Say what you like about Kanye West, but one thing’s undeniable – the man loves his domes.
When the rapper pulled out of a headline slot at this year’s Coachella, it was reportedly due to disagreements with the stage design. Ye wanted a really, really big dome to sit above the festival’s 125,000 festival attendees, and the festival weren’t willing to accomodate his ideas.
Then, in an interview with Forbes earlier this year, he talked about his desire to build “pre-fabricated structures” that could “break the barriers that separate classes... the rich, the middle class and the poor”. He explained that his designs were inspired by the dome-like buildings that exist on the fictional planet of Tattooine in Star Wars.
Kanye seems to be realising his dome dreams today. As TMZ reports, he’s been busy building a whole series of them in Calabasas, the hyper-elite gated community in Los Angeles where he lives – not exactly the sort of place that screams “low income housing”, admittedly. The domes are apparently some 50 feet high, and are being built on 300 acres of land that Kanye bought at some point within the last few years.
In a 2018 interview with Charlamagne tha God, Kanye said that he was “going to be one of the biggest real-estate developers of all time”, likening himself to “what Howard Hughes was to aircrafts and what Henry Ford was to cars”, although we’d hope without all the anti-semitism. “Just the relationships I have with architects, my understanding of space and sacred proportions, just this new vibe, this new energy,” he said. “We gonna develop cities.”
Otherwise, Kanye has been busy with his Sunday Service, which has developed a devout following over the past few months. Now that we mention it, the combination of the Sunday Service and these mystery domes does sort of sound like the start of a cult, doesn’t it?
