Dome
Land - now featuring Dome!
2023 · Lenses: Touchable Stuff, Useless Nonsense, Public Weirdness, Dumb Bits, Wood, Collaboration, Actual Sincerity · Roles: Concept, Design, Fabrication, Woodworking
Go Visit Dome · Construction Time Lapse
In 2017, I purchased five acres of land in Antelope Valley (about 90 minutes from LA). I called it Land. It lay relatively fallow until 2023 when my partner Kayla and I built a 20-foot geodesic dome on it.
After buying plans from Johnny at Trillium Domes, I spent about a month in my old garage ripping 2x6 boards into struts, tapering the edges, turning them into two different kinds of triangles, and securing them into pentagon and hexagon panels. Halfway through I got a new, better miter saw, which helped a ton.
I covered the panels with UV resistant greenhouse film, loaded them all into my friend Alex's truck, and dropped them off at Land, where I'd pre-built the dome's wooden base. A few days later, Kayla drove out with me and we assembled Dome.
It was fun for the first four hours. While Johnny had been very helpful, he didn’t mention that when heavy wooden panels covered in greenhouse film get caught in high winds, they become heavy wooden sails that want to blow you off the top of your ten-foot ladder. Which is scary, even when you’re not forty minutes from the nearest hospital.
Anyway, Kayla and I avoided injury and got Dome done right before sunset. We sat in it for a minute, set up a cardboard standee of the MyPillow guy with some animal bones at his feet to guard it, and drove home.
We’ve been back to visit it a few times with friends and family. I considered spending the night in it, but because the one time I did camp on Land, I heard a bunch of gunshots in the night, Kayla was not interested in this. Also, the second time we went back, we found Mike Lindell cut in half, the remains of a small fire, and a weird pentagram etched into the dirt (which ended up being from rainwater dripping in from the seams of the pentagonal panels, which we were too tired to properly tape during construction). That kind of sealed the deal on Kayla’s unwillingness to spend the night in the desert.
Why did we do all this? Because it’s fun to make things. Also, geodesic domes are cool. It’s been a while since we checked on Dome, but if you want to visit it, there’s a link to the GPS coordinates below. Let me know if it’s still there!