Railroaded

R. Buckminster “Bucky” Fuller’s unique industrial dome in North Baton Rouge, studied and revered by architecture and design students for five decades, was demolished in November by Kansas City Southern, which apparently surprised no one more than the folks at the Foundation for Historical Louisiana, which had vowed to save it.

The railroad, which owned the long-vacant dome and the land around it, destroyed the dome shortly before Thanksgiving when no one was around to see it. The company failed to acknowledge the effort underway to salvage the old dome.

Even after our sister publication, Daily Report, reported the dome’s demise, the only communication the railroad managed was an e-mail to the daily paper, after the fact, in which a spokesman summarized its reasoning.

We believe part of being a good corporate citizen means at least talking with the community in which you do business, and in this case, Kansas City Southern didn’t measure up.

But the Foundation failed as well. Isn’t the Foundation supposed to help protect worthy endangered buildings, and to come up with successful plans to save them? In this instance, a building barely noticed locally, yet revered the world over, has disappeared right under our nose. The Foundation deemed the building worth protecting, and efforts were supposedly under way to do something (although coming up with enough money to buy or relocate it didn’t seem likely.)

The Foundation and Director Carolyn Bennett suggested adopting strict new laws to prevent a landowner from doing such a thing.

Even the leading national historic foundation says it’s not in the business of trying to set limits on private landowners.

So why not salvage key structural elements to serve as artifacts? Couldn’t the Foundation have at least tried to document the building for posterity? Surely it could have assembled an archive of digital photographs and high-definition video footage.

With a little ingenuity and foresight, Bucky’s dome might have lived forever online, offering design enthusiasts from all over the world a virtual 3-D tour.

In this case, it doesn’t appear such work was done.

Kansas City Southern needs to work on becoming a better corporate citizen, especially in a community such as Baton Rouge, which is so integral its operation and profit.

And the Foundation might want to re-examine its approach to saving valuable old buildings because if its only weapon is proposing extreme laws unlikely to win voter support, then the loss of Bucky’s dome won’t be the last example of important Baton Rouge architecture we’ll be forced to helplessly watch vanish from the landscape.