Domed city

The domed city is a recurring concept in science fiction.

Since the Moon and other planets do not have breathable atmospheres, a space habitat must be enclosed and pressurized. In the 1950s science fiction writers proposed to accomplish this by enclosing entire cities in domes (usually transparent to allow visualization). This would be a startling engineering feat even today, so it gave stories a degree of fascination and excitement at possibilities. The covers of magazines like Astounding Science Fiction showed fantastic domed cities in a more or less regular fashion.

Some designers looked at the possibility of constructing real enclosed cities. Buckminster Fuller appears to have made the first specific proposal in 1965. Claiming that the geodesic dome had no practical limit on its size, he described a glass-panelled dome 3 km in diameter and 1.6 km tall spanning a portion of Manhattan Island; he claimed that it would reduce air pollution and provide comfortable weather all year. The dome would not fully enclose the area beneath it, as with most fictional domes, but would float on air at roughly the height of a contemporary skyscraper. Architect Paolo Soleri proposed city-sized buildings called arcologies as a solution to urban sprawl. Early press accounts of Soleri's Arcosanti project claimed that it would be a domed city, although this appears to have been an exaggeration.

Taken to extremes, domed cities on inhospitable planets could grow to encompass large "wilderness" areas as well; this is known as the "worldhouse" concept or paraterraforming.

Examples

• The Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station consists of several buildings enclosed in a 50 m geodesic dome.
• The TV series Buck Rogers in the 25th Century featured a domed city called New Chicago.
• Walt Disney, drawing inspiration from Fuller, imagined EPCOT as a domed city.
• In the film Logan's Run, humans have retreated into a domed city to escape war and pollution.
• The Tripods series of books by Samuel Youd describes aliens who live in pressurized domes on Earth.
• In the film The Truman Show a domed city serves as a television filming set.

External links

• Full text of Fuller's original 'proposal' from St. Louis Post Dispatch insert, 1965