Constructing Symmetric Bamboo Domes and Bamboo Spheres. The Shape of Fullerenes C60 and C80 as a Template For Domes

Abstract

Since more than 20 years I have built many bamboo domes and bamboo spheres of vari- ous sizes in countries like Switzerland, Germany, Japan, Singapore, and the USA. As I have never written a paper on the subject, I will take this chance now to write how a bamboo dome or bamboo sphere is constructed. In honour of my teacher Buckminster Fuller, I used to call a bamboo sphere a BBBB, which stands for Big Bamboo Bucky Ball. The name Bucky ball or fullerene is the scien- tific expression for a carbon molecule. Most of the first bamboo domes or bamboo spheres are based on the soccer ball, consisting of 12 pentagons and 20 hexagons, which for stability reason are constructed not from polygons, but from bamboo-star-elements. In 2019 during a workshop my students assembled a bamboo dome and inserted instead of five pentagonal-star-elements another row of five hexagonal-star-elements. By this mistake a C80 bamboo dome was born! It uses five hexagonal-bamboo-stars more than a C60. To build a C60 dome we need a total of 240 struts to construct 6 pentagonal- and 15 hexagonal-bamboo-stars. To build a C80 dome we need a total of 300 bamboo struts to construct the 6 pentagonal- and the 20 hexagonal-bamboo-stars. Because it is more time consuming to mark all the bamboo-struts and prepare all the flat bamboo-star-elements, than the dome assembly on the site, the transportation of these large bamboo-star-elements was of- ten a problem. We managed to solve this problem by making the bamboo-stars transformable into hyperboloid-like-bamboo-bundles.