OmniDome Theater
2100 NE 52nd Street,
Oklahoma City,
OK
73111
2100 NE 52nd Street,
Oklahoma City,
OK
73111
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The Oklahoma City OmniDome Theater, which opened on January 16, 2000, closed in September 2015 due to aging projection equipment and difficulty in finding film formatted for the theater.
The theater’s architectural design was geometrically complex, featuring an aluminum geodesic dome roof structure covered in pre-assembled double-skin plywood “sandwich panels” and a factory-painted exterior aluminum skin. This structure sat on a cast-in-place, exposed concrete substructure at a 30° angle. The concrete substructure was octagonal in plan, and the dome structure was semi-spherical in shape. The building also contained a double-pitched glass skylight along the entire length of the lobby area. The theater, housed within this structure, was a spherical-screen IMAX-type theater with seating for approximately 250 people. The construction cost was $3.6 million.
Plans for its future involve transforming it into a world-class planetarium. The Science Museum Oklahoma’s “One Giant Leap” campaign aims to raise $3.5 million to relocate the Kirkpatrick Planetarium to the OmniDome site and equip it with improved infrastructure, including state-of-the-art digital projectors. The transformation will enhance the visitor experience with a new 50-foot dome screen and one of the world’s only digital-optical hybrid planetariums. These plans will likely involve the complete demolition of the existing structure.
The IMAX film, “Everest,” opened at what was known as the OmniDome (two capital letters) Theater seating 264 on January 16, 2000. The architect was Terry Kerr of Kerr 3 Architects. In 2006, it was renamed as Dome Theater at Science Museum Oklahoma. It was closed permanently in 2016. In 2022, a new plan was unveiled to replace the unused facility.
I wrote the director, advising against the dome screen, based on my experience with the Ft.Worth Science dome, but this is much better viewing. Unfortunately, the film system is not IMAX compatible, so the only have about a tenth of the movies to choose from. so they have limited film rotation. OOPS!