The Gold Dome, A Building That Should Not Work but Does
Near Oklahoma City, Oklahoma
At the corner of Northwest Twenty-Third Street and Classen Boulevard, there is a building that looks like it landed there from a different era's idea of the future. The Gold Dome is a geodesic dome roughly a hundred and forty-five feet in diameter, its exterior sheathed in gold-anodized aluminum panels that catch the Oklahoma sun in a way that is difficult to describe without sounding promotional. It is, by any reasonable measure, one of the more improbable-looking commercial buildings in the American interior.
It was built in nineteen fifty-eight as a bank, the Citizens State Bank, and it was designed by an architectural firm working with the geodesic dome technology that Buckminster Fuller had been developing and promoting since the late nineteen forties. Fuller himself was not involved in the Oklahoma City project, but his influence was direct: the dome form, the aluminum paneling, the structural logic of a self-supporting curved shell were all drawn from his work. The choice to build a bank in this form was not accidental.
Banks in the postwar era competed for visibility on commercial corridors, and the Gold Dome was nothing if not visible. It was also genuinely innovative structurally, a dome of this scale, clad in this material, had not been attempted for a retail banking facility anywhere in the country. The building served as a bank until the nineteen eighties.
After that it passed through several owners and uses, a credit union, a period of vacancy, a phase of threatened demolition, before being designated a local historic landmark. It underwent a significant restoration completed in the early two thousand tens, and the gold cladding was returned to something close to its original luster. It now houses commercial tenants and is used for events.
The dome does not leak anymore, which is an improvement over its middle decades. It remains the most immediately recognizable building on Twenty-Third Street, and one of the more distinctive pieces of postwar commercial architecture in the state.
