A few years ago while at a crossroad, one option I considered was to work in a remote mine in outback Australia, on a fly-in/fly-out (FIFO) roster.
The way it works is your employer flies you in from wherever you live. You work anywhere from 2-4 weeks, living in the site’s living quarters.
Then they fly you back home for a week or two.
Even though you’re working with others on site, they are not your family or regular friends.
So the work can be pretty lonely, I’m told.
That is, if you’re not an introvert.
At last resort, it would have been a convenient option for me.
My plan was to work for 5 years, spend next to nothing, and save up for a block of land away from the hustle & büstle of… everywhere.
Then build a modest house.
The dream house I was exploring to build was a geodesic dome.
The futurist and dreamer, R. Buckminster Fuller, popularized them. He was truly an amazing man.
The geodesic dome is a tensegrity structure (like the human body) so there is no one place that takes more load than any other.
Yes, a human body can learn to take incoming force and spread it evenly so it doesn’t get affected.
See this man, my old Wing Chun kung fu teacher, as an example.
It means if you push any point on the structure, the force generated spreads evenly over the whole thing, actually making the structure stronger.
Geodesic domes are magnificent and incredibly strong structures, which is why they are used on Antarctica where it snows profusely. As the snow accumulates, the structure gets stronger.
They have many other wonderful positives:
Air-circulation and insulation is optimal, for both cold and hot weather, as there are no corners where wall and ceiling meet; places where air can get caught.
They are relatively cheap to construct, as the material used is much less than a standard house.
Bottom line, they just look cool.
I spent a few months designing my perfect geodesic dome. I would even go to the local park to map out how big it would be, to get an idea of the spacing.
As a child, I dreamed of living in a warehouse style apartment. Those ones in films with high ceilings and no walls.
Open-plan.
And a geodesic dome doesn’t need any interior walls.
For my geodesic dome, 10 meters in diameter, I had designed half of it to be open with a big open living space and a big window wall.
I imagined playing kung fu, stretching, gymnastics, sitting.
It is still possible one day.
In the very least, I would like to visit a dome in person.
Either way, geodesic domes are fun to see and learn about. Just one instance of how Buckminster Fuller saw and imagined the world differently.
