We've seen it happen to Paul Rudolph buildings, resulting in efforts to stop it from happening: The demolition of mid-century modernist gems. This new film by American filmmaker and landscape architect Evan Mather documents the history and demise of the iconic Union Tank Car Dome, the largest clear-span structure in the world when it was built in 1958 in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. The geodesic dome, which Buckminster Fuller consulted on the design, was engineered by a local Union Tank employee named Richard Lehr. Despite making the Louisiana Preservation Alliance’s 2004 Ten Most Endangered Historic Sites list, it was razed Nov. 15, 2007 by Kansas City Southern Railroad.

Premiered on March 22 at the National Building Museum in Washington, D.C., and screened last Friday at AIA NY's Center for Architecture, the film features an interview with Lehr, who died at 82 just three months before the dome's fall. Overall, it sends a cautionary message about endangered modern-era structures and the often prohibitive costs of maintaining them.

A board director of The Foundation for Historical Louisiana said in 2008:

I realize that it would not have been easily saved however.It would have been very expensive to refurbish after having been neglected for so long. It is my understanding that KCS (Kansas City Southern Railway) never really had much interest in the structure, the property being valuable to them for the train yards existing there. I have not spoken to them about this however. Dick Lehr suggested that Union Tank Car Company essentially gave KCS the dome as a part of the deal. UTC stopped using it many years ago, and I suspect maintenance began to drop off even before it was acquired by KCS. So perhaps in some ways its fate was sealed long ago.

While we may not be able to expect KCS to preserve something like this on their own just because many people here, and around the word,thought it was significant, I do think we can expect them to participate in efforts to save the structure. This they did not do to my knowledge. In fact they seemed to shun such efforts. In this way KCS consistently showed a tragic disregard for our community. -Michael Desmond

The Union Tank Car Building was 384 feet/117 meters in diameter and 128 feet/39meters high, functioning as a weather-proof structure that repaired dozens of tank cars at a time. But when the length of standard size of tank cars grew in the late1960s, the specially designed roundhouse became obsolete. After 17 years of neglect and failed plans for reuse, the dome was doomed, and demolished in 2007.

For the nostalgic, there's a great photoset by TaiPics on flickr of the dome taken around 2001. Here's a few: