The Monolithic Dome Institute
[Image: The headquarters of Poland's Radio Muzyka Fakty Sp.z oo. As if stunned by their own work, the architects add: "This is a completed facility! This is NOT a drawing or a scene out of Star Wars." More on that project here].
You can't get much simpler than "monolithic.com," the website for the Monolithic Dome Institute. "Today, Monolithic is a family of companies sharing a mutual goal: to improve the lives of people worldwide through the introduction and construction of Monolithic Domes."
And aren't domes the #1 suggested gift for 13th wedding anniversaries...?
[Image: That same Polish radio station].
The Monolithic Dome Institute operates a number of subsidiary companies, all with wonderfully abstract names: Monolithic Construction Management, Monolithic Equipment (what kind of equipment, you ask...?), Monolithic Airforms, and Dome Living Rentals.
[Image: Anatomy of a dome: "The Monolithic Dome is a super-insulated, steel reinforced concrete structure used for homes, schools, gymnasiums, bulk storage facilities, churches, offices, and many other uses"].
The company is surprisingly earnest in its attempt to design affordable, safe, and easily constructed shelters that are apparently lightning-proof, earthquake-safe, and even "disaster-resistant." They even run something called the Domes for the World Foundation.
[Image: Domes built in "emerging countries"].
The company even seems to claim an architectural genealogy that stretches back to Hagia Sophia and Rome's Pantheon.
They've done sports facilities, so-called podular gyms, fertilizer storage units –
– and even churches –
– including this one in Birmingham, Alabama.
[Image: Faith Chapel Christian Church, Birmingham, Alabama].
Then there are the houses.
[Images: A home near Aguilar, Colorado; images supplied by Michael Wenzl].
[Image: Another monolithic dome home in Colorado].
Interested? Plan yours today.
How much would a BLDGBLOG pod village cost, for instance? Could it look like this?:
[Image: The Willard family dome – check out Orion's belt!].
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This looks very similar to a tecnique pioneered by Italian architecht Dante N. Bini in the late sixties. Check out his homepage.
As an architectual student I'm using this construction method for my assignment this semester, so it's nice to see it used in a current project. Most of Bini's work seem to date from the late senventies.
- Great fan of BLDGBLOG by the way:)
From Dante Bini's homepage: we find a "[m]ethod to construct a sea-floor-based vertical, cable-braced, reinforced-concrete (or all-steel) megastructure, for large cities infrastructure, which is made (or assembled) by mobile, robotized factories. Such a system is comprised of a new method for realizing an underwater continuous footing system which produces a circular 'dam' able to resist external, dynamic hydraulic seawater pressure in order to recover new land from unused shallow sea-floors. (This technique is thought to be applicable to prison and penitentiary construction.)"
Prison and penitentiary construction! On "new land from unused shallow sea-floors"! It's like that oil derrick prison in John Woo's Face/Off...
Check it out here. (And thanks for the link!)
Dome homes look like the new breed of pole-mounted martin houses, and much like red blood cells. How feasible would it be to have my dome home set lose in an American arterial system?
You could go Robert Smithson on the world, and tow your dome home round the American highway system... A kind of performance art/arterial cholesterol piece. The becoming-arterial of earthworks-cholesterol.
(Is that you, Scott? Wilkommen im BLDGBLOG)
It's me, I think!
These tree tents would be a nice variation on the domes above. Just sling one up outside your 35th floor office window and you can stop the crime of renting. Until the purple martins get confused and try to kick you out of your nest.
But the domehome/treetent hybrid I'm imagining would be a good squatter's tool - mounts magnetically onto most urban structures. Modern phone poles ideal (not the old wood ones attacked by beavers in the trans-specific city); Gehry designs even more so. Throw it up on the back of an 18-wheeler and you have a becoming-arterial scenario....
Why limit yourself to magnetics? A couple of class mates and I designed a parasite home for a minimal houseing assignment earlier this year. Buildt of ultra-light materials such as the super cool, and super light aerogel, it would hang from 3 arms with gecko tape pads. Less than a square meter of tape would be more than sufficient. You could stick it to buildings, cliffs, trees - basicly anything. Pity I can't post our drawings.
There could be urban ones that mount magnetically and then the gecko tape version for everywhere else... or you could skip the tent business and make a simple gecko tape suit, stick yourself under an overpass, and catch a few winks...
Nice blog. You did your research.
--Rebecca South
This concept is exactly the one for a Moon colonization linking creator to creator with transparent aluminum travel tubes,it also would lend itself to solar powered living. Agriculture and animal based livestock could also be a part of this,to produce the right amount of greenhouse gases for atmosphere.
weedabus@yahoo.com
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