Word: planetarium
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...full blast and seemed interminable, Saarinen had to figure out a way to make an auditorium without using too much steel and still not have too many supporting columns. The "floating" concrete roof proved to be the answer. Designed on roughly the same principles as New York's Hayden Planetarium, the auditorium is unique in that there are only three points of support for the dome. In order to support the triangular roof, the theater is wedge-shaped. The main auditorium has no balcony and seats some 1,200 people; while downstairs there is a smaller, sharply pitched theatre which...
Hollywood can proceed to the ultimate in cinematic realism by using a hemispherical screen and central projector (as in a planetarium), by using an annular lens (as sometimes used on submarine periscopes), which presents a doughnut-shaped picture to the eye (or camera) covering 360° around the horizon, and practically to the zenith. This picture, projected back through the same type of lens, would recreate the original scene; the camera could project downward from the center of the theater, and could include two such lenses in a polarized system on a common axis for 3-D; also the vibrating...
After a couple of years, as the novelty wore off and crowds dwindled, Planetarium Chairman Robert Coles and his staff had to brush up on their showmanship. Not only did they revamp their programs; they also went to work on the halls and lobby. Where visitors once could examine meteorites and look at telescopic pictures of the moon, they can now stop at a bank of scales to compare the weights they would register on various planets. Or they can study the newest exhibit of all: 14 black-light astronomical murals (see opposite page...
Robot & Time Travel. But for all the innovations, the show has the same star it had on opening night: a giant, two-headed robot studded with shining eyes. On bowed, ladder-like legs, the monster crouches beneath the planetarium's high-arched dome. When the house lights dim in the circular planetarium room, the monster's bright eyes show as points of light reflected from the curved steel ceiling. There, astonishingly real, stretches a boundless universe-a vivid replica of the starbright sky on a clear night...
...Charles Hayden, a dapper Boston-born banker (Hayden, Stone & Co.) who made millions speculating in copper, the versatile robot was built at the Zeiss Works in Jena, Germany at a cost of $110,000. When it made its debut, it was the fourth such instrument installed in a U.S. planetarium. There are now six Zeiss planetaria spotted across the country...