The Center of Spirituality and Sustainability, on the SIUE campus, will be celebrating the 90the day of the year on Tuesday, March 31, with yoga, a talk on sustainability, discussions of the building's designer, Buckminster Fuller, with his former architectural partner Thomas Zung, and the launch of a new art project.
Ben Lowder, Creative Director at the center, explained the significance of the 90th day. The center was designed by Fuller, also known for designing the Climatron at the Missouri Botanical Garden and the dome at Disneys EPCOT Center in Orlando. Although he is well known as a designer, Fuller started as a map maker and is considered one of the fathers of sustainable design, Lowder said.
He was in World War I, and that got him thinking, why do we fight wars, which led him to think that we were fighting over resources, and we needed to manage the earths resources better, Lowder said. To do that, you need an accurate picture of the world, so he set about trying to get the globe into an accurate two dimensional map.
The Mercator map, sometimes known as the classroom map, is the most common map of the world. This map uses the equator as the center point. Fuller thought that this map reinforced borders and an east/west divide, as well as being Euro-centric. It also distorts sizes, Lowder said, making Greenland, for instance, look much larger than it really is. Fuller developed his own map, using the 90th meridian as a starting point. He called his map the Dymaxion map, and he was awarded the first patent in 200 years for mapmaking for it.
Lowder said that Fullers work in mapmaking led to his geodesic domes. To make the maps, he visualized cutting the world into triangles and flattening them out. The geodesic dome is the process in reverse. It is the most efficient means for enclosing a volume of space, Lowder said.
In 1971, when SIUE was being built, Fuller was a professor at SIU Carbondale. Campus planners wanted a religious center on the campus. A building was proposed by a St. Louis architecture firm, but there was not money in the budget to build it. Word came through the grapevine that a building design was needed, Lowder said, and Fuller heard about it. This provided an opportunity for his entire life work to come full circle - a geodesic dome with a map straddling the 90th meridian with an exact surveyor-rendered replica of earth.
The building is designed with the site of the SIUE campus on top of the globe. When you stand in the center, Lowder said, Its like looking from the core of earth to the spot where youre standing. You see your place in the world in relation to everything else.
Because the dome is clear, you can see through to the night sky. For example, if you look at London on the globe, and through the globe to the stars beyond, those are the stars in zenith at London, Lowder said.
The whole building is an amazing metaphor for global unity and seeing the world as a whole, Lowder said. Fuller wrote an essay outlining his view of the world and his desire for a more accurate world view. This building is everything he worked for, his manifestation, his cathedral, his love letter to the planet.
Lowder said the building is largely overlooked when discussing Fuller. He said that unlike the Climatron or EPCOT, it is not in a well-known location, but it is the most important to his legacy. The center, Lowder said, is trying to put the building back on the map. We just applied for and got a recommendation from the state for the National Register of Historic Places. They are continuing with the application for the National Register.
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Center to mark 90th day of the year
