No Place Like Dome: ARCH Students Build Full-Scale Dome at Langford
Built from reused sheet metal donated by General Motors, architecture students constructed a full-scale dome.
On a cold day before December finals, third-year architecture students at the Texas A&M College of Architecture gathered outside the Langford Architecture Center to do something most aspiring architects never do: build a full-scale structure with their own hands.
In one day, the class assembled a 12-foot-wide, 6-foot-tall geodesic dome from 96 triangular galvanized sheet-metal panels. The project capped ARCH 305 Architecture Design III, where students were challenged to learn architecture, not only through computer modeling, but through hands-on fabrication.
Dr. Ahmed K. Ali, associate professor and the Harold L. Adams Endowed Professor of Architecture, designed the studio’s final project as a class-wide collaboration.
“It’s a whole class effort,” Ali said, noting that many students are currently studying abroad or completing internships. “I’m sure now they have beautiful memories from that day that’re gonna just be with them forever.”
Revisiting a Lost Tradition
Ali titled the studio section “No Place Like Dome,” inspired by a 2007 Financial Times article about the Oxford Center for Islamic Studies, a domed building designed by architect Abdel Wahid El-Wakil, who previously lectured at Texas A&M in 2015. The course asked students to revisit what Ali calls a “lost tradition” in architecture: the art of building domes.
Ali described domes as an essential architectural element across history, marking important buildings from the Pantheon in Rome to Texas A&M’s own Academic Building.
“Somehow, domes became associated with historical architecture. It seems like we don’t do domes anymore,” Ali said. But for Ali, revisiting the form helps students understand an essential structure and construction logic at full scale.
Ali designed the studio to balance digital tools with physical making so students can better understand how materials and structures behave.
“If they don’t know how to build, or they don’t know how structures stand, or they don’t know how they put architecture together — I don’t see a point for an architect just creating shapes,” Ali explained.
Four Projects, One Semester
The dome served as the final project in a sequence of four assignments focused on materials, geometry and construction.
As director of Texas A&M’s Resource-Based Design Research Lab (RBDR/Lab), Ali studies how industrial by-products can become building materials, systems and components, and drive design decisions. Ali said the structure was only one part of a broader studio designed to connect his circular-economy research to the classroom.
Usually, architecture students start with an ideal form and then search for a material to match it.
Ali flipped that sequence. Students began with a two-week “warm-up” project using one irregular sheet of steel, then carried that same material logic into the dome. The steel came from General Motors a decade ago. After Ali approached the company about his research, it donated 20 tons of sheet metal that the college has been using in research and studios ever since, including the Living Wall installation.
“You don’t always need to kind of design something and then find out a material,” Ali added. “You can actually look at a particular resource with certain limitations and irregularities in it and design with it.”
Next, students studied muqarnas — geometric forms in Islamic architecture that transition from square rooms to circular domes — fabricating small-scale models in wood, plaster and 3D-printed materials.
The third project asked students to design a room with a dome, applying those lessons.
How the Dome Came Together
Geodesic domes use many flat triangles to form a half-sphere — an approach popularized by architect and engineer Buckminster Fuller, whom Ali calls “the father of the geodesic dome.” For the final project, the class built one at full scale.
Students used the College of Architecture’s water jet cutter at the Automated Fabrication & Design Lab on the RELLIS campus to cut 96 triangular panels with pre-positioned bolt holes. Each panel was bent and numbered in the fabrication shop. They also perforated five panels to place at the top to create an “oculus” allowing sunlight to filter inside.
The prefabrication strategy meant that assembly day required only connecting the prepared components.
“As an architecture student, when you build something full scale, you’re not sure if it’s going to stand right,” Ali said. “But then you see it standing together, you start to trust your design intuition.”
Ali credited key support staff who helped make the project possible: woodshop supervisor Jim Titus; Dave Goltz and William DiNisco of the Automated Fabrication & Design Lab at RELLIS; Alex Nipper of the Makerspace; and Larry Scott, the program coordinator who oversees facilities.
“Their role in architectural education is very important and much appreciated,” Ali added.
On View at Langford
Now, the dome remains on view in the Langford A Outdoor Pit as a temporary installation. Ali hopes it will serve as a learning laboratory for the campus community through the spring semester.
“Projects like these, when they stay for a while, become a learning tool,” he said. “They become a point of interest for others to look at and to ask questions and to create some kind of an environment of curiosity.”