This month, architecture fans celebrated the 130th birthday of architect, inventor and futurist R. Buckminster Fuller.
Now, I’m no expert on the visionary architect, but I do know a lot about the Los Angeles Bicentennial, a year-long celebration that commemorated the 200th birthday of El Pueblo de Nuestra Señora la Reina de los Ángeles del Río de Porciúncula. And Buckminster Fuller’s Fly’s Eye Dome in Pershing Square was an instrumental hub for that city-wide celebration.
While honoring the city’s 200-year past, civic officials wanted to show Los Angeles as a city ready for the future. In 1980, the Vietnam War and Watergate still loomed large in the minds of Angelenos as double-digit inflation and the energy crisis made daily headlines. Los Angeles officials could no longer regurgitate the booster rhetoric of their municipal ancestors.
And what better symbol to demonstrate a city ready to tackle the complex problems of an increasingly globalized future than an energy-efficient geodesic dome designed by a utopian who advocated for “doing more with less.”
According to Fuller, the futuristic geodesic dome was the home of tomorrow built with lightweight materials able to withstand the harshest of environmental conditions. As Fuller told the Los Angeles Times in 1980, he had created “the perfect living structure” in his search for finding ways to “make life in an overcrowded world not only possible, but pleasant.”
Several months into the Los Angeles Bicentennial celebration, the Fly’s Eye Dome opened in December 1980 in Pershing Square. It stood a total of 46 feet — lifted 10 feet off the ground by an x-shaped support structure designed by corporate architects Daniel, Mann, Johnson & Mendenhall (now DMJM Harris).
This iconic geodesic dome, made of fiberglass-reinforced polyester panels, served as the nerve center for all Los Angeles Bicentennial happenings. Under the filtered light coming through the geodesic dome, Angelenos could pick up event calendars, brochures and LA200 merchandise printed with the catchphrase “LA’s the Place.” Also under the “Fly’s Eye” was an impressive exhibit about the 200-year history of the city designed by Richard Saul Wurman (co-founder of the TED Talk series).
“A brilliant symbol for the Los Angeles bicentennial” — Jane Pisano, Executive Director of the Los Angeles 200 Committee
All were not impressed with Fuller’s futuristic structure. Los Angeles Times architecture critic John Dreyfuss likened Fuller’s design to a “toadstool with terminal warts.” In summarizing his review, the Los Angeles Times wrote, “The ‘fly’s eye’ dome at Pershing Square is bad news, but the Los Angeles Bicentennial exhibit inside is good news.”
Once the bicentennial was over in 1981, the structure was dismantled, placed in storage and mostly forgotten. Fuller died two years later in 1983. It was architectural historian Robert Rubin who bought and restored in 2013, after which the dome found an artistic home in Arkansas, at the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art.
One of the reasons that this bicentennial structure lives rent free in my mind is that so much time, effort and money ($200,000 for the dome and $190,000 for the exhibit) were spent donated for this “visual symbol of the Los Angeles Bicentennial” and now it barely registers in our collective memory. Over the years I’ve asked about the Fly’s Eye Dome to folks who lived through the Los Angeles Bicentennial, and their response is usually “I kind of remembering something about it.”
There’s a renewed interest in Buckminster Fuller as younger generations discover his ideas of sustainable design and resource conservation. And surely some of those folks just learning about “Bucky” have no idea that one of his futuristic domes once stood in the center of downtown Los Angeles in the early 1980s. So this is my attempt to share some of my research about the Los Angeles Bicentennial and the Fly’s Eye Dome in honor of R. Buckminster Fuller’s 130th birthday.
In 2031, Los Angeles will be turning 250. And for the city’s semiquincentennial, I’m curious what folks think about temporarily bringing back the Fly’s Eye Dome as a way to build on that conversation that started in 1980? And if we do it bring it back, it could be an interesting/fun conversation to situate it next to one of my favorite public structures, the Triforium (which turns 50 in December 😊).
Thank you to the Los Angeles City Archives for help in researching the Los Angeles Bicentennial!
Victoria Bernal 
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