In 1972 cult sci-fi film Silent Running, Bruce Dern plays a serious astronaut who turns extra-serious when the government orders him to destroy the giant greenhouses he’s trucking through space. The plant specimens were hurtled into parts unknown to save them from a dying earth. And now our guy is supposed to destroy the last of these innocent botanicals? Unthinkable. No can do.
Dern’s gentle astronaut turns homicidal—and we’re with him; the plants are infinitely rare, but humans (particularly the jerks among us) can be replaced.
What you may not know about this quirky film is that it was directly inspired by the completion, in 1960, of the Missouri Botanical Garden’s own futuristic domed greenhouse, the Climatron.
MoBot wasn’t trying to save rare earth specimens from imminent apocalypse, exactly, but to offer a taste of the tropics in our mercurial St. Louis climate. The Climatron traps air to the tune of 85 degrees during the day, 64 at night, with a sweaty 86 percent humidity. It’s filled with exotic hothouse plants (and geckoes and songbirds) native to the world’s rainforests; flowers have colors we’re hard-pressed to name, and many of the plants droop with giant seeds and great, man-sized leaves.
But forget all that. The marvel of the Climatron, in 1960 and now, is its architecture. The geodesic dome of the roof is as much a poem pitched to man’s possibilities as it is a slab to keep the elements out. It’s seven stories high at the center, and enables the greenhouse to have no interior supports, for maximum sunlight.
A book published in 2010, Climatron 50: A Celebration of 50 Years, is a fitting tribute to that retro-cool dome, those wild plants, and the vision mustered to plop an expensive, mid-century architectural experiment into the center of an urban botanical garden, making it an attraction that could never really be considered genteel again.
This oversized paperback features text by Washington University architecture professor Eric Mumford, and a riot of color photographs by many contributors. It’s a sweet little look at what happened when visionary scientist/philosopher Buckminster Fuller convinced the powers-that-was to join 4,000 pieces of triangular Plexiglas (later replaced by 2,425 panes of “Saflex” laminated glass, similar to auto windshields) along a metal frame, above a spectacular greenhouse at the Garden. The book has nifty photos of the Climatron under construction and throughout its half-century of life, including some of the now-defunct “Aquatunnel,” a walk-through tunnel under a pond that allowed visitors to get close to underwater plants.
The highlight of the book, though, might be the final section—a collection of more than a dozen 3D photos of the Climatron’s exterior and interior taken by David Klutho (3D glasses come with the book). They really pop.
Fifty years on, the Climatron is a retro delight that houses plants that are, as in the world of Silent Running, becoming awfully rare back in the wild. It’s an emblem of Fuller’s bold, proto-hippie hope for a world of much greater practicality and beauty, still here in 2011, on a planet that, thanks to humanity, can often seem as horrible as a nightmare.
In the words of Mumford, from the book, “It takes considerable mental effort now to imagine what the impact must have been of Fuller’s futuristic ideas in the dowdy Garden of 1960, and to re-experience the sense of a new and technologically driven future that the Climatron must have inspired. That future as it was then understood, of course, soon proved to be far from unproblematic, and we are still struggling to make sense of the complex legacies of that perhaps overly optimistic era.”
For serious Buckminster Fuller fans only:
Fuller became a professor at Southern Illinois University at Edwardsville in 1959, and his Center for Spirituality & Sustainability, a more rounded and much smaller geodesic dome built in 1969, is still open to visitors on the campus.
