MONOLITHIC DOME INSTITUTE

I talked earlier in the class about stumbling across “Morningside,” an intentional religious community and commercial endeavor just outside of Branson, MO, under the leadership of Jim Bakker, disgraced televangelist who had his heyday the 1980s. One of the community’s selling points is the plan to build concrete monolithic domes, where residents can feel safe from apocalypse and natural disaster. At optional extra cost, domebuyers can choose a hobbit build-out for a storybook feel to their bunker/house.

The supplier of the plans and materials for the domes is the Monolithic Dome Institute (http://www.monolithic.org/), based in Italy, TX, and founded by David South. The Institute builds domes, sells plans for domes, and runs dome-building workshops. South cites Buckminster Fuller’s geodesic domes as his direct inspiration for his fascination with domes, which began when he was a high school student in Idaho in the 1970s and began dome construction experiments with his brothers.

We’re usually most comfortable with what’s familiar. That applies to the structures we live in and use. It’s a self-learned process that begins at birth when we’re slapped on the butt and put in a crib with four corners. From then on, we live in a world of rectangles and squares. - David South

South’s contribution to the dome design was the Airform, “a huge balloon, molded into various shapes and sizes of a tough fabric, that’s attached to a dome’s concrete foundation and inflated.” It allows for huge structures, and the Monolithic Dome Institute has seen domes built all over the world as community centers, churches, homes, and public buildings.

Domes promoted by the institute can be adapted to fit any kind of aesthetic; adding whatever veneer is required:

I think it’s a really fascinating example of ideas being adapted for real-estate development and “man’s house is his castle” emphasis, keeping the emphasis on home ownership as one of the main forms of security and comfort in the US. The Monolithic Dome institute offers a pragmatic and problem-solving based approach that grapples with climate change/natural disaster fears and the high cost of energy and home building. It's a strange mixture - one the one hand it plays into survivalist ideas and fear-mongering like Jim Bakkers, but at the same time the domes are certainly energy-efficient and pretty cool.

The Institute even promotes studio-apartment sized domes for working people and single parents, and Italy, TX has its own development of these studios, which are run on a motel-style payment basis to avoid having to ask for security deposits. They’re offered as a creative solution to the shortage of affordable housing for service workers. Again, I'm not sure that we're getting at the root of that housing problem by suggesting everyone live in a dome motel in the middle of nowhere in Texas, but again, not a bad idea.

I’ve been pretty preoccupied with the co-opting of whole-earth ideas for corporations and advertizing etc., which we’ve talked a lot about, but I’m also interested in the way that the pragmatism of these ideas and shapes does actually move through various different groups in surprising ways that make the political spectrum seem kind of irrelevant. The monolithic dome can, according to David South, serve anyone from Jim Bakker to public high schools, single moms and the Turkish government.

Another strand of thinking has been about RV culture, which I think functions similarly - the nomadism of the type promoted by Whole-Earth-style thinking is welded together with a very American consumerism-influenced vision of a regular house on wheels.