Last year I bought a geodesic dome connectors kit, Hubs, and a load of wood. We built a dome in the back garden, purely because I've always wanted to build a geodesic dome and had given up on waiting for a reasonable excuse to come along. Here's a timelapse of the construction.
It stayed up for a week or so and then came down because, frankly, there wasn't room on that lawn for something so impractical. But having seen it in action, and needing to replace a rotting pergola, we plotted how to bring it back as something we could use.
Initially the plan was to build it in the Spring, but that went the way of all Spring plans, and I wasn't expecting to do anything dome-like this year. But then it occurred to me a semi-covered shelter in the garden might be useful for meeting folks during the pandemic's Autumn period, if not deep midwinter, and this dome, being made with cheap and reclaimed wood, would not be the final version, so I could spend the winter tinkering and refining ready for the re-build in the Spring.
So over the last couple of weeks I built the base and prepared the bits and today Fiona and I raised the barn dome!
One amusing quirk of this build is we wanted the dome to be pretty much the width of the garden. But to make a dome you ideally need an area significantly larger that the final footprint so you can lay it out flat and built it up from the middle.
So for this build I went against the recommended instructions and worked from the bottom up using a mix of props, straps and wife to hold the joints in place.
A geodesic dome is an incredibly strong and stable structure when, and only when, all the sections are connected to each other and the stress and weight is evenly distributed. Until that point it's a mess of chaos and gravity. Pull one bit and something else shifts. It took a while and mental calmness to work through the inevitable collapses, but finally we got the last piece in and, boom, dynamic maximum tension achieved!
Having spent the whole build inside the dome it was very strange to walk down the garden and get a good look at it for the first time. It did not look like I expected, much more compact and subtle, though painting it dark green probably helped. (I'm very aware that the neighbours might not appreciate a 3 metre high sphere in their periphery!) The shape is quite delightful, geometric and engineered, but sympathetic to the plants and trees. Importantly it doesn't feel huge, but has plenty of room inside.
There's something strange about sitting inside a piece of geometry. You understand why both the Egyptians and Mayans obsessed over pyramids on opposite sides of the globe, and why the geodesic dome became the iconic structure of the back-to-the-land movement. It just feels right.
Of course, it's not finished. The structure is up but it needs to be made useful. Watch this space (and come visit once our lockdown is paused!)