It’s back! After a year and a half hiatus, the Monolithic Dome Builders Workshop resumes again in September 2021. Coronavirus restrictions are lifting. Travel is returning. We can finally gather to teach, discuss, and build another Monolithic Dome.

It’s time to say goodbye to the South Sawmill Lodge. Randy South’s family of South Industries started the 90-foot diameter dome in 2009 on the old family homestead in Island Park, Idaho. Over the next four years, the family squeezed in time to finish the dome which became a lodge and reunion center rented out to dozens of families over the years. The lodge sold this spring.

How big is a Monolithic Dome that stores 10,000 tons of ammonium nitrate? Or 750,000 bushels of corn? Or 34,000 metric tonnes of gypsum? These are straightforward questions without quick answers — until now.

Today’s throwback is the story of an innovative school with an equally innovative campus — the largest underground educational campus in the world. When the school needed a new gymnasium they sought a solution as innovative as building underground — the Monolithic Dome.

Built among bluffs and wooded hills, Park College overlooks the Missouri River. That, in itself, is not unusual. But buildings constructed largely of limestone mined from below the campus is, and that’s just what Park College has at its home campus.

“No one who attended the first graduation at our new Breckon Center will ever forget it,” said Rita Weighill of Park University. The new twin-dome sports facilities is a first-class sports venue added to the extensive underground campus at Parkville, Missouri.