Massimo here! Welcome to Episode Seven of our GeoJourney series. This is a milestone moment! The entire structural frame of Amma One has been installed and it looks unreal!

In just a handful of working days, the install team went from bolting down the first anchor hub to completing all seven rows and installing the final hub at the apex of the dome confirming years of engineering and calculations into the bone structure that will support all the components of Amma One. 

In this series, we're pulling back the curtain on Geoship's go-to-market journey, bringing you closer to both the installation of our first customer-ready dome and the people and processes shaping the future of regenerative living.

What You'll See in this Episode:

• The Dome Taking Shape: We are on-site with Neil Decker, witnessing the complete assembly of the Amma One's structural frame. The process involves bolting anchor hubs to the foundation, working through all seven rows of struts and hubs, and finally, installing the apex hub. You'll see the challenges the team solved, the equipment they used, and the precision required to bring the engineered design into physical reality.

• The Nation’s First Geodesic Community:  Morgan Bierschenk, Geoship co-founder and Chief Vision Officer, takes you to Unity Ridge, our first community project of seven dome homesites just outside Nevada City downtown. This is part of the Golden 108 early adopter program that is trying to redefine how circular communities create network effects that increase in value as they grow.

Amma One: Building the Frame Row by Row

The foundation was poured. The anchor hubs were drilled and bolted into place. Now came the moment of truth: assembling the complete structural frame that proves out everything the engineering team designed, will the structure line up on the top?

Neil Decker, our install lead, guided the team through a methodical process that transformed individual hubs and struts into a complete geodesic structure in just a handful of working days.

Row 1: Creating the Foundation Ring

The process began with the anchor hubs, half-circle components that bolt directly to the foundation. The team laid them out over the embedded bolts and tightened them down to create the stable base ring where the dome structure rests.

Anchor Hubs bolted to the ground and struts lined up for the first bone rock assembly

Once the anchor hubs were secured, the team began installing struts (the diagonal pieces that form the dome's triangulated structure.) The assembly strategy focused on creating triangles: bolt the first strut temporarily in place, add the second strut, then install a hub where they meet. Once two triangle sets were complete, the team could install the horizontal struts that connect them into a complete ring.

Aldo and Jason installing the first two struts off of the anchor hub

First ring is in place!

The Temporary Bolt System:

One of the key innovations is the oval-shaped bolt holes in each hub and strut connection. These allow for adjustment during assembly, giving the team wiggle room to ensure everything aligns perfectly before final fastening.

The team uses temporary bolts with 3D-printed spacers (made in-house) that center the bolt in each hole. This allows them to build the entire ring structure loosely, check all angles and levels, then come back and finalize it.

"Once we've aligned and checked all the angles and checked the level of the triangle, then we'll come back and replace these bolts with Huck bolts. Those will be the permanent bolts that support the structure." — Neil Decker

Row 2: The Interstitial Floor Connection

The second row continues the even triangle pattern established in row one. This design choice serves a specific purpose: it creates a flat connection plane for the interstitial floor, the loft level that divides the dome into two stories. Hubs in the second row include knife plates (flat connection surfaces) where floor joists will attach.

Second row is completed

Rows 3-6: Hexagons, Pentagons, and Geometry

Starting with row three, the dome's geodesic geometry becomes more complex. Instead of uniform triangles, the structure alternates between larger triangles, which form hexagons and smaller triangles which form pentagons.

As the dome rises, each row steps inward, following the curved geometry that gives the structure its strength. But this creates an installation challenge: as struts and hubs are added to the incomplete ring, they want to fall inward before the horizontal struts are installed to complete the ring and support each other.

The team developed a temporary bracing system to pull the structure back outward while they fit the horizontal struts into place; this again is another example of solving real-world assembly challenges that only become apparent during actual installation. This learning and a hole catalogue of upgrades and modifications come from these crucial moments, and the process gets faster and smoother every time.

Scaling Up Equipment:

As the dome grew taller, the Neil’s team brought in additional equipment to support safe, efficient assembly. Two scissor lifts and a boom lift joined the site, allowing crew members to work at height while positioning struts and hubs for the upper rows.

Jacob and Sam on the ceiling of the dome 30ft up!

Row 7: The Apex

After completing rows one through six, only one element remained: installing the apex of the dome. Five struts and one final central hub form this last part, the point where the entire geodesic structure converges.

Installing this final hub required precision, positioning at 30+ feet above the foundation, with all five struts connecting simultaneously to the central point. It's the culminating moment where the complete geometry locks into place.

"Completing this frame is an amazing milestone for Geoship. What it proves is that all of our design work, engineering, and planning is actually bringing this dome into reality beautifully and we are so excited to start the installation of the exterior skins." - Neil

Why This Matters

Completing this frame is validation that our engineered system works in the real world. 

The challenges the team solved during this first installation, like the bracing strategies and the equipment needs, have been meticulously recorded in our installation manual. Every dome that follows now will go up faster and more efficiently. What took a handful of days for Amma One will take less time for dome #2, even less for dome #10, and become a refined, repeatable process very soon. This is how we are transforming housing from one-off construction projects into a scalable product.

We will continue to update you from the Amma One site soon showing the installation of the beautiful and strong exterior skins, the fixed and operable windows and with the application of Bondrock to crystallize all the parts together.

Unity Ridge: Geoship's First Community

With Amma One's frame complete and the following stages well under way, one of the questions that is becoming more pressing is: where will the next domes go? How can we use these next domes to serve Geoship's vision of community building? 

Morgan takes us to Unity Ridge where Geoship's first community is taking shape here, the proving ground for a new model of regenerative living.

The Location:

Unity Ridge sits on a beautiful ridge just five minutes outside downtown Nevada City, California. The community consists of seven adjacent homesites, each approximately two acres, immersed in the oak forest, with privacy and views of the Sierra Nevada mountains.

"Unity Ridge is really meant to be a proving ground for a new normal of housing, which we think of as regenerative community architecture. It's where people participate in creating the neighborhoods of the future, built on the principles of permaculture." — Morgan Bierschenk

What does this actually mean? Permaculture is a design system for sustainable living that mimics natural ecosystems to create resilient, self-sustaining environments.  It integrates land, resources, people, and communities through ethical principles and design strategies that prioritize long-term ecological health and human well-being. Our idea doesn’t stop with designing a home, we have been thinking about changing the way communities are thought out and built from the ground up.

Regenerative Community Architecture:

Unity Ridge represents a fundamentally different approach to residential development, built on principles that will foster belonging, and designed to reconnect residents to one another and the natural world. Instead of land being purchased by a developer, bulldozed, built on and then sold, this process is an experiment to co-create a village with the future inhabitants part of the process since the beginning. How the raw land is developed will be determined by the needs and the co-vision of the community that will live there.

This is also a historic achievement: Unity Ridge will be the first non-rectilinear housing community in the United States. Every neighborhood in America besides some rare examples consists of box-shaped structures on rectilinear lots. Unity Ridge breaks that pattern, introducing the Circle as the organizing principle for human habitat. 

The Golden 108 Early Adopter Program:

Unity Ridge is the first community in Geoship's Golden 108 program. It is an early adopter initiative that will place approximately the first 30-50 Geoship homes within an hour of the Nevada City region near our HQ, with additional installations in other high-demand locations across California and eventually the nation.

The program aims to create network effects by establishing dome communities in strategic regions rather than scattering individual domes across conventional neighborhoods. Why? Because the value proposition of dome living increases when domes are clustered together.

Network Effects in Housing:

Morgan introduces here a powerful concept: applying the coordination layer to housing the same way it's been applied to commerce (Amazon), travel (Airbnb), and transportation (Uber).

This is a powerful concept that is at the core of the golden 108 initiative:

• A dome next to another dome creates shared context and community

• A cluster of domes creates a large community with aligned values

• Multiple dome communities networked together amplify value across the entire network

As the network grows, the value increases both for individual homeowners and for the broader movement toward regenerative living. Unity Ridge is the first node in that network, with additional communities to be announced soon.

Bringing People, Land, and Capital Together:

Another aspect of the coordination layer is about connecting people who want to live regeneratively with land that supports that vision and capital that makes it possible, creating an integrated ecosystem rather than forcing individuals to navigate the complex process alone.

This is the beginning of a new model for how human communities can live in greater harmony with the earth, in structures aligned with our innate sense of balance and proportion and nurturing connectivity.

From One Dome to Regenerative Communities

Now the frame of Amma One stands complete; a physical manifestation of years of engineering, material science, and systems thinking. But this is just the beginning.

Unity Ridge awaits the arrival of its first domes, and communities beyond that are being planned and prepared.

Many of you have been following this journey since the earliest days, believing that we can build differently and live in greater alignment with the planet. Thank you for being part of this transformation. Whether you're an investor, a Golden 108 participant, or someone who simply believes in the vision, you're helping build the future of regenerative community living by sharing this vision.

The circle is taking shape and we're building this future together; isn’t that fun and exciting?
Thanks again for reading, watching and supporting us every step of the way.

With gratitude

Massimo Massarotto
Geoship Team