My parents sent me this link a few weeks ago, knowing I would appreciate it. At first glance, it was interesting. A guy built a pretty cool dome home (in Thailand) from cement blocks. He only spent ~$6000 for the basic structure and got it done in about 6 weeks… The home looks nice and organic, but it is not earth sheltered and it didn’t have to deal with our cold weather. Not a lot of lessons that I could apply in North America…
But then I saw this… And I realized that someone on the team, maybe Steve or one of the guys he was working with, was quite brilliant.
This pivot arm is key to the whole thing…
Instead of working with complicated geodesic shapes, he is just using regular concrete blocks. Before starting the construction, he placed 3 of these posts, each with a pivot arm. Then he could just swing the arms to mark the footings.
Then he placed each row of blocks using the end of the pivot arm to set them exactly to form a sphere.
You can see more pics on his site, but eventually, he had several intersecting concrete domes.
Then he just coated them, inside and out, with stucco for a nice smooth finish.
Brilliantly simple. I probably still can’t apply it directly to my build, but I sure do find it interesting. Maybe I will experiment with building something else this way… When I have time ;^)
And here is a video tour of the completed project… (and some practice embedding youtube video)