just implodes if not sustained from the inside... with all my respects, it is just logic.
I mean... 2000 meters AT LEAST. Because, with a 14 kms diameter, it would have needed at least an height superior to half the radius, thus about 4 to 5 kilos with such a structural frame.
I think one huge dome wouldn’t been practical (even by today’s standards) as it seems a bit outlandish. However, many smaller dome/spheres around 5-10k square feet would be ideal. Amazon Spheres in seattle would be a good starting point
200m tall at its highest point.. but would cover the 381m empire state building and 259m rockefeller centre... as iron man once said... not a great plan....
