
Photo by Brendan Jaffer
Once upon a time, in a strange, faraway land (New Jersey), in an era long ago (the 1970s) I attended a public elementary school that was a kind of dreamy castle for a child. It was a golden-colored, aluminum-roofed, geodesic dome shaped in a giant pattern of polygons. The inside was magical; it was all wide open-space rooms that housed hundreds of students. We often studied while sitting lotus-style on the floor with portable totes that doubled as laptop desks, or ventured off into the library loft where you could touch the curved corners of the dome ceiling. Our minds were as wide open to learning as the vast space we were schooled in.
Perhaps surprisingly, nobody thought that it was woo-woo or weird to go to school in a dome, even though it was public. Our parents were mostly moderate, middle-class suburbanites. We just happened to come of age in an era where townships, developers—and people in general—were open to new ways of learning, living, and working.
Our minds were as wide open to learning as the vast space we were schooled in.This era didn't last long. The decades that followed saw the less-than-revolutionary construction of big-box designs, seemingly inspired by the Soviet bloc. Today, however, millennials are coming full circle, finally shaking the foundation of linear thinking. More and more places of business are opting for open-face floorplans, and there's a resurgence of the popularity of shared living arrangements. Similarly, geodesic domes are making a comeback, earning a reputation as creative, spiritual, and ecologically-minded home dwellings. As it turns out, a dome isn't just a random, funky shape. It's a purposeful space that’s rooted in the ancient science of sacred geometry where every aspect of design has a meaning that correlates to mathematics and metaphysics.
