Buckminster Fuller’s Fly’s Eye Dome Restoration: Goetz Composites

The dome is owned by Design Miami’s founder Craig Robbins, who restored the piece in anticipation of Art Basel | Miami Beach and Design Miami 2011. After being contacted by Dan Reiser and John Warren, who fabricated the original dome prototypes with Fuller, and the Buckminster Fuller Institute, Goetz was eager to participate in the project. “The challenge was to renew the piece, but keep the spirit and the original intent,” said Eric Goetz, the company’s chief technology officer.

Fabrication techniques honed for racing boats give the dome new life.

The 40-year-old dome is made with fiberglass mat, a randomly oriented fiberglass with a polyester resin that grows more brittle with time. Where corners were missing, Goetz cast pieces with modern fiberglass and shaped it by hand to match the original. The company created laser scans of each finished piece in the matrix. “Now, the Buckminster Fuller Institute has an as-built, 3-D rendering of what each piece looks like in its archives,” said Chase Hogoboom, Goetz’s president. Accurate to the thousandth of a millimeter, the Rhino files could be used to create new CNC-milled molds should the Institute want to reproduce or replicate a piece.

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