"Imagine living outdoors indoors in a transparent dome, picking organically grown vegetables right in your kitchen, sleeping in a bed under luxuriant trees or slung beneath the opened apex, comfortable regardless of the weather outside. Your autonomous garden home is heated and cooled by the sun, which also provides electricity and hot water. Solar heat is stored in translucent water tanks that nurture edible fish and furnish nutrient rich irrigation water for the plants"
"Let us imagine an enclosure of virtually any scale that lets sunlight into itself and that prevents heat from escaping when the interior microclimate is too cool. It also reflects sunlight, and it dumps heat out into the night sky when its interior is too warm . Let us further conceive that, within this enclosure, sufficient heat could be stored in the ground to provide several days worth , even if the sun did not shine. We would then have a system that would maintain a very stable interior microclimate without requiring mechanical heating or cooling Let us then also imagine a building that is designed not only to provide shelter from the weather, but also to provide some food; fresh water: liquid and solid waste disposal ; space heating and cooling; power for cooking and refrigeration; and electricity for communications, lighting and household appliances.
Image at top:
"Peering Through the Cosmic Sphere" is a black/white woodcut by Camille Flammarion, Paris 1888.
The color bioshelter above is a linear pillow bioshelter by architect Malcolm Wells, 1980.