(a) Ball by Donovan Ballantyne

Los Angeles architect Donovan Ballantyne has shared with us his thesis project project (a) Ball, a rather unique take on the geodesic dome concept. Along with the SCI-Arc Selected Thesis Award, this project has been selected as an Exhibit Finalist to have a portion of it fabricated for suckerPUNCH's Land of Tomorrow exhibition, and it was also nominated as a Co-Finalist for HD Magazine's Annual Design Awards.

Project Description from the Architect:

By amplifying the tessellation and porosity if the geodesic dome, I am giving the geodesic dome a face-lift.

This thesis looks to deconstruct the face of the geodesic dome by amplifying its unintentional, yet inherent aesthetic and monumental qualities. I am proposing to bring depth and discontinuity to a typology that has been about continuity and surface. A face with no ears, no eyes, and no nose is not a face. Similarly, a building with no face is not architecture.

The dome has been the most celebrated forms in architecture since its genesis, while the geodesic dome has been adored by scientists and structural engineers. Buckminster Fuller’s interests were only in structural efficiency, not in monumentality or surface effects which were the driving forces of historic domes such as the Pantheon.

This is a 1,700 seat rock star arena sits weightlessly in Los Angeles’s Pershing Square, and acts both as an urban speaker screaming sound outward through its ears, and acts as a sponge absorbing the voice of the city.