The LongHouse Reserve is fundraising for the restoration of Buckminster Fuller’s iconic fiberglass sculpture Fly’s Eye Dome (1976), which sustained damage during the blizzard that blanketed the East Coast on Sunday. According to the Long Island institution, the outdoor sculpture buckled under heavy snow and collapsed.
“It’s devastating,” LongHouse director Carrie Rebora Barratt told Artnet News. “It’s our most iconic piece in the garden. It’s a backdrop for our galas. It’s on most of our promotional materials. And it’s the one thing that almost no one else in the world has.”
The sculpture is one of only five existing prototypes of Fuller’s Fly’s Eye Dome, a cavernous metal mound punctuated with circular windows. As previously reported, its metal ceiling now lies crumpled in the snow. LongHouse board president Louis Bradbury noted that the dome has a long, expensive recovery ahead, as its components were custom-made, and determining the market value of a piece with virtually no commercial equivalent poses challenges.
In fact, Fly’s Eye Dome is so rare that Fuller patented its modular design in 1965, drawing inspiration from the kaleidoscopic eye of the insect that gives the work its name. Designed for easy transport, the structure’s welded seams remain visible where its components were joined. The LongHouse version stands empty—it’s proved popular with gala attendees, who reliably wander inside for photographs, though it was envisioned as filled with convex glass that would glitter like a fly’s glassy eye.
“And then the interior space would have been created with plumbing and kitchen and beds and everything,” Barratt added. “And the theory behind it, though it never happened in practice, was that at a moment’s notice, a helicopter could come and you could just move it to another place.”
Fuller debuted a smaller-scale Fly’s Eye Dome prototype in 1977, developed with fiberglass expert John Warren. At the urging of architect Norman Foster, he later scaled up the design—first to 24 feet, and then to a 50-foot version completed in 1980 and known as the Monohex Dome, which was shown in Los Angeles the next year. The LongHouse iteration was fabricated in 1998 by Fuller’s student John Kuhtig and stands 33 feet tall. It quickly became a favorite and has remained on continuous view longer than any other installation in the garden.
Fuller died in 1983, leaving his Fly’s Eye Dome prototypes scattered across the country. The smallest found a home with Craig Robins, founder of the Miami Design District, who had it rebuilt in 2014 to withstand hurricane-force winds; it now presides over the district’s Palm Court. The largest dome, meanwhile, fell into disrepair over the decades until the Buckminster Fuller Institute sold it to Robert Rubin. Rubin partnered with Peck Architecture to restore the piece for the 2013 Toulouse International Art Festival, and it was later acquired by the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, Arkansas, in 2017.
The LongHouse version’s collapse was discovered early Monday, arriving at a difficult time for the institution as it pursues an expansion campaign in the wake of the death of Jack Lenor Larsen, the textile designer and artist who purchased the property in 1975.
“We’re already fundraising to open the house to the public, to maintain the garden, to put on a glorious summer program, and to create a real bona fide, not-for-profit cultural botanical garden and museum in the Hamptons,” Barratt told Artnet News. “This is the last thing that Longhouse needed.”
