SPECULATING ABOUT THE FUTURE is an endlessly fascinating pursuit. In his 1895 novel THE TIME MACHINE, H.G. Wells set his story at the dawn of an apocalyptic new age of modernity. Fritz Lang’s 1927 movie METROPOLIS portrayed a futuristic city where a highly-cultured utopia merrily squatted on top of a bleak underworld of workers. On a much lighter note, Robert Zemeckis’s 1985 sci-fi comedy film BACK TO THE FUTURE inserted a teenager in a time-traveling DeLorean car and sent him back 30 years to 1955 to make sure his future parents would fall in love (to thereby produce him!), and then return him to his 1985 present. In August, an Olivier-award winning musical based on BACK TO THE FUTURE will open at Broadway’s Winter Garden Theatre.

This summer, Washington, DC celebrates two cultural transformers whose imaginative creativity focused on the future. The Martin Luther King, Jr. Public Library in the city has a stunning exhibition of 12 annotated drawings from Leonardo da Vinci’s Notebooks:  “Imagining the Future. Leonardo da Vinci: In The Mind of an Italian Genius” is a collaboration between the DC Public Library and the Confindustria company in Italy. It is the first monographic exhibition of da Vinci’s Codex Atlanticus in the United States, and features iconic drawings and notations that illustrate how da Vinci merged disparate fields of art and knowledge as he imagined the future. The drawings are thrilling—they show da Vinci’s literal creative process as he worked through various possible inventions, including mechanisms for human flight.

The notebook pages are drawn from the Codex Atlanticus, a collection of 1119 pages containing Leonardo’s notes, drawings, and diagrams from 1478 to the artist’s death in 1519. Leonardo (1452-1519) kept meticulous notebooks that displayed his constant barrage of imaginings. Left-handed, he wrote on the page from right to left in a tiny hand, and his drawings were intricate and dimensional. He could not afford to waste paper, so each page is crammed with information. Today, we know of 7,200 surviving pages of his notebook drawings, but they have never been bound together, and instead are spread across Milan, Florence, Paris, Seattle, Madrid, London, and Windsor Castle.  Fortunately, the notebooks are now being digitized and will appear at some point in bound volumes.

The Washington display of da Vinci’s drawings is curated in a blackened room (above), and visitors are restricted in number. The exhibition design is brilliant, with the intention that nothing will interrupt one’s sense of awe and wonder. The drawings include renderings of a “Self-propelled cart, c. 1478,”  “Studies on Perpetual Motion, c. 1503-05,”  “Hydraulic Pump and Fountain Within a Building, c. 1500,” and “Studies of a Mechanical Wing and River Bed Sketches, c. 1490.”

Right: Image from Leonardo da Vinci’s Codus Atlanticus, a mechanical water wheel, part of D.C. Public Library’s exhibition

Walter Isaacson’s 2018 biography LEONARDO da VINCI robustly captures Leonardo’s genius. In an age that included such extraordinary figures as Michelangelo, Copernicus, Raphael, and Galileo, Leonardo was regarded as the foremost ideal of a Renaissance man. Painter, scientist, inventor — he effortlessly overlapped art, science, engineering, nature, and mathematics. Isaacson describes him as “curious, passionate, and always filled with wonder” (Isaacson, p. 5)..

[Leonardo saw] Filippo Brunelleschi gain fame as a ‘master of effects’ in productions of “The Annunciation,” where he created contraptions that used pulleys and winches to hoist young boys attired as gilt-winged angels and then swooped them down from the ‘heavens’ to rescue souls from the Devil.”

“Flight” was a theme that recurs often in da Vinci’s drawings. Starting around 1490 and for the next two decades, he explored the flight of birds with the intention of designing machines that would allow human flight. He made over 500 drawings and wrote 35,000 words scattered over a dozen notebooks on this topic. 

Left: “Study of a Mechanical Wing.” Photograph courtesy DC Public Library.

As Isaacson points out, the surprising inspiration for these studies was theatrical: from his days as an apprentice and throughout his life, Leonard threw himself into theatrical spectacles and pageants. He had seen one of his artist-engineer predecessors in Florence, Filippo Brunelleschi, gain fame as a “master of effects” in productions of “The Annunciation,”  where he created contraptions that used pulleys and winches to hoist young boys attired as gilt-winged angels and then swooped them down from the “heavens” to rescue souls from the Devil. When Leonardo first saw this production, he filled his notebooks with studies for theater “flights” that portrayed bat-like wings, with cranks that created motion but not actual flight.  By the late 1480s, he was designing a winged mechanism that would allow humans to fly: he drew a bat-like wing attached to a wooden plank that a man would pump to flap the wing. For the rest of his life, he never stopped drawing possible mechanisms for self-propelled flight. As Isaacson points out in his biography, Leonardo “used drawing as a tool for thinking. He experimented on paper and evaluated concepts by visualizing them”  (190) . 

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ANOTHER EXAMPLE OF IMAGINATION and genius in Washington this summer is an exhibition showcasing a geodesic dome that has been reconstructed at the National Museum of American History. Buckminster Fuller (1895-1983) is often credited with inventing the geodesic dome, but it was actually invented in Germany by Walther Bauersfeld after World War 1. Bauersfeld intended the dome to be a planetarium, and a large version was opened to the German public in 1926.

Above right: Richard Buckminster (Bucky) Fuller (July 12, 1895 – July 1, 1983).

In the 1940s, Buckminster Fuller–a polymath architect, writer, philosopher, and futurist—latched onto the idea with enthusiasm.  He coined the term “geodesic” in 1946, and received the U.S. patent for the dome in 1954. Fuller is credited with popularizing the idea of using domes, which he argued were inherently stable structures with great potential for myriad uses. His most famous geodesic dome is the Biosphere, which was constructed for Expo 67 in Montreal.

Left: Weatherbreak Dome when it was first built near Montreal in 1950. Courtesy of Jeffrey Lindsay Fonds, Canadian Architectural Archives (CAA), at the Taylor Family Digital Library, University of Calgary, Alberta (CU2228732).

The geodesic dome reconstructed this summer at the American History Museum was first built in Montreal in 1950. Called “Weatherbreak,” the dome uses triangular elements that distribute stress throughout its hemispheric design. It was built to demonstrate that the geodesic structure could withstand 200 mph winds and deep snow. 

After its launch in Montreal, “Weatherbreak’s” second chapter was to become a dome house in California’s Hollywood Hills in 1960–a residence LIFE magazine touted  as portraying “Los Angeles in a New Image.” Its third and final chapter came in the 1970s, when the dome house was donated to the Smithsonian. 

Right: Original construction team, 1950. Courtesy of Jeffrey Lindsay Fonds, Canadian Architectural Archives (CAA), at the Taylor Family Digital Library, University of Calgary, Alberta (CU2228729).

The exhibition of “Weatherbreak” this summer is the first time in 50 years that the geodesic dome has been displayed. The intention now is to suggest how geodesic domes can be relevant in an age of extreme weather, perhaps as homes but more potentially as greenhouses and/or planetariums that encourage the importance of living with nature.

The exhibitions of da Vinci’s drawings and the geodesic dome leave visitors awestruck by timeless genius.  But their creativity also reminds us that curiosity about the present world is what enriches life and fills the everyday with wonder.

By Amy Henderson, Senior Contributing Editor

“Imagining the Future. Leonardo da Vinci: In the Mind of an Italian Genius,” at the Martin Luther King, Jr. Public Library through August 20, 2023.

www.dclibrary.org/leonardo-da-vinci

“Reconstructing ‘Weatherbreak’: Geodesic Domes in an Age of Extreme Weather,” through July 27, 2023.  americanhistory.si.edu/exhibitions/weatherbreak. (see video, below)

Walter Isaacson, LEONARDO da VINCI. Simon & Schuster, 2017.