disaster management

Domes vodcast: perfect shelter for struggling cultures and impoverished lands

In April last year, Rebecca South, president of the Domes for the World foundation, was interviewed in this video podcast with Robert Scoble of PodTech on “how her non-profit is using unique building technology to built very inexpensive and durable structures for third-world countries”. Titled “Monolithic domes: perfect shelter for struggling cultures and impoverished lands”, I’ve posted here a transcription of the vodcast interview for those people in emerging countries with poor internet connections. I apologise for any inaccuracies in my quick transcription.

An interview with a local emergency shelter expert on the DFTW project village of “New Ngelepen”, or as the locals call it, “Tellytubby Village”, can be found on this blog here.

Thank you to Rebecca South and Robert Scoble for making the interview available.
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Robert Scoble: …We’re back here in Salt Lake. So who are you?

Rebecca South: My name is Rebecca South, and I am the daughter of the inventor of the Monolithic Dome. I am also the president of the Domes for the World Foundation.

Scoble: Wow. Ok, “domes for the world”: are we talking about buildings, or …

South: Yes, we’re talking about dome buildings, we’re talking about 100% concrete rebar buildings. They’re uninsulated, so they’re only good for equatorial climates. They’re super cheap to build but they’re disaster-resistant, so we go into emerging countries where there’s over 5 million people without houses. So we go into these places and we start a project that’s completely not for profit, completely free for the people who we build the homes for, and then after that, we will continue in the country to keep trying to find resources. For instance, we just built a village in Indonesia, and now that we have the equipment and everything ready to go, and we’ve got 370 men trained in how to build the domes, we’re just going to keep going across the country because they need it so badly with the tsunamis and the earthquakes and the volcanoes.

Scoble: What’s the advantages of building a concrete dome over other methods of building a low-cost home?

South: Well, there’s a big effort there right now where they’re building these bamboo tents, basically. They’ll last about three years. For twice as much money as the bamboo tent, you can build this concrete dome. They use 50% less concrete than a standard concrete structure, and they’re super strong - they’re tornado-resistant, and they’re earthquake-resistant. That’s been proven over the last 30 years, we have all the engineering and everything to prove it. Plus, we can go into really remote areas where there’s no electricity and we can build and we can just use local labour that’s completely unskilled, and just show them how to build domes. And it’s worked out great there in Indonesia, like I said we have 370 people onsite right now.

Scoble: So how many domes have you built this way in emerging countries?

South: I think that you could probably count them under 100, but that was before I formed this foundation, which was last year. Our first major project has been in Indonesia. But we’ve built in Haiti, Kenya, Bolivia, South America, you know, we’ve built quite a few of these projects, just on a much smaller scale, and we’ve had to work with other non-profits. It’s actually always been a dream of my father to build en masse overseas, especially in South America, Central America, Mexico, and also in the equator, in Africa and whatnot, but he just hasn’t had anybody to head it up, until I took it over.

Scoble: Your company’s built domes all over the world, right?

South: Yes, commercial projects: it’s a different type of building. It’s a super insulated dome, you have to have skilled labour to build these domes. But they save 50-75% of your heating and cooling costs, plus they have the disaster resistance of the other domes, the EcoShells. Plus, they’re super quick to build, and as you get bigger and bigger domes, it’s cheaper and cheaper, exponentially you save. So we’ve built in about 48 states and 40 countries: schools and churches and storages and houses …

Scoble: Right, so the advantages are heating and disaster-related - are there any other aesthetic reasons to have a dome instead of a “normal” standard wooden house?

South: Well, most people would say there are no aesthetic reasons… but that is because they haven’t seen some of the domes we’ve built. For example, there’s this gorgeous dome on P—— Beach, it’s been featured on MSNBC, and NBC and the Weather Channel - and every time there’s a hurricane, they go in there, hunker down … But it’s built to reflect a seashell. It’s really beautiful, and it’s right there, like I said, right on the beach, and it gets prettier every time a hurricane goes through there and destroys all the houses around it! But it’s just gorgeous. And there’s another one, let’s see, out by Atlanta, on one of the islands out there. It’s called “Eye of the Storm”, they named it. It also reflects the look of a seashell. Yeah, you can do anything you want with them.

Scoble: You mentioned that the domes can be hurricane resistant - what kind of wind forces can a dome deal with that a normal house can’t?

South: Well let me give you an example, I can’t give you exact numbers because I don’t have them in my head, but when we originally - back in 1979, when I was 3 I was gathering intel, just by listening to conversations, but later I followed up and found out that they did the original engineering testing at BYU laboratories, down in P——, close to here. And they built a monolithic dome, and then they tried to break it. They piled it up with big bags of sand, and then they finally started loading like forklifts on there, they could never break it. They could never break it.

Scoble: The dome structure is a good one engineering-wise.

South: Yes, inherently, the shape of the dome, because the force of a tornado is distributed throughout the whole shell. My dad always says it’s kind of like a tupperware bowl, just sits on the surface. You know I’ve actually been through a tornado, in a dome.

Scoble: Have you?

South: Yes, I was at work one day, and a tornado came through, and it hit us directly, we could see it coming toward us, it hit the office building directly, and it snapped this giant phone pole, and it landed on the dome and it slid off, and we heard this big bang - but that was it. It got our dome a little dirty, the pole did, but the next door neighbours - destroyed. I mean it completely destroyed their huge half a million dollar metal structure, which was really sad, and we lost some boats, but yeah it hit us directly …

Scoble: What got your dad into this?

South: My dad’s just a renagade. He was working for the railroad in Chicago, he was programing in [?], back in the day. He had a slew of people, women, working with those puncher cards - I don’t really understand it ‘cause I have my PalmPilot now, you know - but he just decided one day that he was going to go back to Idaho and spray foam, so he moved back to Idaho and started spraying polyeurathane foam for potato storage insulation.

Scoble: Interesting.

South: Then he went to [?] with Bucky Fuller, built a couple of geodetic domes, but didn’t like all the waste, and he didn’t think he could build them big enough like he wanted to. So he came up with this airform (?) strucutre that you go in, and you go in the inside and you spray it with polyeurathane - you have to coat polyeurathane, so then you reinforce it with rebar and coated it with [?] - and there you have this super structure. And then from that first hideous potato storage that we did, we’ve evolved a lot through the years, you know. I actually grew up in a dome. I lived in an 8000 square feet -

Scoble: I’m going to call you the Dome Lady!

South: Yeah, you can - but I prefer princess … ‘cause my dad invented it, so I get to be the princess, right? no … yeah, I was 5 years old and we moved into our first dome house, it was 8000 square feet. He built it so big so that he could show people that it could be more than just a potato storage. And he had ten kids. I’m number 7. So I gave tours by the time I was five…talking about the r-values of the dome, its r-value of ..60.

Scoble: And what does that mean?

South: It doesn’t mean squat, really, except for that you can use the same heater that you use to heat my sister’s trailer house that was by it, in our house, in an 8000 square foot dome house. You use the exact same heater.

Scoble: So it’s very insulated.

South: Super insulated. And it works just the same way in Texas, in the hot country. I actually lived in an 800 square foot house, but much smaller, down there in Texas for a while and my air-conditioner was the same as an RV air-conditioner. In fact, it was an RV air-conditioner.

Scoble: So if I want to build a dome house in the middle of Silicon Valley, how much does it cost compared to a standard everyday wood house?

South: If you’re going to build a fancy house in Silicon Valley, it’s going to be exactly the same as a regular house, because mostly it has to do with what you do on the inside. Now if you’re going to build an arena, then you go from ten billion dollars down to about 5 million dollars cost. Exponentially - as the size gets bigger, the savings get bigger.

Scoble: Interesting. That’s why Tecoma has a dome?

South: Yes, well, not a monolithic dome, but we’re on the trail, we’re going to build our first hockey rink here in a little bit. But it’s on the down low so I can’t tell you where …

Scoble: Ok .. We’ll be sitting in a hockey game some day in one of your domes.

South: Yes, but I’ve always worked for my father, except for five or six years, here and there, throughout my life, but this has been the most exciting thing that I’ve done - run this non-profit - because I’ve always sort of talked about it, and it’s been so exciting for me to go to these places and then see these families, see their lives change.

Scoble: Where can we learn more about the non-profit?

South: You can learn more about the non-profit at www.dftw.org. You can learn more about domes in general at www.monolithic.com.

Scoble: Well cool, thanks for coming out and telling me a little bit about your world and we’ll check it out.

South: Thanks. It was good to be here.

© Kim Williamson 2008