HOME SWEET DOME

They have been likened to bubble gum beehives, musculatured mushrooms, humanoid terrariums, lunar campsites, shingled igloos and plastic puffballs. By whatever designation, but for every good reason, the geodesic dome home is finally winning acceptance and approbation.

"The market is literally exploding," says Engineer Peter Tobia, whose New Jersey-based Geodesic Structures, Inc. sells prefabricated domes (average price: $12,000) nationally through a network of 40 builder-dealers. Tobia, who says his firm receives 400 written inquiries a week, expects to double the number of dealer outlets this year and sell some 200 units (about $2.2 million worth). Peter Tobia's brother Ronald, who owns a separate company, Building Concepts, Inc., that builds finished dome-iciles in New Jersey and Pennsylvania, anticipates sales of up to 100 domes in its area for a total of some $3 million this year. Cathedralite Domes, in Aptos, Calif., reports that sales of kits are running at 60 a month (average price: $6,500). The company expects to gross between $3 million and $5 million this year and is planning to expand overseas. Like other dome makers, the company sells mostly to people who intend to use them as primary, year-round homes. Since a competent handyman can erect a house himself, with muscle power from family and friends, a spacious, three-bedroom dome built from a kit can cost as little as $25,000 (not including land).

Not All a Ball. Living in the round is not exactly new. Cave dwellers, Kurds, birds, bees, Bedouins, medieval Irish monks, Indians, Eskimos, Zulus, lighthouse keepers and leprechauns, to name a few, have tried it. But it took the genius of R. Buckminster Fuller, now 81, whose brilliantly engineered structures were used as radar domes on the arctic DEW line after World War II, to demonstrate conclusively that for the material used they are the strongest and most efficient way to enclose space. Moreover, they cover maximum volume with minimum surface area. Ergo, it takes less energy to heat or cool a spherical structure than the rectilinear box of traditional architecture and consumer preference. Since nearly all dome homes have big skylights, lighting costs are also lower.

Tate Miller, one of Cathedralite's three young co-owners, estimates that the energy bill for a dome home ranges between one-third and one-half of that for a conventional house with the same floor space. John and Martha Evensta, a physician and his wife who have a five-room, $40,000 dome in Grand Rapids, Minn., say that their highest monthly electricity bill, in subzero January, came to $91--which included not only heating but also power for all their household appliances. The Evenstas' house is mainly heated by a wood-burning furnace backed up by a heat pump, plus a fireplace. Norm and Sirleen Ghigleri, whose Cathedralite dome nestles in California's Santa Cruz hills, reported that their January electricity bill was $41.56, while neighbors complained of paying $125 and more for power.

Life in a globe is not always a ball. Domes have had a bad reputation for leaking, though manufacturers claim that this should be no problem if the home is finished by an expert roofer. They are apt to be noisy, since they usually have few of the interior partitions that muffle sound in a traditional structure. Fitting rectangular furniture into a round house also poses problems; many dome dwellers build in tubs, beds and cabinets shaped to fit the walls.

A perennial headache is the exotic structures' attraction for curiosity seekers and peckers. Bill Woods, who manufactures hardware for geodesics in Phoenix, and lives with his family in three connected domes, recalls looking up from dinner one night to find three people peering in one window, two at another and two more at the door trying to get in. Uninvited guests do not, however, bother Manhattan Businessman Henry Hansenberg and his wife, Interior Decorator Mara Gardner. They have erected a dome studio on their penthouse duplex overlooking Central Park.

Another problem: mortgage financing has been hard to get for domes. However, most builders today agree that loans are usually available for professionally built models; some bankers cite the energy savings as an important plus. The few contractor-built domes that have been resold have brought high prices. The manufacturers claim that dome builders have no trouble getting building permits. Ironically, say the Cathedralite owners, the only city where their earthquake-resistant dwellings have run afoul of local building and safety requirements is Los Angeles.

In contrast to the mid-'60s, when most dome homes were funky, patched-up symbols of the counterculture, the average buyer is relatively well-to-do and well educated. Says Geodesic Structures' Peter Tobia: "The people we're getting today are the presold market that knows about Bucky Fuller. We're building a basically middle, upper-middle-class American housing unit that is a natural and intelligent alternative to expensive and inefficient housing."

Trees and Clouds. All of which, to round-homers, is like discussing Chartres in terms of beam load. They speak lyrically of the feeling of spaciousness, of an almost mystical airiness induced by living under a skylight. A Los Angeles dome-ophile, sounding like Gerard Manley Hopkins, talks of skylights filled with "towering trees and billowing clouds dashed with birds in flight." Ken Niboli, a California real estate broker who lives and works in separate domes, puts the case even more compellingly. "I feel," he says, "like I'm always on vacation."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.