Every year, 10,000 Danes come together for the Folkemødet, a celebrated “political festival” of spirited policy debate, which sounds extremely Danish. Later this year, they’ll be doing so in an incredible space: a beautiful, wood-and-steel geodesic dome.
Tejlgaard & Jepsen, the architects behind the dome, actually built it last year as a temporary meeting space for the Folkemødet — after the festival, it was dismantled and removed. But the space was such a success, the two young architects were invited back to rebuild it as a permanent space for the event — which will happen this summer on the Danish island of Bornholm.
You can read more about the construction of the dome here, but the basic idea was to take a standard geodesic dome — made up of a spherical lattice of triangular forms, which distribute the structural stress equally across the face — and extrude pieces of it outward. That made it possible to create multiple spaces within the dome (a major shortcoming of geodesic architecture, in general), supported by a steel and wood lattice covered in reclaimed wood and acrylic plastic.
The permanent building — which will be its third, permanent incarnation — will include new details, like bathrooms and a basement, to make it tenable in the long-run to citywide events. Pretty cool — if only Bucky was around to see his ideas being used to house a national political debate. That was kind of the whole idea, wasn’t it? [Tejlgaard & Jepsen; ArchDaily]
