This post is sort of a follow-up to a previous post with a similar thesis: that the 60s and 70s aren’t dead, they’re alive and well and living on tumblr. These photos of geodesic dome interiors and exteriors are just a small selection from randomfriendly,  nomadicway, julesandnicho, standardgrey and cerebralmuseum. Curious fact: Buckminster Fuller was not the inventor of these structures. The first geodesic dome was built 30 years earlier “by  Walther Bauersfeld, chief engineer of the Carl Zeiss optical company, for a planetarium to house his new planetarium projector,” according to Wikipedia. However it was Fuller’s utopian PR for his domes that fed these 60s and 60s-style experimentations. Welcome to the pleasure dome – though I’m sure these are not what that song is referring to.

The above by standardgrey really made me laugh, even despite an allergy to lolspeak (click on photo to see other amusing judgments passed on this thing). So many of these glass domes were eventually painted for privacy and shade, but this one takes defeating the purpose to a new level. The 1976 dome fire below, “Buckminster’s blaze,” is via standardgrey via mcslo and is originally from the Montreal City Archive. See some funny remarks about this, and about domes in general, here. PS. check out this Buckminster Fuller collapsing table.

If tumblr is a bellwether – and it may not be but it’s fun to speculate – then the sixties & seventies are back. In style, if not in substance. So many of tumblr’s weird little blogs, each of them a kind of eclectic personal bulletin board, feature this kind of rock and roll Hair: The Musical meets back-to-the-land handmade-house thing. More than a bulletin board, actually, since each one also exists as a sort of complete photo essay and a sustained non-verbal argument. In this case it’s an argument for a simpler yet groovier style of living, and you get a feeling there may actually be a politics behind the aesthetics. Thanks to the way tumblr makes it simple to re-post an image from someone else’s tumblr blog in your own tumblr stream, while providing you with a link back to theirs, each tumblr collection instantly leads you on to many others with a similar world view. I’m not sure how I first came upon cosmic_dust, possibly it was here, but it led to alaskaneyes and self_romance which led to endless numbers of strange little worlds. These images are a tiny sample from the superb cosmic_dust.