Buckminster Fuller'S Cybernetic Pastoral: the United States Pavilion at Expo 67

Introduction At Expo 67, the world’s fair held in Montreal in the summer of 1967, the cold-war rivalry between the United States and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was materialised in the pavilions that represented these two competing superpowers (Fig. 1). To mark its fiftieth anniversary, the Soviet Union constructed a rectangular glass enclosure sheltered by a large swooping roof raised on V-shaped supports. The Soviet Pavilion, designed by M. V. Posokhin with A. A. Mdnoyants and A. N. Kondretlev, was a giant vitrine full of exhibits highlighting the nation’s accomplishments in agriculture, mining, hydroelectric generation, and atomic energy. Aircraft, satellites, and space capsules—including a replica of the Vostok, the craft that had carried the first person into space in 1961—emphasised Soviet preeminence in the key fields of aeronautics and space exploration. Next to the Soviet Pavilion across a narrow river channel was the United States Pavilion, a threequarter geodesic sphere designed by Buckminster Fuller with Shoji Sadao and Geometrics Inc. for the United States Information Agency (USIA), the State Department division responsible for international public relations (Fig. 2). Two hundred and fifty feet in diameter and two hundred feet tall, the dome was clad with transparent acrylic panels and equipped with an array of automatic sun-shades that augmented a conventional air-conditioning system. It housed four freestanding interior platforms designed and programmed by Cambridge Seven Associates on the theme ‘Creative America’ (Fig. 3). Displays featured the nation’s material culture and painting, its filmmaking, and its space programme, geared toward the moon launch that would take place two years later. Mannequins, enlarged photographs of Hollywood stars, mechanical rides, and themed environments invited visitors to identify with an internationally ascendant American culture. Newspaper and magazine coverage of the Expo played up the confrontation between communism and capitalism. In this competition, the innovative design of its pavilion gave the United States a distinct advantage. Life and Paris Match both featured photographs of the building on their covers, highlighting the structural geometry of the steel frame and the monorail that passed right through it. The giant dome rapidly came to be seen as a key work of postwar modern architecture. Although experienced by fairgoers as a spectacular totality, the pavilion incorporated two distinct visions of America’s role in the world. Its programming and interior architecture reflected USIA exhibitions officer Jack Masey’s intensification of the consumerism that had proved so effective at the 1959 American National Exhibition in Moscow, where an array of washing machines and other domestic appliances in a simulated ranch house had helped Vice-President Nixon win the Kitchen Debate with Nikita Khrushchev over the relative merits of the American and Soviet systems. Its spherical enclosure, on the other hand, derived from an early proposal by Fuller, Sadao, and John McHale to create a transnational deliberative forum in which world-citizens would use American 463