[freebeard]

I figured that we would asphyxiate...

It's certainly not a given. Worst case you'd have 'pores' all over the thing to exchange air; but look at the Old Man River project*. The dome is 1 mile across and the bottom edge is 500 feet above grade. The air moves through freely, but the mass inside is so great it can maintain it's own climate.

If something like that was next door, wouldn't you want to move? I'm sorry, but Phoenix is built all wrong. It needs to be replaced.

*Seriously, really look at it. Then look up Agorism.

Since some might not, I ran the text through Summarize by Paragraph set at about 20% and then cherry-picked what was left:

Having undertaken the solution by artifacts of the world’s great housing crisis, I came to regard the history of cities. Cities developed entirely before the thought of electricity or automobiles or before any of the millions of inventions registered in the United States Patent Office. For eminently mobile man, cities have become obsolete in terms of yesterday’s functions-warehousing both new and formerly manufactured goods and housing immigrant factory workers. Rebuilding them to accommodate the new needs of world man requires demolition of the old buildings and their replacement of the new and now obsolete real estate, streets, water and sewer lines, and yesterday’s no longer logical overall planning geometries. I sought to take on this challenge and developed plans for an entirely feasible and practical new way for humans to live together economically. Old Man River’s City is one such design.


....


The private-home terraces on the outward circular bank are subdivided by trees and bushes to isolate them one from the other. This garden-divided exterior terracing hides the individual private-home terraces from one another while permitting each an unobstructed view outward to the faraway landscape. Thus landscape-partitioned from one another, the individual homes beneath the umbrella dome do not need their own separate weather roofs. The experience will be that of living outdoors in the garden, without any chance of rain and out of sight and sound of other humans, yet being subconsciously aware that your own advantage is not at the expense of others, zonal advantage.


....


From the individual, external home terrace on the crater’s outer slopes one can see no humans other than those within one’s own family’s hometerrace domain. People can look outwardly, however, from Old Man River’s City as far as the eye can see at the interesting Mississippi River scenery outside the moon crater’s umbrella limits. The Old Man River City’s home views are analogous to those of individuals living in dwellings on mountainsides, such as those of residents on the hills of Hong Kong Island or those above Berkeley, California. Such hillside dwellers overlook vast, mysteriously inspiring scenic areas, ever-changing with the nights, days, and weather.


The total roof surface area of the one-mile-diameter, quarter-sphere dome is only 2 percent that of the total roof and exterior skin surface area of all the buildings standing on an equal ground area in any large conventional city. The amount of external shell surface through which each interior molecule of atmosphere can gain or lose heat is thus reduced by 98 percent. Another energy-conservation factor is operative, for every time we double the sphere’s diameter, we increase its surface by four and its volume by eight. Therefore, the energy efficiency doubles each time we double the dome size. This means that the structural efficiency, useful volume, and energy conservation are all at optimum in the Old Man River’s City project. Throughout the year Old Man River’s City will have a naturally mild climate. With a large, aerodynamically articulated, wind-and-weather-controlled ventilator system atop and round the dome, together with the 500-foot-high vertical opening that runs entirely around the city below the umbrella, the atmospheric controllability will guarantee fresh air as well as energy conservation. The umbrella will jut out above and beyond all the outer-slope residential terrace areas as does a grandstand roof, so that neither rain nor snow will drift horizontally inwardly, being blocked from doing so by the mass inertia of the vast quantity of atmosphere embraced by the umbrella as well as by the vertical mass of the crater’s cone within the dome.


Optimum efficiency also characterizes the way in which Old Man River’s City is to be produced. The three-and-a-half-mile circumferential moon crater and its terracing will be developed entirely with modern, high-speed, highway-building equipment and earth-moving techniques as well as with suspension-bridge-building and air-space technologies...The mammoth, 500-feet-high and 2000-feet-wide-based, A-frame-shaped, circumferential segments of the crater become highly repetitive and economically producible. There will be 100 columns rising from the A-frame tops at the crater’s top-rim esplanade. These 100 columns will be 500 feet high and will be spaced forty meters apart, mounted above the A-frames. The tops of the 100 columns will be 1000 feet high and will be capped by a circumferential ring.


The whole terraced crater structure, inside and out, will be of thin-wall reinforced concrete...The whole structure is, in effect, a circular, triangularly self-stabilizing, “suspension bridge”-principled, terraced, ferroconcrete bowl with the human occupants and their goods constituting only a small fraction of the stress loads of equimagnitude highway traffic bridges.


I said to the East St. Louisans at the outset that our first resolve must be not to compromise our design solution in order to qualify for any private foundation or government subsidy funds. Three-quarters of the United States national debt of almost $1 trillion and much of the private debt, which altogether transfers $25 billion a year “interest” from our nation’s pocketbooks to the banks and insurance companies, has been amassed through government building subsidies that were designed strictly as “money-makers” for bankers, real estate operators, and handcraft building-industry interests. The funds were not amassed in the interest of the individuals and the community. I advised the East St. Louisans that we must develop our design and its production and assembly logistics strictly in terms of the individual and the community’s best interests. I said that if we solve the human problem and do so in the most economical and satisfactory manner, independent of building codes, zoning restrictions, etc., while employing airspace technology, effectiveness, and safety, we will do that which no subsidized housing thus far has done.

....

At the outset meeting of our OMR’s City’s development, I told the East St. Louisans that I would develop the design and models at my own expense and do so without fee.
....

I have never engaged in a development that I have felt to have such promise for all humanity, while being, at the same time, so certain of realization, because its time is imminently at hand.

TL;DR:

These hazy photos are of a model showing the general layout of Old Man River’s City, a mile-diameter (1500 meter) megastructure providing the homes, workspaces, and recreation area for 125,000 people. The enormous dome is supported 1000 feet (3005 meters) above a “moon-crater” depression with a raised rim. The outer surface of the rim is terraced to provide 25,000 earth-sheltered garden homes, each with a view and a generous 2500 square feet (232.24 square meters) of floor area. The inner surface of the crater is terraced for communal use. Millions of square feet of commercial space share the hollowed-out earth of the crater’s rim with parking lots and services, Weather under the dome would always be pleasant despite the someti mes- unpleasant East St. Louis climate. (I have not seen the calculations for tornado resistance.)

This shows us Bucky the radical libertarian.