The Bowl of Heaven is a “tremendous object in space” novel, similar in scope to Niven’s original Ringworld books. Like Ringworld, it involves a massive construct — in this case a hemisphere — that has several million times the surface area of earth. A crew of human explorers comes across the hemisphere and sends an away mission to investigate.
It’s a better novel than Ringworld; that had spectacle going for it, but Niven’s characterizations were often cookie cutter and his plotting tended toward the unbelievable Benford grounds Niven, and the resulting book is all the better for it.