Iona Napier
A DUPLEX summer igloo for holidaying Eskimos? Or a spare set of shells for a giant Galapagos tortoise?
No. Two expat families are about to call this pair of dome houses home.
The wooden structures in southern Murcia are designed by Spanish architects Ecoproyecta.
The major draw is that ‘geodesic’ domes cost just €500-€1,000 per square metre.
Compare that to Madrid property which costs approaching €3,000 per square metre and it’s certainly one way to burst the house price bubble.
Geodesic domes are the work of R. Buckminster Fuller, not these two Spanish architects, as I am certain the two Ecoproyecta architects would acknowledge if asked.
The present author ought to report with more accuracy. There is a distinction between attributing a derivative work, as opposed to stating who is actually responsible for design principles and practice, though there isn’t anything wrong with using previous work as long as it’s acknowledged.
Bucky Fuller – engineer, systems theorist industrial designer, futurist and architect – did early geodesic dome work in 1948-1949 in North Carolina. Since then many, many designers have based structures on his mathematics and construction methods, but acknowledge it since beyond being accurate and honest, anyone familiar with 20th C architectural history and engineering know it is Fuller’s work.
As to cost? Anyone with minimal construction experience could easily build their own very livable dome since they are constructed modularly with few variants all fixed to identical hubs. It would be absurd to pay €500-€1000 per square meter for dome construction, especially, since all of the design principles and thousands of plans are in the public domain, and accessible via library and internet.
I know this to be true as I briefly knew Fuller when he gave seminars to my students in an alternative secondary school. As a follow up project, our 14 – 18 year olds built their own outdoor dome to use as a green house.
Having said that, it is good to see that a few Spanish architects are rebelling against the usual inefficient cement block cowsheds with ornate tiles preferred by the poorly trained and corrupt ayuntamiento aparejedores and most clients.