Sewed own popup dome-home for need, been selling them since

we use the dome for a lot of reasons it could be a guest house a room for your teenagers it could be a work studio we have people living in the domes we have clients who've lived in their domes for 30 years we have domes in the warm costa rican climates all the way in alaska often we sell our domes to university projects who are doing research in the polls because of the shape of it the wind just blows around it the geometry of the geodesic dome is the geometry that buckminster fuller discovered from nature so this is the magic garden of my dear friends they love their dome they use it for a music studio jam session place guest house work space and we'll go inside this dome this is a 20-foot dome so you have a window yeah this yeah each dome come for the shelter domes we usually have a bay window this is a 20-foot dome and you can actually fit a lot in here i've seen a 20-foot dome with a little sleeping loft and underneath would be a desk or office this dome they just use for a guest room and music they play music in here a lot so they've got a bed and some music gear this is actually an unusual door so normally you can put a normal pre-hung door here or we have a different type of zipper door they have a wood stove in oregon we get some snow once in a while so you're able to put a wood burning stove into this material well we have a flashing designed especially for exiting any kind of heat and that's perfectly safe there so you wouldn't melt the fabric with heat there right it doesn't even get hot it's completely diffused by the flashing so this little wood stove heats this up more than needed um it's pretty easy to heat it's a small space and and material is quite insulated um yeah this insulation so what you've got here is you've got the outer cover then you've got the frame there's a dead air space between the outer cover and the inner cover here and then you've got this insulated liner right now they just have their screen window in but you can put a double pane window in there even people have lived in a dome this size in the same area as here without the liner and lived all winter for years with a little tiny well they used a pellet stove which is very efficient the original geometry that bucky used he extrapolated from the icosahedron you know what platonic solids are so all of those platonic solids are found in nature and he created this whole geometric unfoldment to take that original icosahedron which is a 20-sided sphere and turn it into a more rounded thing by adding frequencies we call it but if you go from the very top pentagon and you go down to this pentagon here you see it's a straight line or if you go right to the door that would be a pentagon and then also let's see where's the pentagon here here pentagon and here is another pentagon right here so there's five pentagons because it's a five-sided structure so from the very top point to each of these points that would have just been one straight line one vertice on the original icosahedron but to make a rounder structure we divide that and add triangles all between so we basically to get a bigger dome we go to a higher frequency we grew up from grassroots very grassroots like necessity is the mother of invention i made the first dome so that i could give birth to my child because i was living under a tree at the time i was pregnant i remember putting the dome up and being so happy i got it up before the reins this tree is like worth showing this is a sequoia redwood a matter of fact when i first started making structures i was living under a california redwood tree in santa cruz and my first task was to make tepees so i made a whole bunch of tepees for the farm at the university in santa cruz all the staff members we lived in the tipi village that was how i began sewing structures i moved there in 69 i was a staff member building the organic biodynamic farm along with rudolf steiner's main student alan chadwick who came to the united states to teach everybody biodynamic farming when i moved to oregon and decided to start a business making domes for other people i needed to make money so i would just sit in my living room while my kids played i would just sit and sew domes and i could make a dome a house for somebody in a weekend i felt really amazed you know that i could actually do that everyone loved them so much they wanted me to make more and then when i moved here to oregon i needed a livelihood so yeah i moved up with a whole group of people mainly because they wanted to be in southern oregon it's so beautiful and it's like it was much more communities around and people doing back to land adventures and whatnot so that's very good switzy so grassroots you know that's our little shop good morning thank you for calling pacific domes this is andrew can i help you pacific domes this is taylor how can i help you yeah but if you have wind like tornadoes or things like that that might be something you want to look at we also provide engineering as well too hi yeah over here we have our sales and marketing's lunch hour so a lot of people are gone but yeah i think it's a little bit of a break time yeah it's quiet but there's a few people here left this is all the designs that are produced in our design department we do a lot of custom work so it's not like every dome is already figured out and so what happens is all these different patterns get nested on this table this is the cutting table tony is um working on cutting out some screens right now and then over here we have our sewing section a lot of people at lunch right now those two guys are welding so now you have they're welding what welding means okay so um yeah there's there's other than metal welding there's fabric welding and this is a fabric welder that's a fabric welder and what it does is it puts out a high frequency that melts the fabric together kind of in in a way it doesn't melt like sploogey now but it lets it bind and so you put the fabric under this bar and the bar comes down and it makes a weld so all the seams on the architectural vinyls are welded together and that material is very stable actually you would think vinyl is a bad thing to use but it's actually a lot less toxic than the cotton domes i used to sew which are treated with formaldehyde mildecide fire retardants and those powder off and the employees end up breathing it whereas this is a lot less toxic we have a bunch of different fabrics on here this is one we use for our insulated liners it's a nice polyester very tight weave this is our architectural vinyl we use for the shelter domes so this is our greenhouse vinyl it works really great for diffusing light to create a greenhouse what he's working on right here so this is just a clear vinyl so this is what we make the large windows out of and i think we started a fashion with large windows because since we've gotten the domes out with these big windows pretty much everyone copies us we've inspired a lot of different companies in the last maybe five years maybe 10 years at the most there's many many copycat companies that have sprung up all over the world inspired by our designs and i never had a problem with that i think it's awesome here's a photograph of an astronaut and a dome and this is on the top of a mountain in hawaii so this is a nasa project and they've had astronauts living in the dome for many years they've been doing mars simulation in this dome this is a really old board it just shows some of the jobs we did i think this was a truck show and this was a car show in hong kong at repulse bay this is a shelter dome you can see how they even integrate wood into the structure so yeah this was an easy one what they did was they just took the floor plan and built and pop and built it up because the geometry is the same right so they just built that up to make to divide the dome they've got a kitchen back there and a bathroom in a kid's kid's bedroom in the loft and their bedrooms in the back this is also another one near the coast of california this is actually sean hausman's dome he was a famous architect he designed and built the la airport the figure eight part and he chose to live in a dome in oh in the mountains of ohio california one of the reasons why domes were not successful in the 60s is because when you build a wooden structure that big you have to seal all the seams and you know doing the roofing project of sealing each corner and each edge and each side was a real conundrum people did it because they love domes but you'll often hear a story of my dome leaks and when we solved that by using steel tubing and fabric but we are considered a temporary structure in regards to that we are only considered a permanent structure in hawaii for instance where one of our business partners pushed on the permitting because they don't require the insulation in hawaii that we require so i could probably push to make it a permanent structure i just haven't had the bandwidth to go there and can these domes be plumbed and electrified and everything oh yeah you can anything you can do you can plumb through your floor but we also often use when you have a window opening instead of a window or a screen you can just put a solid piece of fabric if you're plumbing you can cut a little x in here and put any size tube through so if you want to vent your bathroom fan or do something we also have the solar fan that fits right in the same opening so yeah we figure out all kinds of stuff what if you wanted to do a liquid though um yeah well you got to build your deck we provide the floor plans for free and according to my clients anyone can build one of our decks and then you've got to put the frame up on top of the deck right here we have what we call a flat hub and this is very simplistic you the the punch press cuts this rounded and punches a hole in it we bend it to the right angle according to the which frequency dome it is and then it just bolts together so it's it's very easy for installation you know like the dome we were in today my son he probably would put that dome up in a day that dome would be up and covered and skinned and liner put in and so and the cost roughly like we're talking range for uh just a backyard simple like the dome you saw the 20 foot today i think those are about 6 000 right now to 7 000. with the liner it would be a little more and if you live in a heavy snow area there's a little upgrade required for heavier snow loads so we have i can show you in here so we have different sized tubing i started actually when i my first domes were even smaller i used to have a half inch pipe hanging right here and when i first made domes i used half inch tubing it was plenty strong handled the snow in oregon but we got an engineer after we grew into a business and now we have to be more specific about what we use the tubing and plus the quality of the tubing is different 40 years ago it was much stronger steel tubing than it is right now so this is our normal we call it one inch and this is our next size and this size and when we get into the bigger domes you know when you're talking about putting up a 120 foot diameter dome we would use a longer strut length as much as nine feet because it's stronger makes the length stronger so yeah it just depends what you're making this is what we make our bay window out of this is what we make the bay window in the round this is actually a round window so we put a bunch of these in each shelter dome you can take them out and put screens in instead you can also put we have a solar fan so it will exhaust the hot air out in the same opening or you can put your wood stove flashing which you saw and this material is really interesting when we make our insulated liners we either use this which is thinsulate and it's basically like what you would use to make an insulated jacket so we buy this in bulk to make these really elegant liners as you saw today so because of the stable structure of the geometry we can supply domes for places that other structures won't survive when snow we've had our domes make it through hurricanes it reported back to us like everything blew over but the dome it's the geometry of of nature do you find that there's a connection more of a connection with nature with the dome structure yeah absolutely our experience over the many years of putting domes up people will walk in the dome and go ahead

Channel: Kirsten Dirksen

Views: 723,045

Rating: 4.9614935 out of 5

Keywords: dome home, fabric dome, dome company, dome building company, dome kits, dome home kits, greenhouse house, tensegrity, bucky fuller, buckminster fuller, geodesic dome, dome, dome building, extreme home, extreme dome homes, insulating fabric, fabric home, hand sewn dome, dome entrepreneur, pacific domes, asha deliverance, nasa dome, ashland, oregon, extreme weather dome, dwell domes, event domes, projection domes, greenhouse domes, climbing domes

Id: eek45AVW5BE

Length: 17min 11sec (1031 seconds)

Published: Sat Dec 19 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/ParkaPoncho]

There are still a lot of families from the fires that could use these.

[u/[deleted]]

There were domes at the New Waveland Cafe hurricane Katrina relief village and they were perfect. The relief village was set up in a huge parking lot in Waveland, Mississsippi. One dome was the dining room where we would serve up to 2000 meals per day.