Domes to dot City Hall Plaza for innovation-themed festival
It was a futurist from another era, R. Buckminster Fuller, who helped make the 1967 world’s fair in Montreal an iconic event by designing one of his giant geodesic domes to house the United States’ pavilion. The soaring Fuller dome, which entranced fairgoers, still stands on the fairgrounds to this day, as a museum dedicated to the environment.
Next month, HUBweek organizers may be hoping for a bit of the Fuller magic when they build six geodesic domes of their own on Boston’s City Hall Plaza as part of an effort to turn the barren, brick expanse into a futuristic staging ground for a weeklong festival devoted to art, science and technology.
The third edition of HUBweek, which aspires to be Boston’s high-tech answer to South by Southwest in Austin, will feature talks by entrepenuers, scientists, and journalists; as well as video projections, music, live art performances, and a “robot block party’’ with more than two-dozen robots, including a solar-powered garden weeder.
Organizers on Tuesday said that Eric Schmidt, the executive chairman of Alphabet, Google’s parent company; the commentator Van Jones; Colin Angle, the chief executive of iRobot; and Sheila Marcelo, the founder of care.com, had been added to the list of speakers.
Other events will feature Malcolm Gladwell, who will interview his fellow New Yorker writer, the surgeon Atul Gawande; Deepak Chopra, the wellness author; and George Church, the Harvard geneticist who has drawn attention for his efforts to resurrect the woolly mammoth.
In the past, HUBweek events took place at venues around the city and region. This year, the six domes, along with 80 shipping containers, will form a central festival gathering place, dubbed the Hub. The area, which resembles a Martian base in an artist’s rendering, was designed by CBT Architects, a Boston firm.
“We wanted something multipurpose and exciting that would capture people’s attention and get them to experience a familiar place’’ in a new way, said Brendan Ryan, HUBweek’s executive director. “Everyone’s been to City Hall Plaza. Most of us like to complain about it.’’
The idea of using domes came from an official at the Swiss consulate, who was interested in bringing a dome from Switzerland to the US, Ryan said. Initially, HUBWeek planned to have four on the festival grounds. Now, six are planned, right next to the concrete behemoth known as City Hall.
David Nagahiro, a senior principal at CBT, said the domes — the largest of which is 100 feet in diameter — are light enough that they will not exceed the weight limit for structures on City Hall Plaza, which sits above MBTA subway lines. The domes should also provide a dry place for events, he said, if the fickle fall weather turns nasty.
The festival, which takes place Oct. 10-15, was founded by The Boston Globe, Harvard University, Massachusetts General Hospital, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Globe Managing Director Linda Pizzuti Henry is chairwoman of the HUBweek board.
The festival has drawn an estimated 20,000 registered attendees each year since its debut in 2015.
