Lloyd Kahn, the self taught architect, proved to his own satisfaction that domes don't work, even though he built one of the famous ones. He got started on domes working with J. Baldwin for that experimental boarding school.
But then were these one-off DIY domes what Bucky Fuller had in mind? Not really. He was looking for something more aerospace and able to provide shelter for more rectilinear structures internally.
As for domes leaking, J. Baldwin had a good story regarding how that happened. Baldwin claimed he was so eager to get the dome tabulations out to the hippies that he declassified Joe Clinton's NASA computations too early, when they still had some bugs in them. No wonder they leaked, right?
Keep in mind that oil and grain companies around the world have used domes because they are both free-span and leak-proof, if done right, by industrial engineers.
