North Pole

The North Pole mobile ice cream store featured delicately framed glass walls with a slightly cantilevered roof suspended from a mast anchored to a truck trailer. The truck chassis formed part of the building, and thus the entire store was portable. It could follow the warm weather and be driven to any location where the weather would encourage the consumption of ice cream---the only product handled by the store. Stores were intended to be installed in a parking lot in a downtown area in the north of the United States during the summertime, and move to the south during winter. Goldberg contemplated creating a series of these stores to be served by a "mother-truck" where ice cream would be manufactured.

The inventive little building was influenced by Buckminster Fuller's Dymaxion House, which featured a similar roofing system. Goldberg showed the design to General Wood, the President of the Sears Roebuck Company, who, as Goldberg states in his Oral History, "was very interested in it as a concept for Sears Roebuck for stores that could be erected quickly in new industrial areas.…He became sort of interested in it but nothing ever happened."

As stated by Goldberg in his Oral History, "the concept of a tension supported roof ---of a roof supported by hanging was something which obviously I hadn't designed or invented…but the awareness of it certainly opened up a new horizon for design....You could get a building that was suddenly open at its edges rather than closed at its edges."

QUOTE: "our mobile ice cream station, The North Pole, it was meant to wander around. The form of it conformed to road requirements, maximum width and so on"
- Oral History