¶ Montreal Expo’67 Dome
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Index Entry
Montreal Expo’67 Dome:
"On the day the Vancouver Habitat opened, front-page center photographs appeared in newspapers around the world-- not of the UN Habitat meeting, but of the acrylic skin of my USA 275-foot diameter, geodesic dome of Montreal’s Expo’67 (now belonging to the city of Montreal) being burnt out. At first the news reports said the dome had burned to the ground. This was untrue: the steel structure was undamaged. Since the invisible acrylic skin had been mounted inside the spherical structure, the structural appearance had not changed. No one was inside and no one was physically hurt. Within 10 days (before Habitat closed) a committee from the city of Montreal came to see me in Vancouver and it was publicly announced in Montreal that it intends to rehabilitate the dome…
“It almost seemed as though the nonstructural skin of the great unharmed geodesic dome had been set afire by some mystical evolutionary wisdom to remind the world of geodesics’ very high structural performance as accomplished with only three percent of the weight of any given material necessary to produce equivalent structural and functional capabilities by any other known alternative engineering systems.”
