Home Architectural Design of the Dome House by McBride Charles Ryan

The Dome House is an extraordinary house located in suburb of Adelaide Australia. The Architects, McBride Charles Ryan design this house to accommodate at the various stages of its life, a family, a single person, and a single person with large visiting family. The architectural design concept of this house to take a perfect shape, the copper sphere, and to remove parts.

By selectively removing parts of the sphere, there is the sense internally of being in and surrounded by garden. The spherical shell also provides beautiful internal spaces on the first floor. The plan evolved into one with a central living area, ancillary rooms were carefully slung either side providing a graceful union between private and communal in family-life. The dome was an office favourite. And a good rough fit of the setback and programmatic displacement.


But the idea of the dome as an incomplete puzzle came about after experiments with hollowing and cutting the object. The accidental superimposition of dome and rectilinear plan resulted in a great variety of new domestic interior spaces. The building which evolved had the extreme heroicism of the revolutionary modernist dome house and yet it could also be read as a ruin of the same.



Those little things that surround houses, the letterbox, seats, sheds, fence, and lights were subsumed as fragments in the system. They become markers and semi-enclosures of outdoor spaces, both courtyards and forecourt. Internal spaces were divided and colour-coded between two categories – ‘the exterior’ (main living area) and ‘within the dome’ (bleached white). The dome house also utilizes solar hot water, a drip garden watering system and double glazing to maximize energy efficiency.