The Religious Center Dome at SIUE
Buckminster Fuller's Only Geodesic Dome for Spiritual Use
Aug 10, 2008
In the 1950s, planning began for Southern Illinois University Edwardsville on a 2,600-acre tract of land just southwest of Edwardsville, Illinois. Soon thereafter, a University Religious Council was formed and planning and fundraising began for a campus religious center designed by Hellmuth, Obata, and Kassabaum, the university core campus architects. Although the land was part of the university tract, the building itself would be owned by the University Religious Council.
However, several problems arose. The university, planning for future expansion, changed the location of the site on which the center was to be built. Questions concerning the First Amendment and the state university’s policy in granting land to religious institutions needed to be addressed. And, the fund raising company hired by the University Religious Council overestimated the amounts of money that surrounding communities would donate.
Buckminster Fuller and Shoji Sadao Design a Dome
The building plans, fund raising company, and building committee were abandoned. Eventually, a new committee came together with the goal to raise funds from participating denominations. Significantly, they requested architectural assistance from the architecture department at Southern Illinois University Carbondale.
Buckminster Fuller was then a professor at the Carbondale school, and he replied in a letter to the University Religious Council dated December 17, 1968, that “it will give me great joy to serve as architect for your new building” and that “this project inspires me.”
Fuller and architect Shoji Sadao had formed a company, Fuller & Sadao, Inc. in Cambridge, Massachusetts, to work on another dome project, and Sadao came on board the project. Fuller, well known for his invention of the geodesic dome, proposed in a meeting on March 18, 1969, with the University Religious Council that they would design “…a building marked by the prominence of a large geodesic dome. Around the base of the sphere and sunken into the ground would be a cylinder of offices.”
Map of the World Overhead
Fuller further proposed that “The area of the dome would be of glass, taking the image of the surface of the earth, so that when one looked up out of it from within, he could see the outline of oceans and continents, much in the same way that he could if he might look out from within the core of the earth,” according to the minutes of the March 18, 1969 meeting. Another extraordinary feature of the building is that it would be sited directly on the 90th Meridian, which Fuller called “our planet’s great circle main street.”
The architectural firm of Fuller and Sadao, Inc. was approved to provide the design and architectural drawings and specifications. Fuller’s inspiration provided the overall plan and Sadao did the architectural plans and the cartography for the map of the world on the dome. The dome was constructed of Plexiglas panels – clear where the continents are and blue in the area of the world’s oceans. When one stands in the center of the dome and looks up, it is as if one had descended down into the earth and is looking up at Edwardsville.
The Religious Center geodesic dome is completely unique. It is the only Fuller dome with a map of the world on its panels, and it is the only dome designed by Fuller or Sadao exclusively for religious use. It has been used as the campus religious center continuously since its construction in 1971.
 |
