Can it be considered prefab?

The search for an engineer is on hold. I spent the week talking to engineers and it became pretty clear that I need to talk to my town. My goal is to see if they will accept the fact that the dome is a stock shell design. I would be great if the town could treat it a bit like a prefab home. This would be the easiest and cheapest solution. It is sort of prefab and sort of not. It depends on how you look at it and doesn't fall firmly into any category. The airform (the big inflatable version of your house) is made in Texas and shipped to the build location and then assembled. The materials that can easily be found locally are not shipped but it is still sort of  prefab. All the engineers I talked to encouraged me to see if the town will accept it as a prefab before we go any further. This would allow us to have the engineering of the superstructure be done by the people that do them all the time. I don't know for sure, but since this dome layout has already been built by Monolithic the engineering must have already been done.

All fingers and toes are crossed for the easiest (and cheapest) solution!

Many people go to workshops at Monolithic and learn the process so they can put up the shell themselves. Its a bit like buying a build your own home kit. We are not quite that ambitious. We will stick to interior stuff and leave the shell to the pros.

This is a photo of one of the workshops held both spring and fall at Monolithic in Texas.

The shell of our dome is from one of Monolithic's stock layouts called the Europa. All we did was customize the interior and place windows/doors where we wanted them. Then the whole thing just gets set over a partial garage/basement instead of a full slab like most of the domes. Assuming they have the general engineering done for this shell, the only parts that need adjustment are the openings.

Here is the Europa that is unfinished and standing at Monolithic in Italy, Texas. The windows and doors are different but the main structure is exactly ours.

The engineers I talked to explained that they would be very expensive for the engineering of the dome shell. This is because they would need to completely re-engineer the shell from scratch in order to sign off on it. They won't use someone else's work and just double check it.... I did ask that. This would be basically reinventing the wheel on something that has already been engineered and built in other locations. I do understand their point but I am not thrilled with the idea of paying someone to learn something new just because of the red tape involved with being licensed in my state.

If the town will accept that this dome is a stock superstructure (handled by Monolithic's engineers) we can have the CT licensed engineers handle the foundation and support for the floor over the basement/garage. This is just how local engineers would deal with a prefab home.

I am currently waiting for the complete set of "standard construction documents" to arrive from Monolithic. As soon as they do, I will go talk to the town with papers in hand. Until then I am still firmly stuck at this roadblock.