The Dome Cluster House
In 1982, Michael Jantzen designed and built the Dome Cluster House for his mother and four of his sisters in Southern Illinois USA. The house was one of a series of structures he built that explored ways in which to create super energy efficient, sustainably designed, low cost houses. The Dome Cluster House also experimented with ways in which off the shelf, low cost, agricultural components could be used to build alternatives to conventional houses.
Being raised in the USA Midwest, Michael was very aware of the agricultural building that dotted the Southern Illinois landscape. He was particularly attracted to the painted steel dome silo roofs that capped off the tops of all of the concrete cylindrical silos on the Southern Illinois farms. These painted steel domes were light- weight, very strong, and low cost. They could also be assembled very fast by one person, and were available in many different diameters up to 30 feet.
Michael’s intention was to create a prototype for super energy efficient, modular, low cost houses and other buildings, made from these domes that could be installed anywhere in the world in order to provide an alternative solution to the human shelter crisis.
He first created a simple way in which to merge any diameter of these domes together in a modular fashion in order to make any size structure, in the same way soap bubbles merge together. He determined that this particular house needed to be around 1700 square feet in size to accommodate the needs of his mother and sisters.
Michael assembled and merged four twenty six foot diameter domes together into a Y formation with one dome oriented to the north and three to the south (for maximum solar exposure) to form the outer shell of the house. He then erected and merged four twenty-four foot diameter domes inside of the outer shell to form an interior shell with one foot of space between the two. That space was filled with cellulose (ground up newspaper) insulation.
The super insulated dome cluster was mounted onto a concrete foundation and floor that provided a large amount of thermo mass for the wintertime solar heating, which was obtained through the south facing windows. The only backup heater required throughout an entire Southern Illinois winter, was a small woodstove that because of the large amount of insulation in the house, only used one cord of wood.
In the summer the house also did not require an air conditioner because of the super insulation and because all of the windows were fitted with operable louver sun shades mounted onto the outside of the windows. Because the house was designed to be extremely airtight in order to maintain a high degree of heating and cooling energy efficiency, an air-to-air heat exchanger was used to provide fresh air into the house.
The house also utilized the most energy efficient lighting and appliances available at the time, along with domestic water conservation techniques such as a low flush toilet, and low volume water conserving faucets. The domestic water was also solar heated with a highly efficient backup electric water heater that was seldom used. Michael also designed and built all of the interior furnishings and furniture that were created to be mass-produced from wood, in a modular fashion in order to fit into the perimeters of the buildings themselves, which had to accommodate a wide variety of personal needs and/or desires
Status: Built
Location: Southern Illinois
