Dome Sweet Dome These unusual structures popping up in some parts of the country hold promise, even if their benefi By Julie Sturgeon May 2006

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Joseph Brown Sr. applied for the superintendent's position at Grand Meadow (Minn.) School District #495 because the one-campus school building boasts a monolithic dome structure.

As a high school principal 30 miles to the west, he had heard his predecessor talk extensively about this new construction. When Brown read about the opening in the newspaper, he called the sitting superintendent on the spot to apply, and landed the position five days later. "Honestly, I never would have considered coming here had it not been for the dome school," Brown says today. "I am a social studies guy and I was intrigued with the idea of circles. A lot of anthropology studies are about the importance of the fire pit and people working together in a community."

Yet the architects who built Grand Meadow's dome expected that same reaction-and the subsequent business dollars-but it never materialized, even after the firm began racking up regional and national awards. "After we started constructing this thing, we saw a lot of interest around the state of Minnesota, and as far up as North Dakota and then it fizzled out," says Jon Neubauer, project manager architect at TSP Architects & Engineers in Rochester, Minn. "I don't think it's going to happen up in this part of the country."

David South, who, as president of the Monolithic Dome Institute in Italy, Texas, is considered the founding father of this movement and its biggest cheerleader, eventually admits to the same experience. He and his brothers built the first monolithic domed school in Emmett, Idaho, and then waited 10 years for the next order. Since the mid-'90s, he has doubled his number of domed buildings every year, but given he's a small, 50-person company, that boils down to 24 school facilities in his portfolio.

So by all measurements, the movement is in a grassroots phase. The institute offers a five-day course to other small builders, and to date 1,400 have graduated from its program. Yet only 280 of them have built a domed structure, and most of those are residential. South estimates only three other companies in the United States besides his own are large enough to take on a project the size of a school.

"I tell people it's like kissing frogs," South says. "I started this sleigh ride 30 years ago and I've pushed and pushed and pushed, but there are just a lot of people who haven't seen them yet."

Monolithic domes aren't new to construction by a long shot. In ancient days, they were the premier construction option and "dome and cheap were never in the same sentence," South notes. The technology took a huge leap forward in the 1970s when engineers puzzled out how to inflate a fabric balloon within a circular foundation, then spray a layer of urethane foam to the interior and place reinforcing steel rods via a special hangar system. Finally, the outside is coated in a thin-shell concrete. That process has stood for three decades.

"It's pretty hard to improve on an egg," says South. "So we're learning to make them look nicer." Today's monolithic domes usually sport planters around the base, with concrete shelves that jut out to make an inviting entry into the facility. In the education market, where bottom-line budgets rule, most school districts save the esthetic investments for the interiors.

The idea so captured the imagination of the 1,000 people living in Grand Meadow, they passed a bond issue to build the entire K-12 campus as a series of five connected domes to house its 360 students and 34 full-time teachers.

The Grand Meadow school's appearance, of course, swayed most parents. The previous building had stood since 1914-a three-story structure that offered no handicap access and no sprinkler system. Twice parents lobbied for $1.5 million start-up money from the state legislature to replace the inefficient structure, and twice then-Gov. Jesse Ventura line-item vetoed it. On the third time they successfully landed $3 million in seed money-and Brown credits the persistence in part to the fact this new school offered such a unique appearance.

Likewise, Pontiac-William Holliday District #105 in Fairview Heights, Ill., tried five times to pass a school bond for an elementary gymnasium, succeeding only after it distributed drawings of a monolithic dome as the design plan. "OK, so some people are still saying, 'It's kinda an odd-shaped looking school,' " Brown laughs. But South reports similar economic boosts from his initial school structures in Emmett. When South first pulled into town, "every other house was for sale. When I came back two years later after the school was built, you couldn't buy or rent a house in the town," he says. Turns out, people moved over the hill from Boise to put their kids in the super-modern school.

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