Edmund Harriss has solved a problem I’ve been working on off-and-on for nearly 15 years. This is splendid. Back in 1995 or so I was challenged with reducing the waste involved in making geodesic domes for Worldview Livingspace a nascent dome company. I couldn’t get the waste below about 25% because of the poor fit between geodesic triangles and 4’x8′ sheets of plywood. This has been a perennial problem since the start of geodesic domes.

In 2002 I had a breakthrough – do the simplest thing that could possibly work – and I invented the hexayurt. I figured out some simple ways of making bigger hexayurts but never really cracked a geometry for making truly large zero-waste structures.

A couple of weeks ago I asked Edmund about it. A couple of days later I got plans and models. The “nearodesics” are zero-waste like the hexayurt – whole sheets and half sheets are the only pieces used – but are large – about four times the size of the hexayurt, and there is good reason to believe that even larger structures of this basic design are possible using different geometries.

This PDF describes the new large structures and has laser-cut plans for the models you can see at the link above. This is very exciting work indeed, and I’m looking forwards to working with Edmund on building some of these things full sized soon!