La Casa Grande Colectiva

Tag: dome

  • Dome Encounter

    I went on a class trip to East St Louis this weekend, and lo and behold, we visited a dome.
    Mary Brown Community Center Dome Gym

    The Dome housed the gym of the Mary Brown Community Center, which was a big stop on our two day tour of the different community centers, libraries, and churches where community engagement is taking place.  I was very much in awe of this dome (which didn’t seem geodesic since there weren’t just triangles, but I could be wrong).  I made the spliced panorama above (hastily) while two games of pickup basketball were being played.

    As a blogged about before, Domes are notorious for being difficult to maintain.  I was curious about this beautiful structure so I decided to cast a net (aka Google Search) and see what info about the Mary Brown CC was out on the web.

    click the image to see the search results page
    click the image to see the search results page

    I tried a few different search strings and eventually came across the Search Timeline for “mary brown community center”.  The Timeline feature is cool, but its utility is limited.  As you can see, the search results only go back as far as 1988, when Jackie Joyner Kersey began getting press about her desire to rehab the Community Center where she first began running track.  The timeline displays results from the Google News database, which seems to have a limited scope.  I’m sure if I went and did a similar search through old microfilm and other non-digital archives, I would come up with a much broader picture of the history of the Community Center and the Dome.  Of course, I would probably never actually do that, and I was able to learn much about the Center by rifling through the results.  I couldn’t find the year the Dome was built but I did learn that the Dome was rehabbed in 2004 after years of delays (and a scandal?).  One thing I don’t like about this Timeline feature is that many of the News stories need to be purchased in order to view the fulltext, boo.  I guess newspapers need to make money somehow.

  • Domebook 2, Geodesics: futuristic design meme of the past

    A geodesic dome made of glass
    A geodesic dome made of glass

    The Library of Radiant Optimism is a project by Let’s Remake, a group of local artists/activist that live in our hood. They write: “The Library was begun to catalog a groundswell of optimistic and visionary activities in the late 1960s and early 1970s. We gathered a handful of books that embrace grass roots exchange of information and themes of self and community empowerment.” They put up a PDF of a book titled Domebook 2 and I’ve been fascinated with it the last couple days.

    Domebook 2 was published in 1971 by Lloyd Kahn, at the height of geodesic dome excitement within the counterculture.   Geodesic domes were evangelized by Buckminster Fuller as being cheap, easy to construct, and structurally superior.  Sounds super-cool, right?  After spending some time reading through the book I did a bit of background research on domes, this book, and the author.

    It turns out that Domebook 2 was taken out of print by Kahn a few years after publication after continued frustrations with dome building.  After building some 19 domes, Kahn abandoned domes altogether and shifted his inquiry towards elegantly built homes made from local material.  This new work was published in the books Shelter (1973) and Shelter II (1978).  However, he had created so much hype about domes that he continued to be asked about their construction for years and years.  He finally wrote up this piece, Refried Domes, along with a comparison of dome/rectangle construction.  His arguments against domebuilding are many and seem to have been earned through the pain of experience.

    Reading Kahn’s later words killed some of the excitement I had upon discovering the book.  Over a hundred pages of beautiful people trying new and exciting ways of living resonated with my current view of the world.  Domes might make bad homes, but they certainly seem appealing when the rest of the world is so square.  I also love the idea of starting with a stack of triangles and a group of friends and building an object of wonder together.

    Kahn, now 72, lives outside SF, CA.  He has a blog and wrote a new book, Builder’s of the Pacific Coast.