Fly's Eye Dome (Crystal Bridges Museum)

Fuller had sketched dome shells punched with circular openings, which he called eyes, as early as 1965, but it took the surfboard manufacturer John Warren's expertise in moulding large curved fibreglass forms, and a young unlicensed architect named Norman Foster working in Fuller's circle, to get a buildable version off paper by the late 1970s. Three hand-built prototypes came out of that collaboration, at twelve, twenty-four and fifty feet across, the largest requiring dozens of unique moulded panels bolted together into a single self-supporting shell with no internal frame at all — the oculi are not windows cut into a wall but part of the monocoque structure itself, sized and placed to balance daylighting against the shell's remaining strength. This fifty-foot dome appeared at Los Angeles's 1981 bicentennial celebrations and then went into storage for over three decades before the architectural historian Robert Rubin restored it and Crystal Bridges Museum installed it permanently on its lawn in 2017, the only Fuller-designed structure on long-term public outdoor display east of the Mississippi.