FYI,

Lessons learned from past proposed domed city.


"Doomed Dome: The Future That Never Was"
H+ Magazine
http://www.hplusmagazine.com/articles/politics/doomed-dome-future-never-was

In the bright and shiny future, we all live in green, gleaming communities,
monorailed shuttles at the ready, climate-controlled at all times -- a sort of
Logan's Run, but without the forced euthanasia. It almost happened in, of all
places, an old mill town in northern Vermont.

Winooski and its 7,000 people lie just north of Burlington, Vermont and next to
Lake Champlain. The name means "wild onion" in the language of the Abenaki
Indians, for the plants that grew along the river of the same name, whose rapids
powered the mills that sustained the town for decades. But by the 1960s the
mills had lost to modern technologies, and Winooski became a kind of poor and
overshadowed cousin to its progressive (some said socialist) neighbor.

Vermont, the saying goes, is nine months of winter and three months of bad
skiing. Winooski's January lows are -20 Fahrenheit or lower, and winters see 75
or more inches of snow. Residents shovel the stuff for months, and then unshovel
it in the spring, spreading the high piles across their driveways to encourage
melting. Getting from your car to the store can at times feel like the Iditarod.

In the late 1970s the U.S was in its second energy crisis of the decade and
roiled by double-digit inflation. Oil was at a then-shocking $38 a barrel ($107
in today's dollars), having risen eightfold in the previous ten years, and Jimmy
Carter went on television in a Cardigan sweater to urge Americans to turn down
their thermostats. Few towns were hurting more than frigid Winooski, whose
residents spent about $4 million a year to stay thawed.

One night in 1979 a group of its creative young city planners went to dinner and
Mark Tigan, then the city's 32-year-old director of community development and
planning, decided that not enough attention was being paid to energy
conservation. Then, in the way that only a few glasses of wine can facilitate
brainstorming, someone said, half tongue-in-cheek, they should put a dome over
the city.

The next morning it still seemed like a good idea -- or, at least, not
necessarily completely absurd.

At the time, Winooski was second in the amount of federal money received per
capita, and was favored by the Department of Housing and Urban Development as a
place to pilot new ideas. Tigan had his staff prepare a white paper on the dome.
They wrote that a one square mile dome would reduce resident's heating bills by
up to 90 percent. Tigan presented the idea to the city council.

Clem Bissonette, then on Winnoski's city council and now its ex-mayor, asked
Tigan, "Are you nuts?" But when Tigan explained it could mean millions in HUD
money, Bissonette and the rest of the city council quickly signed on, and a
young reporter named Jodie Peck who was covering the meeting wrote about it for
the next day's Burlington paper.

The following morning, Tigan recalls, three satellite trucks were parked in
front of city hall, and within days the town was receiving 20 bags of mail a day
from enthusiasts all around the world. Companies were calling, wanting to build
the Winooski Dome.

The city's request for $55,000 for a feasibility study went to Washington, and
enthusiasts pushed it up through channels. A deputy assistant secretary at HUD
named Bob Embrey said he would fund it.

"I didn't hear one organized voice against it," said Tigan. "The Woodchucks
loved it," he said, referring to the city's long-time French-Canadian residents,
"since it meant that they'd never have to shovel snow again. They thought of it
as their little piece of Tampa Bay."

Naturally the media was full of questions, and Tigan and his staff had few real
answers. Basically, he says, they made it up on the fly. "They asked how high it
would be, and we said 250 feet, so it wouldn't block planes but clear the town's
highest building (eleven stories). Would it be clear or opaque? `Of course
you'll be able to see through it,' we said. What about automobile exhaust? `Oh,
we'll have electric cars or monorails inside.' By the time the media was done
constructing it, we had a picture in place."

Tigan contracted with John Anderson, a Vermont conceptual architect, to produce
drawings of the Dome. Anderson's vision was not a hemispheric shape, but more
like the top half of a hamburger bun. He colored it whiteish yellow and eschewed
any inside support structures.

Anderson's picture was the first tangible view of the Dome. Thinking ahead, he
envisioned a vinyl-like material attached over a network of metal cables,
ranging from transparent (on the southern side, to allow in sunlight) to opaque
on the northern side. Air would be brought inside by large fans and heated or
cooled as necessary. The Dome would be held up by air pressure just slightly
above atmospheric pressure. Entrances and exits would consist of double doors,
akin to an airlock. The homes inside would require no individual heating or
cooling -- "you could grow tomatoes all year-round" he said. If the Dome were
punctured it would come down slowly, allowing for ample warning. Anderson now
recalls it as a "totally fun" project, though he did occasionally get insulted
in restaurants by some local residents. "What will happen to our children?" they
asked.

Enthusiasts organized an International Dome Symposium, held in March 1980.
Buckminster Fuller, then busy assisting in Brasilia, the planned capital city in
Brazil that had been hacked out wholesale from the Amazonian jungle, flew in to
express his enthusiasm. Fuller (naturally) proposed a structure of multiple
geodesic domes, but in any case declared the engineering "not terribly
difficult," and pointed to already existing structures like large airport
terminals in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. Fuller had built the "US Pavilion" at Expo
Montreal in 1976 -- three-fourths of a sphere consisting of 1900 molded,
transparent Plexiglas panels, 200 feet high and 250 feet in diameter, covering
1.1 acres. Winooski's dome would cover nearly the entire town, 800 times that
area. He stressed that the biggest challenge was not keeping the dome up, but
holding it down against the force of rising warm air.

Tigan and his staff waded deeper into the idea. Someone calculated that it would
make economic sense if heating oil rose above $1.25 a gallon -- it was then at
$0.99 per gallon. (Today it sells for about twice that, in current dollars.) And
then there was the money saved on snowplowing. They applied for HUD money, not
so much to study the feasibility of the engineering, but to learn how people
might react to such a unique living situation, and to refine the economics and
the environment.

Everyone had an opinion. The New York Times editorialized against the Dome,
saying it would ruin the view. The financial pages of Saudi Arabian newspapers
feared it for the precedent it might set. Tigan appeared on the Letterman show,
McNeil and Lehrer, and others. Then, Senator William Proxmire from Wisconsin,
famous (and some said, short-sighted) for his "Golden Fleece Awards," given
monthly to a project he deemed a waste of federal funds, got wind of the idea.
President Carter, struggling for reelection in a terrible economy with Americans
being held hostage in Iran, personally called up Embrey -- the project backer at
HUD. In May, 1980, HUD turned down Winooski's request for funds.

After Ronald Reagan won the autumn election, money for such projects dried up
very quickly. Peck, the reporter who broke the story and who is now a realtor in
Vermont, called it "wonderful publicity for the town, but it was a great idea
that would never work."

Tigan, now an associate professor of Community Development at the Clark
University, disagrees. "Economically it's a slam dunk," he said. The biggest
issue, he believes, would be the public taking of land via eminent domain to
secure the area around the edges, illustrated by the 2005 controversial Supreme
Court decision in Kelo vs. City of New London. Such issues, Tigan expects, will
become more common in the future as environmental sustainability and even
survival become economic issues.

"You could have had year-round fly-fishing," he says with a bit of a sigh. "If I
had stayed in Winooski, it would be under a dome now."

Mark Reiff