By Heather Warlick
Staff Writer
In "The Wizard of Oz,” things would have been much different if Dorothy had lived in a dome.
For instance:
She might never have bumped her head and gone on to meet the wizard.
The Wicked Witch of the East might not have been crushed beneath the house as it fell from the twister.
And instead of chanting "There's no place like home” while clicking the heels of her ruby red slippers to return home from the magical land of Oz, Dorothy might have weathered the storm safe and sound in Kansas.
Undoubtedly, she would have been chanting, "There's no place like dome.”
Robin Griffin loves "The Wizard of Oz” almost as much as her all-time-favorite movie, "Gone With the Wind.” But the last thing Griffin wants is to visit Oz if her home is blown away with the wind.
That's one reason she and her husband, Joe, decided 22 years ago to build their dome.
"I've actually had bad dreams about having to move back to the city into a normal house,” she said.
Her dome sits amid five acres of lushly wooded land west of Newcastle. At night, she turns on colorful outdoor lights all around the circumference of her dome, and the glowing skylight at the pinnacle of her dome gives it the unearthly look of a spaceship, hence its nickname, The Mothership.
Tornadoes whiz by The Mothership each spring, Griffin said, but she feels safe inside.
"The neighbors come over here when it gets bad, because they know it's tornado-proof.”
More and more people are building dome homes, said
James Lynch, owner of Good Karma Domes in Oklahoma City.
"We're giving the square housing people a bloody nose,” he said.
He credits the boom in business to more awareness of domes because of the Internet.
"You talk to any good dome builder, and their businesses have doubled and quadrupled in the last five years.”
David South, owner of Monolithic Domes in
Italy, Texas, said his goal is to educate people to the many virtues of dome structures. Since his company was founded in the 1970s, he has sold thousands of domes throughout the
United States, he said.
In fact, the Griffins bought their home from South.
"Domes use less than 50 percent as much energy as other homes,” South said. "They're safe. They can't be burned, you can't blow them down, earthquakes don't mean anything to them, and tornadoes don't mean anything to them.
"They have a lifespan measured in the centuries. Some of these will be around here 500 years from now.”
Jerri and
Darrell Strube know firsthand just how fireproof domes can be. In 2006, they were finishing construction of their Monolithic dome in Marlow when a wildfire tore across their land.
The fire claimed their farmhouse, with most of their belongings inside, but their dome suffered only superficial damage from scorching where weeds and grasses had burned against it.
"I wouldn't live in anything else, especially in tornado alley,”
Jerri Strube said.
Her dome has nearly 3,000 square feet of living space, and she said her highest electricity bill to date was only $170. "Once you get all that concrete to temperature, then it takes very little energy to maintain it.”
The energy savings and safety of dome homes are the two biggest reasons many people are choosing to go round. Not only are dome homes generally less costly to build, but the amount of money that dome owners can save in energy bills can add up over the years.
But aside from practical reasons for choosing domes, many dome owners, like Griffin and
Strube, love their domes because of their aesthetic beauty and uniqueness. Inside a dome, the gently curved walls, high ceilings and earthy stonelike texture lend an organic feeling unlike anything conveyed by the stiff, 90-degree angles of drywall.
Many companies build dome homes, but there are different types of dome homes to consider.
Monolithic domes are built by inflating a dome-shaped balloon, installing layers of insulation and rebar, and finishing the interior with concrete and the exterior with polyurethane foam.
The simple design means people with little building experience can successfully erect a dome with the proper tools and instructions. Monolithic offers classes to teach people to construct their domes. The next class will be April 8-12.
Lynch's Good Karma Domes are geodesic domes. These are created by linking triangular panels, creating a mathematically intricate design. Geodesic domes are the only man-made structures that become proportionally stronger as they increase in size.
Lynch said geodesic domes are stronger than concrete domes because they have higher tensile and sheer strength.
"If you look from an engineering standpoint, squares are not structural. Parallel lines are not strong,” he said. "Triangles are very strong. It's the basic form that's found in nature. Spheres and triangles pervade the environment, the natural world.
"That's the design that nature has incorporated and uses from molecules to planets. You could say it's a divine design.”
South said he originally worked with geodesic domes but found "they wasted too much material and could not be built big enough for what I wanted.”
"I didn't foresee just building domes; I envisioned building huge domes,” he said.
While Lynch and South may disagree on their preferred type of domes, the two wholeheartedly believe in the power of the dome to withstand the forces of nature and to stand the test of time. They urge people who are considering building new homes to think outside of the box.
"We live in a square building world, and we are resistant to anything different,” South said. "Yet, a dome is much prettier than many give it credit (for), and people are beginning to realize this.
"A dome's structural beauty is in its unobtrusiveness. A dome that is well-built and tastefully landscaped becomes part of its surroundings.
"For example, a dome built on a hill would blend gently into the curve of the hill. This beauty is very subjective, but I know that as the number of well-done, attractive domes increases around us, the prejudices against domes will decrease.”
