Building a dome in 1977

This was in September 1977. My friend David, on the left, had decided to build a geodesic dome to live in with his wife and soon-to-come children. All his friends, even unhandy I!, helped from time to time. But probably the friend who put the most into helping was Ken, on the right.

A few days before I took this and some other pictures, David and I had climbed to the top of the dome's structure and held hands across the top-most space, jumping on the cross pieces to get them into the alignment needed to get the last bolt in place. Until the moment we did so, the whole dome was squishy and mobile. When we got the bolt in place it went rigid. Work could then begin on filling in the hexagonal spaces with the shorter pieces you see for example on the right. Had we fallen the ten metres or so to the basement level, I would not be posting this picture. :)

In this picture David and Ken are lifting pieces for a scaffolding to make that fill-in work easier.

Forty-six years later, in 2023, that dome is still a home for someone, though David and his family moved out when the children were small. They moved into a more conventional house.

This was Pan-X film, shot in a peculiar, cheap, and low-tech 1940s camera from Germany, the brand name of which escapes me. It suffered from several problems most notably a twisted viewfinder (which I never got used to) and a user (me) who poorly understood how cameras worked. I am lucky that this picture is as good as it is!