Effort to restore dome from doom

CARBONDALE, Ill. -- Bill Perk walks alongside the dome where his old friend Buckminster Fuller used to live and recalls its glorious past.

Walter Cronkite once paid a visit to interview the geodesic dome inventor in the late 1960s. Southern Illinois University students gathered for functions in its curvy interior, around the time that Fuller, then an SIU professor, made the cover of Time magazine.

Perk, 70, who bought the dome three years ago, hopes to transform it from a tarp-covered hulk behind a crumbling fence into something more befitting its historical significance as the only geodesic dome Fuller ever lived in: a guesthouse for distinguished university visitors or a center that showcases Fuller's work for his legions of followers.

But the former Fuller protégé must raise some $100,000 to repair the dome's sagging roof and restore it, a task he believes SIU can help complete if he also manages to reverse years of apathy at the school toward its famous former professor. "I want SIU to embrace this legacy," Perk said. "It would be good for everyone."

Perk was working for the Rand Corp. as a defense-systems researcher when he first heard Buckminster Fuller lecture in 1958.

More with less

The self-described "comprehensivist" told his audience that humanity must work together and harness technology to survive; he said man must "do more with less," an axiom exemplified by his geodesic dome. "Here I was working for the military-industrial complex at the height of the Cold War, and he was saying we're all in this together," Perk said. "He changed my life."

The dome for which Fuller received a 1954 patent epitomizes doing more with less; the spherical collection of triangles -- imagine a soccer ball -- encloses the most space for its size and weight. It can be built relatively cheaply with environmentally friendly materials.

Today, thousands of domes stand around the world from the South Pole to Disney's EPCOT Center. "He tapped into the general principles of how nature worked," said Lauren Darges, chief administrator of the Buckminster Fuller Institute in Santa Rosa, Calif.

Carbondale years

Although Fuller's dome inspired thousands of like-shaped houses, he and his wife, Anne, always lived in more traditional homes except during their time in Carbondale, Darges said.

Fuller came to this town in 1959, at the behest of Southern Illinois University President Delete Morris, an ambitious man who saw recruiting famous academics as a way to help hoist the second-tier state school out of obscurity.

Fuller got to keep his busy traveling schedule -- he would lecture at 550 universities before his death in 1983 -- and in return hung his hat at a university, albeit an unknown one tucked into the rural hills of Southern Illinois.

But when Morris was drummed out of office in 1970 -- amid anti-war protests and a scandal that discredited his administration -- few at SIU were interested in keeping his star recruit, said Robert Harper, a former geography professor who wrote a book on Morris.

Fuller left for a job in Philadelphia in 1972, selling his Carbondale home, a geodesic dome built in 1960 in a quiet residential neighborhood near campus.