The Monolithic blog about designing, manufacturing, and working.
Watch the inflation of a new Monolithic Dome home going up in Pensacola, Florida. This blog post has video and images covering the job site before we turn the fans on, the inflation of the Airform and inside the Airform after it’s up. You’ll also find details about our inflator fans, manometers, airlocks and the Paxis rotating scaffold system. … read more
This article features a video walkthrough of the dome shell and underground cistern of a new Monolithic Dome home in Fredricksburg, Texas. The house has some unique features, including a rain catchment system and 15 custom augments creating window seats, arched openings and round fixed windows. In addition, the interior shotcrete has been smoothed to an orange peel finish. … read more
All Monolithic Domes need regular maintenance and coating. This home’s exterior hadn’t been touched in 20 years! Needless to say, it desperately needed a fresh coating and a new awning. For this project, we used a Gaco acrylic coating. We are now dealers for this product and plan to use it on many coating jobs coming down the pike. … read more
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