Creating a Geodesic Dome

pasted as is from Wiki

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1. Geodesic Domes

Ever see a geodesic dome or sphere and wonder how they are made, or if there's something more behind the mathematical beauty of these shapes?

Let's learn a bit about geodesic domes, and then make one ourselves!

2. Geodesic Dome basics

Most geodesic domes start with the icosahedron, which has 20 sides, each made up of a equilateral triangle (a triangle that has 3 equal sides).

Icosahedrons are also known as d20's by gamers before video games, but that's for another tutorial.

2.1. Turning a icosahedron into a dome

To turn a icosahedron into a dome, we'd want to "pull out" each of the triangle sides of the icosahedron to become more spherical.

Here you can see by adding a smaller triangle, and pulling that triangle out, we can get closer to a sphere! If we were to add a smaller triangle inside of each side of our friendly icosahedron, we'd end up much closer to a sphere.

2.2. Geodesic Frequency

Geodesic domes are named by their frequency. What does frequency mean? Let's start with our favorite icosahedron.

On the left, the icosahedron is made up of 20 triangle sides,.

The next shape has each triangle face of the icosahedron divided into a smaller triangle. Since the triangle is divided, it's known as a 2 frequency dome.

Similarly, the next sphere is has 3 subdivisions, resulting in a 3 frequency sphere.