The insane idea to build a dome over New York
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- čas přidán 3. 08. 2024
- New York ... but not as you know it. Walking down 5th avenue, You look up to the manhatten skyline, but instead of seeing stars, you see only the twinkingly lights of the Mid-town dome. Welcome to an alternative cyberpunk new york that never happened.
Back in the 1960s, an architect named Buckminster Fuller proposed building a massive geodesic dome over midtown Manhattan, which would have completely transformed the skyline of New York City. Today, we're going to explore the history behind this plan and why it ultimately failed.
(BREAK)
The proposed plan was to cover midtown Manhattan with a massive geodesic dome. It would have been tall enough for the biggest skyscrapers and wide enough that most of central new york would have lived under its lofty borders. This dome would have been made out of lightweight materials, been transparent and it would have covered an area of over 17 square miles - from the East River to the Hudson River, from 21st Street to 64th Street. The idea behind the dome was to create a climate-controlled environment that would protect the city from the harsh New York winters and summers.
The dome would have been supported by a network of cables and steel beams, and it would have been anchored to the ground by massive concrete pillars. And we mean truely massive here, each one would have been the size of the statue of liberity and been out in the river and the bay.
The dome would have been 200 feet tall at its highest point, and it would have covered some of the most iconic buildings in New York City, including the Empire State Building and Rockefeller Center - then at the time some of the tallest buildings in the world.
Ironically it seems that the economics of this dome made sense the bigger it was, hence the size was considered conservative with additional ideas floated for other parts of new york.
The dome itself would have its own internal climate that would have been controllable, allowing the powers that be to make it rain or shine inside, and generate electricity from the sheer amount of air convection inside - powering the city indefinity to come.
When it rained externally, vast gutters would capture the downpour and channel the liquid to a vast holding reservoir under central park. Unlimited fresh water, and no more water shortages that were common in the 1960s in New York.
And boy you know this idea generated a lot of buzz in the 1960s. In true 1960s science fiction frenzy, People were fascinated by the idea of a dome covering Manhattan, and many saw it as a way to protect the city from the elements while also creating a futuristic new look for New York. A retro fallout esk cyberpunk look that honestly I'm quite jealous of!
(futurama welcome to the world of tomorrow)
So how did we get here? Well we need to start with the somewhat crackpot, somewhat excentric inventor of the idea - Buckminster Fuller!
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Buckminster Fuller was a visionary inventor, architect, and philosopher who left an indelible mark on the 20th century. born in 1895 in Milton, Massachusetts. He had a fascinating life that spanned multiple disciplines, but he's perhaps best known for his work in architecture and design - particularlly the geodesic dome!
This thunder dome was a lightweight structure made from interconnected triangles that's incredibly strong and energy-efficient. He believed that this type of structure could be used to solve some of the world's most pressing problems, like housing shortages and environmental issues.
You know what else has housing shortages and enviromental issues? The big apple!
As Buckminster said, You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete." This quote encapsulates his philosophy of using innovation and design to create a better world - a world that included a better new york.
Teaming up with Shoji Sadao , the pair claimed that a dome would reduce energy expentiture of the city to 20% as well as the aformentioned issues of storms and housing. As for the cost, fuller said that “the cost of snow removal in New York City would pay for the dome in 10 years." The only thing was to causally figure out the material science and construction could begin right away.
As part of the pitch for this project, Buckminster Fuller and architect Shoji Sadao collaborated on designing the massive "Montreal Biosphère," which served as the U.S. Pavilion at Expo 67 in Montreal. The concept was proven, it would work and new york was ready to change in a big way!
The concept inspired the science fiction writer Ben Bova's story "Manhattan Dome" in the September 1968 issue of Amazing Stories, subsequently expanded into the 1976 novella City of Darkness. A Fuller dome over Manhattan also appeared in John Brunner's 1968 novel Stand on Zanzibar.
However, and I bet you didn't see this coming, the plan ultimately failed for a number of reasons.
"200 feet tall"
Graphic shows 200m
"Covers empire state building"
Which is over 400m tall...
😂ikr
Glad I’m not the only one who caught that 💀
I saw that, too, it must have been a mistake.
Yanks
Compared to the skyscreapers and the diameter... the real height of the dome is in truth 2000 meters. A 0 has been missed. A VERY big one lol.
Of course it was an architect who thought this was a good idea.
As an architect we dont claim Fuller
It is a good idea.
No don't worry we won't factor in the sun we'll just laser some cars
Honestly! Ohio or Florida I'd understand, but why New York?
It was and still is a good idea
As far as planes go, this one is definitely insane.
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.
@@Kishanth.J Yeah the dome would make it tough to get in from the outside. You could say they might do it with...an inside job.
It could be designed to take worst case hits from multiple airplanes, but the damage tolerance analysis must be keep secret
@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.
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.
What if it collapses due to many reasons? A lot of people will die.
Good discussion, but Simple Fix: *demolish whole New York and start from scratch.* 😇
Good discussion, but Simple Fix: *demolish whole New York and start from scratch.* 😇
A perfect way to simulate what it feels like to be an ant under a magnifying glass
Lmao “instead of seeing stars…” in New York City? BUDDY LEMME STOP YOU RIGHT THERE 😂
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
No, it would still be stupid even if it were built as a stand alone structure followed by building a city under it.
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.
I can't imagine how expensive this would have been, custom glass is unbelievably expensive, and just about every piece would have to be different.
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.
Yea...gov military spending is... The numbers don't even mean anything to us
Don't for get to double that 33 billion. Always double your construction costs.
@@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.
The idea was unfortunately way ahead of its time by say one or two centuries at least.
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.
@@user-hy9it2lm9k such a dome did exist in Antarctica for some decades.
I can’t even imagine a hot New York City summer under/inside a dome!
As someone who lives in the upper 60s with a view of west 64th, Im trying to imagine what a massive dome would look like right outside my window
And turn it into The City of Amnesia, I'm guessing?
What's next, giant robots duking it out in the streets? Tomato people?
Reminds me of the domes in Paradigm City from the Big O anime.
I was hoping someone mentioned Big O in the comments 🎉
I literally thought the same.
@@JLCL01 Welcome to the party, pal.
Could we make it so that it locks from the outside?
😂
One could only hope
Only if we get to put you inside Lol
A solid glass dome would be ideal.
@@devins7457 until vandals start throwing bricks
1:48 This needs a fact check, considering that the Empire State Building is inside the dome and itself sits at 1275ft.
Got the measurements wrong
A single natural disaster would make this dome into a catastrophe
Engineers: I can feel a sudden disturbance in the force
All architects and dreamers are required to submit their ideas to engineers and physicists before presenting them to any politician.
200m can't be right , empire state building is close to 400 at its spire
Just imagine how bad the air pollution would be in there.
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?
Influencers and oligarchs
CAST IN THE NAME OF GOD YE NOT GUILTY
They need to do this to the entire state of Florida and just keep them in there
😂😂😂😂
Ah yes, lets put a giant dome right in the middle of the busiest airspace in the world.
Planes don't really fly that close to Manhattan
@@gameonyolo1Famous last words...
This thing remind me of NYC Liberty Dome of Crysis 3.
Fr!!
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.
None of these problems are killers. We should probably still build this
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.
Or under water.
Ah yes, pesky obstacles like physics and logistics.
@@bestaround3323 Yeah, I realize that. Why do people respond with this snark? It's a sign of low intellect.
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.
If we were to go into every reason why this is a terrible idea, we would be here all day.
Wow cant believe the Simpsons movie predicted this
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.
This channel deserves more attention
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.
aren’t there like…. a plethora of movies explaining how this would be an awful… idea?
0:11 its not like you see stars in the _dead center of Manhattan_ anyways 💀
I’d like to think in alternative universe the dome inadvertently stopped the 9/11 attacks in New York if it existed
Or worse, whole dome collapses.
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...
Are you go to one on O’Neill colony?
That would be great.
i’ve always wanted a dome for rollercoasters. that way rain won’t ruin the day or extreme heat.
That's sounds like a big sci fi dome city like in mandalore, star wars and the story plot in Crysis 3
That's a pretty wild plane. Not gonna' lie.
I think they didn’t get the joke hahha
I love it when a plane comes together
This is a super cool idea but the toxic gas from things like garbage and engine exhaust would make the dome uninhabitable
Yes. They would have to forbid everything but electric transport and heating inside, for a start.
I doubt it... While you would need to manage the airflow it might even be an improvement.... Certainly no worse than an inversion layer.
they should do this in Phoenix, Az. That place is way too hot.
Great video. You need more subscribers!
If they did this it would make a lingering old rubber smell common in Old architecture everywhere you went
This is like that city dome they showed in Final Fantasy movie: Spirits Within.
Crazy idea, but really suited for off World, like the moon or Mars
The movie "Escape from New York" comes to mind.
The idea of geodesic domes is outstanding. The size of these structures matters like everything else.
In the Sprawl series, William Gibson always mentions the busted and decrepit Fuller Dome looming overhead whenever his characters are in the area.
Sanctuary? Renew, renew, renew!!
nice .. i was hoping tho of hearing if todays structure could already hold that weight, or what technologies might make that possible technically soon. great video nevertheless :)
I'm old enough to remember when Fuller was all the rage in certain circles.
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.
Bro this literaly Crisis 3 lol
This give me crysis 3 vibe
Paradigm City in The Big O featured Fuller Domes too.
I prefer the old idea of putting a wall around NYC and making sure the residents can't leave.
Don't let Snake Pliskin hear about that plan.
@@ROBOHOLIC1 😁
Like the series Big O
that should smell fantastic.
You're giving poor Kurt Russel (Snake Plissken) flashbacks. What if someone kidnaps the President and hides him in there?
It would only work if they could integrate ads into it 😂
Who the hell would think this was a good idea?
"...Buckminster-Fuller..."
Oh.
What about underwater domed cities?
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.
thats one insane hotbox
This might be a good idea for future cities
Is anyone getting the Simpson vibes?
The dome would have to be 200 meters tall in order to cover the Empire State Building.
Well when the city slickers lose out during the atmospheric stripping of Earth, i better not hear any "we shouldve build the dome" comments
Just lock the door from the outside when complete.
"Stand on Zanzibar" by John Brunner is a great novel, I'd highly recommend it (5:52).
Phineas y Ferb approve the project
"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
I think we should build a future city under a dome. I think it would work. Maybe a town for starters.
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...
hey... wait a minute. this was a futurama episode
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?
This was 100% in the movie Final Fantasy Spirits within. I thought it looked sick!!
Just here for the Big O chatters.
Wasn't it German architect Frei Otto, designer of the roof of the Olympic Stadium in München (1972), who came up with this idea?
The Simpsons prediction strikes once again. That dome😂
Great idea we should do it.
this man could have prevented 9/11, but they probably would have attacked the dome supports instead...
It's been done - documented in the movie called 'Escape from New York'
Typo in the title?
No, it is about crazy aircraft designed to build the dome😂😂😂😂
Keep them in!!! We need one around California too!!!
Yeah but then who's going to pay all the taxes so you can live in your rural state and have roads and education etc?
Land mines are cheaper.
@@michaelfrench3396you can keep your "education"
@@michaelfrench3396 go ahead and stop paying. Tell them I said it was okay.
@@michaelfrench3396 I doubt if any of those druggies roaming the streets pay taxes.
Only clicked this video to add the comment about how this looks like how cities were designed in the anime Big-O
Even without the glass, the dome grid would have been a good idea .
I can see where crysis 3 got the inspiration from.
Surely it would make it very hot the reflection of sunlight
I can only imagine the dome falling on the city it’s meant to protect?
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....
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
Please build it with no way to get out. It'll be America's terrarium. (Whoops I forgot to feed them, and it looks like the sun might have gotten hit a little hot) lol 😆
This sounds like its from the big O in anime lol
Why does putting a dome over a city sound like something from the Simpsons
bro trynna make crysis 3
Who's to say this wouldn't work? Let's give it a try. We can start by surrounding NYC with a 30 ft wall
I kinda wanted a spaceship that size I was gona get a flying pyramid or something to mess with ppl real bad
Buckminster Fuller tried to contain the spread, but nobody listened. Now it's too late!
After all the pros were mentioned, I actually think it can be a good idea, but since I've never lived under a dome, I can never know what will happen...
Plus, I am sure people will shoot at it foe some random reason