Rick Crandall and the Monolithic Dome: A Story of Art, Architecture, and Purpose

Musicians think in musical notes. Writers revel in words. Singers awaken with songs on their lips. Frederick “Rick” Crandall designs domes, and he thinks round. His creations have housed, harbored and helped thousands of people. He delights in seeing his imaginings burst into being, becoming beacons in the darkness, shelter from the storms. Crandall believes in creating the best, safest buildings—so he designs Monolithic Domes.

“The Airform method of construction as developed by the South brothers now has made it the most sustainable, dependable and economical means of sheltering and protecting people,” Crandall said. “It meets climate change concerns better than any other system available today and is the most versatile solution in many applications.”

Crandall has been instrumental in the creation and design of more than 250 Monolithic Dome projects and at least 450 Monolithic Domes. He could not name a single favorite dome, but a project in Indonesia remains paramount in his heart and memory.

New Ngelepen, Indonesia

In 2006, Rebecca South, co-founder and then President of the Domes for the World Foundation (DFTW), contracted with Crandall to complete a feasibility study with her in Indonesia. The World Association of Nongovernmental Organizations (WANGO)—who were the stewards of funding donated by Mohamed Ali Alabbar of Emaar Properties—gave them a broad directive: DFTW was to research and define a project costing under one-million USD that would utilize Monolithic’s technology to help address the humanitarian crisis in the wake of a 6.3 earthquake that left 1.3 million people homeless on the Island of Java, along the Bantul Plain near Yogyakarta.

Crandall and South plunged into the country, making contacts, interviewing city, church and state officials, networking with NGOs and consulting with Gadja Mada University(GMU). After a meeting with Dr. Ikaputra at GMU, they decided to focus their efforts on rebuilding a small hillside village called Ngelepen.

Villagers in Ngelepen witnessed their homes destroyed during the quake, their loved ones swept away in flowing mud. Their village had been utterly wiped from existence.

After talking with enthusiastic locals and village elders, the team worked with homeowners and other village, city and district leaders to design the homes and layout for the new village site. A plan for 72 homes arranged in groups of 12 started to take shape. Each group of 12 dome homes centered around one of six 32-foot domes called “MCKs” that would house communal bathroom, shower and laundry facilities. Plans for drilling wells to provide the new village with potable water at every tap in every house and MCK were finalized.

At the ground-breaking ceremony, families received markers—stakes—to show the spot where their new dome homes would be built, symbols of a new beginning, hope after deep despair. One by one, they placed those stakes, determined to begin anew.

One woman, frail and heartbroken, had lost all her relatives, every one, and when the time came for her to place a marker for where her new home would be built, a man pulled the stake from her hand. He would be her landlord, he insisted, since she had no male relatives to represent her.

Crandall stepped in. He took the stake from the man’s hand and looked into the woman’s eyes. 
 
“I will be your son,” he said calmly. “You will own this home.”

The woman passed away not long afterward, but at the end of her life, she had shelter and a place to call home.

Because of money saved during construction, DFTW was able to build a mosque, a community center and a school in addition to the 72 homes and 6 MCKs. Crandall worked consistently and constantly on the Indonesian project.

Of their time in Indonesia, South said, “Rick was meticulous, fun, kind, and tireless. He’s a couple of decades my senior, but keeping up with him in that equatorial heat was no easy feat. He was incredible in meetings. He is an unbelievable artist and would quickly sketch exterior profiles, floor plans and village layouts in such a beautiful way. I remember watching the lights go on as each person we talked to caught the vision of what we were trying to achieve. Before Indonesia, Rick was my favorite architect, but after working with him over there, he became one of my favorite people, a personal hero and somebody I have since always tried to emulate.”

Mongolian Orphanage

Crandall embraces the challenge of hard, grueling work, and nowhere more than in Hongor, Mongolia, in a country so cold that they could work only seven months a year, as blizzards raged the other five months. They built an orphanage on land so far removed from any town that the work crews had to create a road to the village before they could begin work on the concrete domes.

“No one knew where Hongor was,” he said. “We had to build a road to get our equipment there. We brought wheelbarrows, and they were so glad. It was the first time they had ever seen wheelbarrows. It was an area known for its famous horses, and some of them named their wheelbarrows after those famous horses. We installed their first flush toilets, the first in that part of the country.”

Everybody in the area started learning English. The orphanage was built at the request of Jerry and Susan Smith of LifeQwest. The Smiths took in children brought to them and told harrowing stories of going out into landfill areas and recovering babies alive who had been left there. They built three Monolithic Domes for that orphanage. Although the organization eventually lost control of the buildings, for a decade they did good work there in the domes. Crandall has stayed in touch with some of the people he met.

Chateau de Lumiere

Helping children find their way to safety means much to Crandall, a consummate family man. He and his wife of 52 years, Melody, had eight children, 39 grandchildren, and three great-grandchildren. His wife was the business manager for his company. She passed away in May 2020. They had resided in the beautiful Le Chateau de Lumiere, and he loved living in a Monolithic Dome.

“It’s hard to describe,” Crandall said. “It’s a feeling of security different from living in any other structure.” Le Chateau de Lumiere—the Castle of Light—consisted of two 23-foot diameter domes with 25-foot high walls joined by a 250-square-foot glass block structure for 2,800 total square feet. Now, he lives in a remote cabin in the woods in Prescott, Arizona, with squirrels as his nearest neighbors. He’s working on plans to build a dome home for himself again.

“I’ve had a good life, well-blessed and very happy,” Crandall said. “I am close to my family, and they visit me here, along with the squirrels and the deer. I’m writing books.” And he’s still working on selective dome projects.

Ever since he began designing domes in 1995, he has learned something new from every project, and he has never stopped exploring and expanding new possibilities. His books include Domes for Tomorrow: A Sketch Book of Monolithic Domes, and Design Ideas for the Monolithic Dome Home. He pioneered the basic principles that have maximized practicality for minimal cost: Keep it symmetrical. Do not mix circles and squares. All circles have a radius point, so align to this radius. Utilize the greatest volume available in the center of the dome. (Design Ideas, p.3) “People are creatures of habit and stereotypes, so my job (and yours) is to introduce it gently, getting it out of the strange and weird category to something people understand as truly worthwhile,” he said.

Designing Monolithic Domes combines his natural creativity, his artistic talent and his desire to bring beautiful buildings into the world. Crandall had been a landscape painter and an art teacher in high school and college. He created illustrations, murals, architectural renderings, theater work, museum displays, and models. He owned Crandall Studios, painting, creating and working as a framer and designer. That creativity, artistry and ability to think beyond established boundaries fueled his interest in Monolithic Domes.

First Domes

“Art and construction came together in 1984 and 1985 when I passed the national exams and became an architect,” he said. “I worked for an architectural firm, and a friend introduced me to concrete domes. The Payson School District wanted to create a sports event center, and I suggested a sports dome, but they went with another architect. Then, three months later (I’d opened my own shop and sat there twiddling my thumbs) when the School Board decided to build a dome, and they let the other fellows go.”

He told the Board he could make a sports center out of a Monolithic Dome. He hadn’t done it yet, but he had confidence. When he got the offer, he called up David B. South, who had created the Monolithic Dome with his two brothers, and asked numerous questions. What he learned impressed and astonished him.

“Everything he said that sounded fanciful, extreme, and impossibly optimistic turned out to be absolutely correct,” Crandall said. “The building could go up quickly at half the cost. It was absolutely dependable and would not burn down. You see, it takes someone willing to change their own thinking to experience that kind of epiphany.”

The School Board also asked him to design Frontier Elementary. Crandall had found his niche in architecture, doing work that no one before him ever had done, imagining a myriad of uses and creative ways to design Monolithic Domes. They made the first Monolithic Dome elementary school in Arizona, and now there are 14 dome schools in that state.

“After Frontier Elementary was completed, I never advertised again, anywhere, ever,” Crandall said. “One after the other, people came to me wanting domes, domes, domes. I haven’t seen a common denominator as yet for those who buy monolithic concrete domes. Many are introduced to the concept without having a choice but soon adapt and adjust to the new way of thinking.”

Innovators

Crandall worked at the forefront of this new industry with David B. South, Jack Boyt, and Arnold Wilson, whom he considered the true Titans of Monolithic Domes. He founded 922 LLC with John Edom, and founded Crandall Designs. The excitement of envisioning and creating Monolithic Domes has never gotten old.

“The origination of the Dome industry was fascinating,” Crandall said. “David was a maverick. He talked me into it. Of course, I was very hungry at the time. He was a wonderful man with wonderful children. I watched them grow up for 30 years, and I’m glad to say that they have become my very close friends. I could talk to his son Dave South all day.”

New ideas tend to take a while to take hold and flourish. Crandall said he felt he was working with fine, fast, free-flowing ideas, something that had never been done in this way.

“Remember, fifty percent of people don’t plan ahead and won’t try anything new. Forty percent will only try it if someone else does it first. Only ten percent are true pioneers pushing the boundaries of knowledge,” he said. “These very rounded numbers vary between different locations and types of people. The youngest are more open to change and adaptation. A lot of people will do something if someone does it first, and trying something different means history gets made.”

Along with Crandall’s lightning-fast creative thinking comes quick, irrepressible humor. He has an architect friend in Mesa, Arizona, named Gary Spraggins, and the two of them appreciate domes and working on them. Before long, folks started calling them Dome and Domer. He thoroughly enjoys working with people who share his passion for Domes.

“We don’t take ourselves too seriously,” he said. “We are regular, normal people who’ve experienced an epiphany. We’re born in square hospitals, and we live in square houses, so thinking round can bring up anxiety and questions. Your mind actually changes when you experience conversion from square to round thinking and possibilities. I would be thrilled with a 30 percent acceptance of Domes, a huge increase.”

Indestructibility

The sheer indestructibility of Monolithic Domes, their natural beauty, and their diversity mean that domes will be around for a long time, Crandall said.

“Concrete is one of the most abundant natural materials on earth and the easiest to mine,” Crandall explained. “It is the most permanent when assembled properly with an exceptionally long life over any other method.”

When Crandall joined up, he began to hear dome stories of all kinds. Saddam Hussein, then an ally of the US, had twenty-eight-grain storage Monolithic Domes built and a Monolithic Dome mosque in Basrah, Iraq.

“The British Air Force called and asked, ‘Did you build this? We’ve been trying to bomb it, and the bombs just bounce off,’” Crandall said. “The only way they could penetrate it at all was to use iron piercing perpendicular to the surface, and they were extremely impressed. The British Air Force made it their headquarters with a new skylight, and it got reused—a true testament to Dome durability.”

“And in Turkiye, after an earthquake, with rubble everywhere, a Monolithic Dome still stood strong. They rolled it to one side, rebuilt, and put the Dome back on top,” he said. “I could tell you so many stories! They survive tornados, hurricanes, fires. Several underground bomb shelters have domes, and I could not tell you their locations because it’s secret, but they look like little hills with trees, and if you look closely, you can see little doors and windows poking out of the hills.”

Continual Creativity

Crandall continually imagines more ways for Monolithic Domes to enhance and improve daily life. He envisions an entire village could be built beneath a Monolithic Dome Sky Shell, in which the inner surface is smoothed and painted, then lit to illuminate the dome so that it feels like being outdoors. The interior would look like a city park with grass, trees, and windows looking onto the park, always designed to resemble a bright, sunny day, easing depression.

In its heyday, the five architects in his company, Crandall Designs, covered all fifty states and five additional countries. Crandall’s work includes international Monolithic Dome projects built in five countries and more than 50 feasibility studies for architects, clients and municipalities.

Crandall has designed educational facilities, sports venues, churches, beach houses, mountain homes, theme parks, multipurpose centers, wellness centers, libraries, movie theaters and shopping centers. He also has conducted numerous private research projects concerning Monolithic Dome development, many with David B. South and other Monolithic Dome Institute personnel for industry development.

Recently, he’s designed the Kauai Resilience Project, class A fireproof Monolithic Domes that can outlast earthquakes, stand through 290 mph wind, and even be used as a fallout shelter.

Crandall’s designs can also be sources of safe and lasting pleasure. Crandall designed a proposed theme park in Quiquichara, China, with a lagoon, a space station, a winter wonderland, and a cave of wonders. His designs include three connected 150-foot (46 m) domes for Living Word Church, and the soaring Global Temple of Divine Administration.

Crandall said that the popularity of the Star Wars movies supported the dome industry, and soon, the question arose as to whether a Monolithic Dome could be built on Mars. The fractured sand on Mars differs from soft, round, beach wave action sand, and Mars experiences extreme dust storms and sandblasting. The conclusion came that an Airform could be buried and expanded and thus protected from the sandstorms. ”All we have to do is get an Airform there,“ Crandall said.

Whether designing personal castles for residential homeowners or structures that thousands will utilize, Crandall focuses on the specific details that will add to the uniqueness of each vision. He chooses vertical or tilted openings and augmented archways that are pointed or round. He considers whether a stemwall ought to be masonry, foam block, or sprayed-in-place shotcrete. He chooses transitions to rectangular openings, be they skylights, notched openings with formed shotcrete, wood dormers added over Airforms or augments, round and square.

Monolithic Domes can be ball-shaped, pillow domes, oval, spherical, elliptical, polygon, or caterpillars with round forms interlocking. Lately, Crandall has been considering the tower dome, and he’s done the conceptual sketches for a hurricane-resistant housing project, a twelve-floor condominium high rise with twenty-four apartments in two towers, soaring 116 feet high by 56 feet in diameter. The details will vary, but the intention remains constant: Monolithic Domes can provide protection for centuries.

“In all my years of designing Monolithic Domes, I’ve constantly discovered new ways,” Crandall said. “Domes have endless possibilities.”