A Project Four Domes — endemicarchitecture

For the 2015 Architectural League Prize exhibition,

Authenticity,

4 domes were made with the following ideas in mind.

In the United States four primary middles of America can be identified depending on whether or not you include Alaska and Hawaii, if you include the curvature of the earth, or if you use Google maps and GoogleEarth on a PC or a Mac. It should be noted that the context of these American middles do not in themselves substantiate or offer relevant contingencies for architectural form to correspond with or derive techniques from, rather the inverse is a more intriguing possibility in which these American pastoral middles are conceptually re-authored by the introduction of something unfamiliar. A Project Four Domes implicates the four middles of America, a spatial paradox of locating centers within boundaries, by marking these remote, pastoral points with free standing domes atop earthen mounds.

Disembodying the domes from an institutional underfoot allows them to be characterized by formal, spatial, and sceneographic qualities rather than through a pre-determined lens of a cultural or political institution. In other words, the biopsy of the dome from an institutional affiliation alleviates predetermined cultural associations, thereby emphasizing the material and spatial qualities. The intention is to reconvene discussions on this longstanding typology in order to speculate on alternative possibilities in contemporary culture. Each of the Four Domes borrows from a traditional plan type of domes – centralized, cruciform, linear, and so on – but achieves an outward address that is not immediately associated to its conventional plan organization. This is primarily the result of composing the domes using only spheres, cones, and cylinders. Along with the domes, is proposed a hill. The hill produces an interiority generally not experienced in domes by lifting one vertically into the volumetric center of the dome.

Copyright, Endemic Architecture 2025