The Dome Restaurant is a 54-foot diameter geodesic dome built to house the dining room of the restaurant of the Nautilus Motor Inn. Commissioned by Falmouth, Massachusetts, architect E. Gunnar Peterson, the Dome was designed by R. Buckminster Fuller, working with a group of MIT graduate students in architecture. Constructed of a frame-work of interlocking diamond shaped panels, the building is 27 feet high and stands on a concrete block foundation built atop a hill overlooking Little Harbor and Vineyard Sound.

The dome is currently sheathed in a fiberglass skin, with four large triangular tinted plexiglass windows at the base and a larger polygonal window on the southwest side facing the water. A long rectangular wing extends to the northeast, housing the kitchen and restrooms; a small porch reached by a flight of stairs originally provided entry to the structure from the motel; a rectangular wing now contains the entrance and stairs leading up to the 50-seat dining room.

Inside the Dome, the original layout placed the long curved bar on the south-west side facing the water, taking up one quadrant of the circular floor plan. The remaining three quarters of the space housed the main dining room, located several steps up above the level of the bar to provide better views. Early photos show umbrellas providing shade inside the bar; subsequently, a parachute was installed, to be opened in the afternoons to provide shade and some acoustical dampening.

The Dome is part of the 54-unit Nautilus Motor Inn complex, with the inn buildings west of the Dome forming a u-shaped configuration open to south light and views of the harbor beyond. The courtyard of this grouping features a terrace, outdoor swimming pool and a garden. The two-story buildings were originally built as a single story, with plans to add the second floor. On the courtyard side, continuous balconies provide outdoor seating for the rooms. The demising walls between rooms extend slightly into the seating areas, which are polygonal in plan because the water-facing walls of the rooms angle slightly.

On the back sides of the inn, cantilevered open porches provide access to the rooms from the parking lot. The wood railings and intermittent vertical posts contribute a lightness to the design. In the center of the main block, between slightly splayed wings, is a double-height lounge with fixed plate glass window walls and an open pentagonal fireplace below a circular hood.

The Dome is fabricated of 1" x 3" and 1" x 8" struts made of Douglas fir, assembled into 90 diamond-shaped hyperbolic paraboloids. The original exterior covering was a clear sheet mylar product just introduced to the market by Dupont. The clear skin let in too much sun, according to news accounts, and neighbors complained that it let out too much noise. After being damaged in the hurricane of the fall of 1954, it was replaced with fiberglass cladding over most of the dome, and tinted plexiglass windows.

Fuller estimated that the dome used only three and a half tons of building materials, while he believed that conventional structure would have taken 250 tons of material to cover the 54-foot diameter.

The Nautilus Motor Inn and the two wings of the Dome are wood-framed buildings, with the inn buildings featuring floor and ceiling timbers spaced four feet on center, with structural insulated (wood, fiber, cement) decking used for subfloors and roofing. Much of the exterior wall is cement coated insulation board. Interiors are gypsum wallboard with carpeted floors and ceramic tile in the bathrooms. Seasonal heating is by electric radiant panels.

The Dome restaurant and Nautilus Motor Inn are located on a five-acre hillside site above busy Woods Hole Road and overlooking Little Harbor in Woods Hole, a village in Falmouth and internationally known center for oceanography and marine science research. The Dome is sited on the highest point of the property. Two smaller motels were built on either side of the Nautilus in the following eight years. All three motels were built on the subdivided grounds of the 1878 Joseph Fay estate. The estate house, designed by Peabody and Sterns, stands west of the Nautilus. Parking behind the motel is interspersed among landscaped islands of trees and granite boulders.

The Woods Hole Dome was one of the first permanent realizations of R. Buckminster Fuller's geodesic domes, and is the oldest extant Fuller dome designed for commercial purposes. Its light-weight wood construction of 1x3's and 1x8's spanning a 54-foot diameter epitomizes Fuller's focus on this structural form as the most efficient and economical way to cover large spaces. With no intermediate supports required within its dining room, the Dome restaurant was able to provide unimpeded views. The strict geometry of its engineered structure combined with the small size of its individual components meant that its construction did not require the skills of trained construction workers.

This Dome also represents a successful venture in pre-fabrication, which had been a focus of Fuller's since the late 1920's, seen in such earlier experiments as the Dymaxion house, the Dymaxion car and the Wichita House. The Dome's component parts were fabricated by graduate students in a workshop at MIT, and were then delivered to Woods Hole where the students assembled the structure.

The Dome Restaurant demonstrated the feasibility of the geodesic dome concept for a permanent structure. While many other geodesic domes would be made from materials ranging from aluminum to plastic to plywood and steel, with components often pre-fabricated in factories for mass production (or to suggest the possibility of such production), the use of conventional lumber in this dome signalled the potential for what might be thought of as a "low-tech" construction of a sophisticated, highly technical structural concept.

Although its use was very short-lived, the original mylar covering of the Woods Hole Dome was among the very first applications of this material for a building, and contributed an open, green-house quality to the interior space.

As one of the first applications of the geodesic dome structural concept for a specific commercial program, the Woods Hole Dome demonstrated that an engineering idea with a narrow, functional evolution and history, might house social programs that were usually found in traditional buildings, whatever their style.

Among the antecedents for Fuller's domes were technologies that directly responded to specific, demanding requirements. For instance, the domical shape of the modern planetarium was developed as an appropriate shape to act as the screen for a newly invented projector in the 1920's. Because the first such projection dome was to be built on the roof of the Carl Zeiss optical works in Jena, Germany, the projector inventor, Walter Bauersfeld, designed a light-weight steel geodesic form for the dome, which was then covered by a light-weight concrete shell. In the next decade, a similar geometric form was developed for the open framing of the fuselage of the Wellington bomber, designed and patented by Barnes Wallis in 1935.

In contrast to such functionally-driven precedents, the Woods Hole Dome housed a restaurant dining room that might just as easily (and probably more comfortably) been located in a building form other than a dome. That this technology could be adapted for such a traditional social program was important to Fuller and to Peterson, and the Dome was featured twice in articles in Progressive Architecture, and was also included among a range of domes in an article in the popular magazine Better Homes and Gardens.

As the built expression of a structural idea, the Woods Hole Dome can be seen as the forebear of three different strands of cultural history in post-war United States, with far wider significance than might be expected for most buildings of the modern era.

First, in the United States the geodesic dome's greatest popularity as a cultural concept may have been in the "counter culture" movement of the 1960's and 1970's, when domes were seen as efficient, economical and purportedly easily-built structures, as Woods Hole appeared to be. The Woods Hole Dome was an eye-catching form, built by amateurs. (It is noteworthy that Buckminster Fuller was a college drop-out with no architectural training, who was never licensed as an architect, and that the graduate students who engineered, fabricated and assembled this dome had minimal architectural experience and were not registered architects.)

The allure of a relatively simple approach to structure, but with an engaging holistic philosophy behind it, proved attractive to owner-builders for small single-family houses and communes. Dome homes proliferated proliferated across the country, recalling the popularity a century earlier of the octagon house, publicized by its "inventor" Orson Fowler for its more efficient enclosure of space, but surely for its distinctive appearance as well. Fuller's own 1960 house-dome in Carbondale, Illinois, demonstrated his embrace of a somewhat ad-hoc, domestic application of the geodesic dome concept.

The place of the Woods Hole Dome as a precedent in this cultural movement can be seen in its appearance in several publications, and in the images that were published of the dome's wooden framework under construction, with the student builders climbing on the structure. The 1960 book, Geodesics, by Edward Popko, included the Woods Hole Dome. This volume was one of only three "especially recommended" books in Mother Earth News in May of 1971, in an article "Where Domes Come From". (The book could be purchased from the magazine for four dollars.) The Woods Hole Dome also appeared in 1960, and again in 1974, in Robert W. Marks' book, The Dymaxion World of Buckminster Fuller.

Second, and perhaps more expected, this dome led directly to the two major public domes on this continent. The United States pavilion at Expo '67 in Montreal was designed by the architectural firm Geometrics, along with Fuller. This firm was led by Fuller's former MIT students who had engineered, fabricated and erected the Wood's Hole Dome, who had initially formed a company with Fuller, but who subsequently established their own company with other colleagues. Floyd, Wainwright and their fellow MIT graduate William Ahern were key players in this company. They collaborated with Fuller to realize the Montreal dome.

Perhaps the best known dome in the U.S., the "Spaceship Earth" pavilion of 1982 at Epcot Center, was designed with Fuller by the new firm that Peter Floyd had by then started after splitting from Geometrics.

Third, the most widely distributed domes around the world are probably the strictly functional "radomes" that were developed to house radar installations. Initiated about the same time as the Woods Hole dome, these structures were designed for many years by Geometrics, and continue to be designed today by William Ahern with the company L3 Communications/ESSCO. (It is not insignificant that the engineering for the Woods Hole Dome was worked out in MIT's Building 21, the same building in which radar was developed.)

The primary international significance of this structure is as the oldest extant, permanent version of Fuller's geodesic dome concept, perhaps the best-known idea developed and popularized by the indefatigable self-taught inventor, educator and philosopher.

Within Massachusetts, the Woods Hole dome has additional historical importance. Fuller was born in Milton, Massachusetts, in 1895, attended Harvard in Cambridge, Massachusetts from 1913--1915; and was a visiting professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge at the time he received the commision to build this dome.

The MIT connection is fundamental, for E. Gunnar Peterson, who commissioned the dome and who designed the Nautilaus Motor Inn, was a 1929 MIT graduate and knew of Fuller through MIT. Fuller's students, William Wainwright and Peter Floyd, worked out the engineering of the dome at MIT, and, along with their fellow students, fabricated the dome's components at MIT, in the Chemical Engineering shop. A contingent of MIT students, along with students from other schools, assisted Wainwright and Floyd in the Dome's erection.

From this group of students, two signficant Boston architectural firms with nationwide practices developed (both of which would nurture later Boston offices). In addition, after many years as a practicing architect, William Wainwright became a well-known sculptor working with light-weight sculptures that showed his continuing fascination with the engineering principles of the geodesic dome, taken in a more imaginative, creative direction.

Though unassuming in its simple form and in its minimal, basic construction components, the Woods Hole Dome is significant on an international level.

It was one of the earliest demonstrations of the geodesic dome concept popularized by Buckminster Fuller.

It housed a traditional architectural program, and thus suggested (accurately or not) the feasibility of such adaptations of the structural idea in the real world.

It holds a key place in the lineage of geodesic domes around the world, as a result of the later work of the individuals who participated in its design and construction.

Finally, and perhaps most unexpectedly, in publications over two decades this dome was illustrated or referred to as an example of a wood-frame structure fabricated of conventional lumber, and built by amateurs; as a result, the Woods Hole Dome can be seen as playing a role in the widespread popularity of low-tech owner-built houses that was one facet of the "counter-culture" movement in the U.S. in the 1960's and 1970's.

Geodesic Wood Dome Restaurant, Woods Hole, Massachusetts, Progressive Architecture, June 1954. pp. 100-101.

What Do You Know About the Geodesic Dome, Better Homes and Gardens, June 1957, pp. 72 ff.

Motor Inn and Club Dome, Progressive Architecture, September 1957. pp 110-113.

Edward Popko, Geodesics, 1960, University of Detroit Press.

Robert W. Marks, The Dymaxion World of Buckminster Fuller, 1960, 1974.

Falmouth Enterprise, Articles dated July 10, 1953; May 27, 1955; E. Gunnar Peterson obituary dated 1992.

Yunn Chii Wong, The Geodesic Works of Richard Buckminster Fuller 1948-1968, June 1999.

Form B, 418, Falmouth Historical Commission, Candace Jenkins.

National Register of Historic Places Criteria Statement, Form W, 418, draft by Ann Sears.

WNET website, American Masters, R. Buckminster Fuller.

Gary Wolf, Oral History Interview with Peter Floyd, William Wainwright, and William Ahern, Concord, Massachusetts, January 13, 2006.