Buckminster Fuller and Climatroffice
If Mies’s glass skyscrapers partly inspired Foster to design a frameless curtain wall, Buckminster Fuller’s thinking on shelter, energy, and environment impressed Foster to rethink the architecture of workspace as well as the sustainability, long before it became mainstream.31 Foster and Fuller met in 1971 when Fuller was looking for a collaborator on the Samuel Becket Theatre in Oxford. During their first encounter, their ideas on design, materials, and research resonated so well that Fuller selected Foster. For the next 13 years, they collaborated on four projects and stayed close friends.32 Throughout his career, Foster has attributed his inspirations for sustainability and the unorthodox geometric forms of his buildings to his mentor and friend “Bucky” Fuller. He writes, “he was not simply a technocrat visionary, but the very essence of a moral conscience, forever warning about the fragility of the planet and man’s responsibility to protect it.”33 For Foster, each project is a response to the challenges Fuller set out for him as a young architect, and the Willis Building was one of the first projects influenced by Fuller’s ideas.
With Dome over Midtown of 1960 (Figure 3.24), Fuller proposed to cover Midtown Manhattan along 42nd Street with a two-mile wide glass-enclosed geodesic dome. At such distance, the dome’s structural members would be invisible from the street, minimizing visual obstructions. New Yorkers would be protected from the elements, yet be visually connected to the sky and the rivers. Enclosed by a shell thick enough to be occupied between sheets of glass, Fuller claimed that the dome would save the city the costs of air-
FIGURE 3.24 Dome over Midtown (I960) by Buckminster Fuller.
Courtesy of The Estate of K. Buckminster Fuller.
conditioning, street cleaning, and snow removal.34 Fuller readily admitted that the idea of building a collectively shared dome in Manhattan, where land owners battle over air rights, would be improbable.35 He made the proposition before the oil crisis of the 1970s, the point at which heating and cooling costs would render the scheme even more unlikely.
The Dome over Midtown was a foundation for Foster and Fuller’s Climatrof-fice concept of 1971 (Figure 3.25). Climatroffice, their second collaboration following the theatre, featured multilevel office floors with a bank of escalators in the center, and enclosed by an oval glass dome which housed offices and shared gardens in a controlled microclimate.36 Foster remarked that Climatroffice was a vision for “an architecture of interiorized buildings, which live within an envelope so diaphanous that its presence is perceived as being closer to the sky or clouds than any conventional structure.”37 Both the Dome and the Climatroffice aimed to bring “nature and the workspace together within a lightweight flexible enclosure.”38 Fuller developed ideas for lightweight glazed domes, such as the Montreal Expo geodesic dome and the St. Louis Climatron. Likewise, Foster’s early sketches for the Willis Building show a lightweight transparent shell with flexible office floors. The building realizes ideas latent in Climatroffice.
FIGURE 3.25 Climatroffice (1971) by Norman Foster and Buckminster Fuller featured multilevel office floors with a bank of escalators in the center, enclosed by an oval glass dome which housed offices and shared gardens.
Courtesy of Norman Foster Foundation.
Foster has designed multiple iterations of a glass dome as a workspace that brings nature inside. They have been met with both praise and criticism. The most recent example is the Apple Park, a ring-shaped headquarters building with 2.5 million square feet of office space in the suburb of Cupertino. Called an “anachronism wrapped in glass”39 by Wired magazine, it is a high-tech glass bubble - with a toroid glass roof and curved, frameless glass walls — isolated in the suburbs away from where most employees Eve. Using glass, a material firmly intertwined with Apple’s products and corporate image, Jobs and Foster aimed to create an innovation campus for the next century. However, architects, technologists, and employees remain critical of an office in a bubble that is notoriously secretive and opaque in office policies. The idea of a life in a suburban bubble is satirized in the science fiction Truman Show (1998) in which the main character Truman Burbank lives his life, unbeknownst to himself, in a giant stage set covered by a semispherical dome. His family and friends are all actors, and the weather and events are all artificially created. In many ways, life in a bubble remains associated with artificiality, particularly when situated in a nonurban environment like Cupertino. The critique that such an office environment is an anachronism is accurate, since the idea of an open office steins from the late 1950s.
Climatroffice was preceded by about a decade of growing interest in Biirolandschaft (“office landscape” in German), an organic office layout developed from 1958 by Quickborner, a German consulting company. Quickborner, founded by two sons of a furniture designer, offered an organically laid out open floor office as an alternative to closed-door, hierarchical private cubicles. Biirolandschaft motivated Herman Miller to design, also in 1958, lines of modular furniture which continue to spawn a variety of open-layout, adaptable furniture today. Rendering of Climatroffice by Foster’s office (Figure 3.26) shows an office furniture system with partitions, in a sky-lit open office with a green floor finish that matches the colors of plants growing in the office and on the roof. From the idea of Climatroffice developed with Fuller to the notion of Biirolandschaft, Willis Building materialized an agglomeration of ideas budding in the 1960s and 70s concerning democratic, transparent office culture. At a scale of architectural practice and projects matched by only a few, if any, of
FIGURE 3.26 Climatroffice (1971) by Norman Foster and Buckminster Fuller. The drawing shows an office furniture system with partitions, in a sky-lit open office with a green floor finish that matches the colors of plants growing among desks and on the roof.
Courtesy of Norman Foster Foundation.
his peers, Foster has continued to translate Fuller’s seemingly implausible visions of thin glass membranes into buildings.
