Good morning! Back in 1939, there was a World’s Fair in New York City that featured two iconic structures: the Trylon and the Perisphere. They were huge, impressive, and had no function other than attracting people to attend the fair. The Perisphere was a big ball, and the Trylon was a spire, and they did their job very well; 44 million people attended the fair and many, if not most, rode the world’s longest escalator connecting the structures.
In 1951, England hosted an event that was very similar to a World’s Fair: the Festival of Britain. It was not exactly the same, because instead of celebrating “the world,” all the exhibits focused on England (not even the whole United Kingdom). It was held to commemorate the centennial of the Great Exhibition of 1851, which is still remembered because of the huge cast iron and glass exhibition hall, the Crystal Palace. Anyway, it was obvious to the organizers that if they were going to have a big exhibition that would attract millions of people, they were going to need some big, impressive structures.
The job came to Ralph Tubbs, (who, just by the way, was born January 9, 1912). Prior to designing the Dome of Discovery, his biggest claim to fame was working for Ernö Goldfinger (the real-life architect, not the Bond villain). The Dome of Discovery was the biggest dome in the world at the time, and they copied the 1939 New York fair again by adding a Very Long Escalator as the entrance. It was mostly made of aluminium, which for no apparent reason is called “aluminum” in American English.
The Dome of Discovery was paired with the Skylon, which sounds like it might have been trying to do the Trylon one better. But the Skylon wasn’t a spire you could enter; it was just a big pointy sculpture. It was supposed to look like a giant needle floating in the air, which kind of worked if you ignored the frame and cables holding it up (the illusion worked better at night; the Skylon lit up, but the foundation didn’t). It wasn’t a building, though, and Ralph Tubbs had nothing to do with it.
The Dome of Discovery and the Skylon were sold for scrap after the festival ended, and some of the aluminium was made into commemorative letter openers and other small mementos. You could probably still find one of those if you wanted to. But Ralph Tubbs’ dome is long gone — the Jubilee Gardens near the London Eye is now on that site. The Millennium Dome, an even bigger project built in London for an exhibition in 2000, featured an exhibit about the Dome of Discovery. That dome is still around, but now is called The O2 (after a telecom company) and houses virtual reality rides and an indoor trampoline park. Nowhere near 44 million people have visited.
