The Monolithic blog about designing, manufacturing, and working.
Check out this smooth interior shotcrete finish featured in the Brown’s home in Aubrey, Texas. Javier and his crew have gotten really good at smoothing out the interior shotcrete finish on the domes we build! I call it a sponge finish because of the swirly, sandy finish we leave behind. … read more
Learn how to frame out an extended augment in this pictorial how-to. Extended augments are a great way to make openings in Monolithic Dome Structures. They create natural eaves and finish out easily and beautifully. This blog entry aims to cover the fundamental techniques we use every day to frame and to finish out these openings. We hope this will help customers find sub-contractors to bid on and complete work for them as well as empower clients to do it themselves. … read more
The Airform for Maggie Chu’s new Monolithic Dome home on the east coast of central Florida went off without a hitch and was cause for celebration. This now completed dome features beautiful ¾ circle extended augments over the front and back door and elliptically topped extended augments for the windows. … read more
2020 was quite a year. One exciting thing we did here at Monolithic was build our first swimming pool as a crew. My wife and I had been thinking of putting in a pool for years, and it was finally time to pull the trigger. We put a lot of thought into the design and because it was a smaller pool, I think I thought it was going to be easier than it was. We battled rain, partial cave-ins and problems with the concrete supplier, but we learned a lot and the pool is a great addition to our lives down here. … read more
Monolithic attended the Southwest Fertilizer convention for the fifth time this year. It’s a great conference to network with fertilizer producers and resellers. The Monolithic Dome has many advantages — but keeping the material dry during storage interested people the most. … read more
Back in April, we constructed an 800-square-foot Monolithic Dome home for the Salyer family in Batesville, Indiana. Situated among the trees, we poured a ring beam footer — instead of a slab foundation, attached the Airform, inflated it, and constructed a Monolithic Dome — and we took pictures. … read more
Imagine creating a wedding dress for a bride you never meet. With only two or three measurements, you design the dress, make a pattern, cut the fabric, sew it together, box it up, and ship it to her — hundreds of miles away. She isn’t allowed to wear the dress until the wedding day. Then, at the altar, with her friends and family watching, she puts it on. Will it fit? Will she love it? That’s what it’s like to manufacture a Monolithic Dome Airform membrane. … read more
The Fall 2022 Monolithic Dome Builders Workshop will be here before you know it. The Monolithic Dome Builders Workshop is the only place where you can get some real hands-on experience from people who have been in the industry for over 30 years! The early-bird discount ends next week so hurry and sign up today. … read more
This dome home features six extended gothic-style augments, and two of those augments are very large. Planning and inflating augments like these is tricky because they require cutting a large hole in the dome, and then connecting to an almost perfectly vertical section of the gothic augment. Further complicating this Airform pattern are the varying shapes and sizes of the four interconnected domes. The main dome is spherical and the attached domes are elliptical—making the saddles between domes highly technical. … read more
An estimated five hurricanes — Bonnie, Rita, Humberto, Ike, and Harvey — have hit a carbon storage dome in Port Arthur, Texas. It‘s their standard procedure to store rolling stock inside the dome during hurricanes — saving an average of $50,000 of equipment loss per event. … read more