By Dr. Desmond
To answer your question from Thursday evening’s lecture with a bit more time, of course preservation of the Union Tank Car Dome wasi mportant, it was an artifact of great importance and significant general interest. It was the first important industrial use of the geodesic dome idea,and in this way was a part of the story of Louisiana in the 20thcentury. The fact that such as tructure was built here when it was tied our community and our economic history into the greater story of the growth of the petro-chemical industry.Beyond this however, the structure was indeed something to see, the sense of scale and of accomplishment overwhleming. Pictures and lectures can remind us of this but its sense of scale was enormous is now lost to us. We all wish it could have been saved.
I realize that it would not have been easily saved however.It would have been very expensive to refurbish after having been neglected for so long. It is my understanding that KCS never really had much interest in the structure, the property being valuable to them for the train yards existing there. I have not spoken to them about this however. Dick Lehr suggested that Union Tank Car Company essentially gave KCS the dome as a part of the deal. UTC stopped using it many years ago, and I suspect maintenance began to drop off even before it was acquired by KCS. So perhaps in some ways its fate was sealed long ago.
That being said however, I also think that KCS treated the structure as though because it had no value to them, it had no value to ourcommunity, and even seems to have resisted efforts by others to find ways ofpreserving it. The Foundation for Historical Louisiana, to cite one example, has a history of concern and effort toward the preservation of this structure going back to the beginning of KCS’s ownership in the early 1990s when Bill Brockway and Carolyn Bennett, among others, began to try to get it registered with National Register of Historic Places. At that point in time saving the structure would have been more feasible. Even then KCS resisted such efforts.
Acknowledgment and reuse are important tools in preservation. While we may not be able to expect KCS to preserve something like this on their own just because many people here, and around the word,thought it was significant, I do think we can expect them to participate in efforts to save the structure. This they did not do to my knowledge. In fact they seemed to shun such efforts. In this way KCS consistently showed a tragic disregard for our community.
Buckminster Fuller’s ideas of efficiency andhis search for new solutions are perhaps as important as his work on domes. They are representative ofthe kind of thinking we will all need in the coming decades. We are just at the beginning of the use of these technologies and we will continue to find new ways of using them. I would like to think that such innovation will be seen as much in Louisiana in the coming years as it was in the late 1950s when this dome was conceived and built.
Michael Desmond, Ph.D., AIA
LSU School of Architecture
Member, Board of Directors, Foundation for Historical Louisiana
By Mike Hendricks
The kind that occurs when kids, mostly, pick up a rock or a can of spray paint.
Then there’s the kind that one of our hometown companies stands accused of in Baton Rouge, La.
“How can I express my contempt for the Kansas City Southern Railway?” asks Baton Rouge resident Ward Bond. “There are no words strong enough.”
The Union Tank Car Geodesic Dome, off Scenic Highway in East Baton Rouge Parish,
is architecturally significant because it was designed by scholar, philosopher
and mathematician Buckminister Fuller, who patented systems specifically applicable
to the development of geodesic dome structures. The Baton Rouge dome, built
in 1958, will withstand up to 230 mile an hour winds. Fuller was in Baton Rouge
during the construction period of this "great grandfather" dome to
thousands of geodesic domes which followed across the globe. The Foundation
has been in contact with a descendant of Fuller's and the family is interested
in assisting in anyway possible. The Union Tank Car Geodesic Dome is currently
unoccupied and in deteriorating condition.I’m unfortunately not exposed to a lot of the culture that is... continued
Monday, October 1, 2007
By Sarah Young
Baton Rouge’s most distinctive modern building is rusting into the
earth, and barely a soul has batted an eye about it for years.
The building was the brainchild of R. Buckminster Fuller, one of the most important innovators of the 20th century.
The renowned philosopher, inventor, architect and engineer conceived the plan
for the... continued