Update: Mother's Stackwood Dome

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"A cordwood-geodesic-dome-solar-greenhouse? That's what we're building?!!"

A lot of people attended MOTHER's Summer of 1979 seminars held at our ever improving Ecological Research Center . . . and a good number of those visitors were bighearted enough to chip in on a very unusual building project, a project that just sort of happened to happen!

It all started when Jack Henstridge -the self-educated stackwood construction expert who was teaching his lowcost building technique as part of MOTHER's Earth-Sheltered Homes seminar decided to offer our students a chance to "get their hands dirty". So Jack found an open spot and-along with his pupils began splitting log rounds . . . mixing sand, lime, water, and cement . . . and building one of the billet-and-mortar structures known as a stackwood wall.

Before long, a whole lot of seminar folks got stricken with the legendary "Tom Sawyer fence painting" syndrome and pitched right in on the project. All of a sudden, Jack Henstridge found himself in the midst of an on-the-spot stackwall construction movement. A lot of go-get-'em volunteer workers were sawing and splitting and stacking and slapping cement and sweating up a storm and having a fine of barn-raising-type good time building the gracefully curved structure . . . the only question was, what in blue blazes were all these good-natured people actually constructing?

Well, the half-dome of cordwood has been finished since then, and MOTHER researcher Emerson Smyers has come up with his own innovative way of constructing a translucent geodesic half do me to match it. Emerson has also figured out how to attach the glass-triangled structure to the already completed, south-facing stackwood-and-cement creation . . . and the result will be a geodesic-dome fronted, wood-wall-backed solar greenhouse!