GEODESIC DOME FORT

I made a Geodesic Dome Fort with my daughters!

What started off as a small crafts project with my 4 year-old, grew into a months-long bonding experience — and a 5-foot Geodesic Fort in my kids’ bedroom.

One afternoon, my daughter and I were playing with a toy Constructor Set that uses plastic straws and various connectors. While she was building a massive arc out of the tubes, I wondered if we could use the Constructor Set to make a Geodesic Dome.

After looking up some photos and information about Domes from around the world, we became instant fans. But it turned out that making a Dome is much more complicated than I originally guessed, and our Constructor Set was not up for the task.

So as a learning project for me, and a way to bring the concept to life for my kids, I spent the weekend building a 1-foot Dome out of cereal boxes. My daughter used the same triangle patterns to build a Tetrahedron too. We learned how to draw accurate triangles from scratch (using just paper, pen and ruler). We learned words like “Equilateral, Isosceles,” and “Scalene.” And we practiced tracing, cutting, gluing.

As I was cutting all the cardboard with my kids, I kept thinking about my own childhood, when I would build stuff out of boxes with my Dad — like huge Forts. Then I had one of those wonderful nagging thoughts, that just would not go away:

How cool would it be to build a huge Dome Fort out of cardboard boxes??

What followed was 3 months of obsessive research, building scale prototypes with my girls, and refining the design in 3D CAD software. After printing the build patterns, cutting out all 77 triangles, gluing everything together… and of course adding some mood lighting, we finally had what we lovingly call, THE MOLEDOME.

Did I mention this all happened while we packed and moved to a new home?? It’s been a year now, and my girls won’t let me take it down — they love it so much! And I loved getting to build it with them!

For more of my work, check out: https://reyniermolenaar.com

Designer: Reynier Molenaar
Build Team: Metzli Molenaar, Zemi Molenaar
Behind-The-Scenes: Itzel Molenaar