Frameless Geodesic Dome

A cheap, portable, self-supporting dome whose skin is its frame—an heir to Fuller's self-strutted plydome.

The frameless geodesic dome is a low-cost dwelling design documented in 2013 by programmer and builder Bruce Hauman. Roughly 18 feet wide and 13 feet tall with a 209-square-foot floor, it dispenses entirely with the struts and hubs of a conventional geodesic dome. Instead its shell is a self-supporting sandwich—an outer corrugated-plastic dome, two layers of rigid foam insulation, and an inner plastic dome—bolted together through all layers, standing much as an igloo does. Hauman built his for about $2,100, and the shell disassembles quickly into a couple of truckloads, making it portable.

The design descends directly from Buckminster Fuller's self-strutted geodesic "plydome," by way of Steve Miller's plydome. The key insight, Hauman explains, is that the built-in strength of the sheathing material under tension can serve as both frame and enclosing envelope at once—dramatically cutting part count. He frames this as a lesson in Fuller-style efficiency: where a conventionally framed dome of this size might require nearly 700 parts, breaking the 3v geodesic geometry into just three repeating patterns of pentagons and hexagons (laid out like a soccer ball on 4-by-8 sheets) reduced his shell to about 164 parts, buildable in three to five days.

Hauman presents the dome explicitly as an act of "hacking housing"—answering Fuller's call to use intelligence and modern materials to treat shelter as abundant rather than scarce, and to free people from a lifetime of servicing mortgage debt. He is candid about limits: the polypropylene skin degrades under UV over years and must be periodically replaced (at roughly the cost of repainting), summer solar gain requires shade and ventilation, and an early bare shell collapsed under a freak snowstorm before completion. He also stresses that mass-produced efficiency is not his ideal—only a pragmatic way to buy time for slower, handcrafted building.

See Also

• R. Buckminster Fuller (R. Buckminster Fuller) — the central figure
• Domebook One (link) — an earlier counterculture dome-building manual
• Lloyd Kahn (link) — chronicler of owner-built domes

Sources

• Frameless Geodesic Dome (Bruce Hauman's Blog)