Dome housing at University of California Davis will be preserved

from The Sacramento Bee: More than 200 students at the University of California Davis and other volunteers plan to help repair a collection of residential domes, known as Baggins End, that the school had closed earlier this year. Now the university is ready to sign a five-year lease with a group called the Solar Community Housing Association to manage the neighborhood, also known as the Domes, until its replacement, dubbed Domes 2.0, can be built. If all goes well, students will reoccupy the 14 igloo-like structures later this school year. UC Davis officials had ordered residents out of the structures as of July 31; they had concluded that the prefabricated fiberglass-and-foam huts – erected in the early 1970s as an experiment in sustainable living – were falling apart and would be too costly to fix.