Big chunks of Raleigh are on the chopping block, with no sign of a last minute reprieve. The state fairgrounds has permission to demolish several structures including the old-timey Jaycees turkey shoot and the rabbit barn, as well as the futuristic domes flanking the south entrance near Dorton Arena. Over at NC State, the Student Supply Store is pretty much a goner. The irony there is, the campus planners excusing the demolition with the need for “green space” are the same ones destroying huge swaths of the Lake Raleigh Woods so that they can throw up the new chancellor’s McMansion and other cookie cutter buildings. Cameron Village, once a truly unified mixed-use village with a common modernist vernacular look, continues its downward slide. Downtown, Milton Small’s municipal building is still awaiting its demise. The Paschal House sits empty. All of these buildings have been championed. Whereas no one we’ve heard from, not even the hardest of hardcore preservationists, is trying to save the unique but flawed Harrelson Hall on NCSU campus.
The past decade has seen the loss of some key modern buildings in Raleigh. Anyone who is preservation-minded knows that the Catalano House is gone. Also lost in recent years: Milton Small and William Henley Dietrick’s Wake County Social Services Building, the First Federal Bank, and the Water Garden complex. Include private residences and the list lengthens considerably. The house of School of Design profs Margaret and Edgar Hunter is no more, as is one of Raleigh’s two Lustron houses, and the Howie House designed by Lee Butler, just to name a few. Matsumoto’s Poland House now sits in the wilds of north Durham county, saved but ripped from its original location.
All buildings have stories and the domes at the fairgrounds are no exception. They are not geodesic domes and they only have the most tenuous connection to visionary/crank/genius/hypemeister Buckminster Fuller. They are Charterspheres, small circle domes (thus, not geodesic), which are quicker and easier to construct than true geodesic (great circle) domes. The story of Charter Industries and Synergetics Incorporated is too long to be told here. Suffice to say that many of the structures you’ve seen around the world that were supposedly designed by Buckminster Fuller were actually designed here in Raleigh by T.C. Howard, James Fitzgibbon, and others working at Synergetics, and then built by Charter Industries under the leadership of Forrest “Pete” Barnwell. The credit for the mathematics of practical domes—mathematics that Fuller could not work out for himself—goes to Duncan Stuart, another person on the list of NCSU School of Design dramatis personae who deserves much more credit and a much lengthier biography than is now available.
The domes at the fairgrounds are a symbol of a lofty vision of the future, of better times ahead, as is Dorton Arena itself. The older buildings at the fairgrounds are a symbol of North Carolina’s rural past, and they deserve to stay as well. Some of the newer buildings there are bland structures, characterless watered-down postmodernism, whose main positive feature is that the bathrooms are bigger and easier to clean. If the domes at the fairgrounds must be removed, they should be transplanted to another public area where Raleigh’s innovation can be celebrated. They should not be scrapped.
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