By George Hart for the Museum of Mathematics

Maybe you’ve always wanted to build your own geodesic dome home, but consider that too large of a project. You can build up your skills on a smaller scale by constructing a chicken coop. Anthony Liekens built this lovely one-meter geodesic dome so his chickens can lay in style.

The construction uses two shapes of pine triangles, which are screwed together on the inside with steel plumber’s strapping, then caulked in all of the joints. The pentagons are each made of five isosceles triangles and connect to each other via equilateral triangles.

Anthony’s step-by-step instructions are here. I like how it is elevated on five posts, in consonance with the five-fold symmetry about its center.

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