Domes

webpage from the Buckyverse Zotero collection.

Page content (https://www.shelterpub.com/domes)

Contact Us Use the form on the right to contact us. You can edit the text in this area, and change where the contact form on the right submits to, by entering edit mode using the modes on the bottom right. Form Block This form needs a storage option. Double-click here to edit this form, and tell us where to save form submissions in the Storage tab. Learn more 123 Street Avenue, City Town, 99999 (123) 555-6789 email@address.com You can set your address, phone number, email and site description in the settings tab. Link to read me page with more information. Home Building Books Fitness Books Shelter Merch Lloyd Kahn Contact Shelter Publications Info Email Search Menu Shelter Publications Info Email Search Home Building Books Fitness Books Shelter Merch Lloyd Kahn Contact Domes A collection of essays... REFRIED DOMES SMART, BUT NOT WISE DOMEBUILDER'S BLUES DOMES VS. RECTANGLES Refried Domes It was the call last night that finally did it. “Lloyd, a friend of mine just built a dome in Big Sur and wants to know what to cover it with.” A few days earlier there had been the call from a dome designer I’d met back in the dome glory days. He said there was so much call for information that now he was looking to republish a book he’d written on domebuilding. — Deja vu, all over again. As Yogi Berra said. I started building domes in Big Sur in 1966 . Then in 1969 I spent two years overseeing a domebuilding program at an “alternative” high school in the California hills. We had to house about 50 students and a dozen or so teachers. We were inspired by Buckminster Fuller to work on solving “mankind’s” housing problems, and we took it upon ourselves to experiment with as many materials as possible. We built domes out of plywood, aluminum, sheet metal, fiberglass, ferro-cement, cedar shingles, asphalt shingles, and even nitrogen-inflated vinyl pillows. With all the interest in domes and other alternative concepts of the times, and due to the extent of our dome design and experimentation, we soon became the focus and clearing house for the counterculture’s domebuilding movement of the late ’60s/’70s. By 1970 it was obvious that there was enough information and interest for some type of publication. We borrowed the Whole Earth Catalog’s production facilities and in 1970 produced Domebook One and then in 1971 Domebook 2, which went on to sell 175,000 copies. Throughout this time we maintained a network of dome builders and designers. By then we had built 17 domes at Pacific High School, and to tell the truth, the workmanship was less than exquisite. The time factor (just a few months to beat the rains), the age factor (teenage workmanship), the cost factor ($1200 per dome), and of course, the dope factor, all took their toll in the fine product. Yet we learned a lot. Two years was about as long as the school lasted in full force. Things began to deteriorate on all fronts (for one thing, 50-odd teenagers do not make a good living situation) and I left the school in 1971 and bought a lot in a small coastal town. I wanted to try building one last dome on my own, without the constraints of communal living. This one I built carefully. It had a lightweight exposed wooden framework inside and was paneled with used reddish rough-sawn Douglas fir. The exterior was covered with redwood shakes that I split from driftwood logs and there was a long plexiglas skylight that focused on a pine tree outside. It ended up being featured in a two-page color spread in Life magazine. By then I was getting even more calls and letters (and drive-by/drop-in unannounced visitors) and all the attention made me think very carefully about domes. I liked this dome far better than any I’d ever been in, but the problems of dome construction and dome living did nothing but increase. It had by now been five years of growing frustration and the disadvantages were overwhelmingly obvious. Domes weren’t practical, economical or aesthetically tolerable — at least for my life and sensibilities. Finally, for a variety of reasons I sold the dome and dismantled it. At the same time we discontinued publication of Domebook 2, even though it was still selling well. A cycle completed, a process carried full circle: mission impossible . . . . We then went on to publish two more books on building: Shelter (1973) and Shelter II (1978) . The first of these was even more popular than Domebook 2 . It showed an intriguing variety of building methods from all over the world and a richness of human spirit in people providing their own shelter. Both these books outlined the advantages of rectilinear construction (and most notably stud-frame construction) for building one’s own home in North America. The disadvantages of domes were also well documented. Yet since that time — in fact since Domebook 2 went out of print in 1973 — we’ve had a steady stream of calls and letters on domes: what do you think of them as homes, do they leak, where can I find chord factors, can I trust dome salesmen . . . We kept meaning to print something up, but the years slipped by. As I said, the call the other night did it. The same old questions, 16 years later, but now increasing in frequency. (Maybe a lot of the bad ideas of the ’60s are resurfacing now along with the good ones.) Enough procrastination! Here’s our answer to all those dome questions. This hastily-assembled publication has a two-fold purpose: To present our hard-earned opinion of domes as homes. (They don’t work.) To reprint some long out-of-print mathematical information from Domebook 2 . (Models do work.) Along the way there are comments on plastics and “appropriate” technology, letters from readers, insights on mega-design and the little-known story of the world’s first geodesic dome. The other day a friend asked what we were working on. “Well, this thing called Refried Domes, about why domes don’t work…etc. “Aren’t domes passé?” she asked. No, I said, there’s apparently a whole new generation of people out there now asking questions again. And then it occurred to me that although we did publish most of the information herein 10-15 years ago, it was never assembled as a whole. Here then are the results of an experimental voyage. The bitter and the sweet. The great idea (!) and the concrete reality. The ideological principle and the physical follow through . . . Mamas, don’t let your mathematicians grow up to become builders . . . — Lloyd Kahn October, 1989 Return to Top Smart But Not Wise Further Thoughts on Domebook 2 , Plastics, and Whiteman Technology by Lloyd Kahn “He looked upon us as sophisticated children – smart but not wise .” – Saxton T. Pope (said of Ishi) This article was prepared a year after publication of Domebook 2 , reflecting then, as now, our changing views and evolution of thoughts on shelter. ”Those who cannot remember the past are doomed to repeat it.” — George Santayana 1863-1952 Metaphorically, our work on domes now appears to us to have been smart: mathematics, computers, new materials, plastics. Yet reevaluation of our actual building experiments, publications, and feedback from others leads us to emphasize that there continue to be many unsolved problems with dome homes. Difficulties in making the curved shapes livable, short lives of modern materials, and as-yet-unsolved detail and weatherproofing problems. We now realize that there will be no wondrous new solution to housing, that our work, though perhaps smart, was by no means wise. In the past year, we have discovered that there is far more to learn from wisdom of the past: from structures shaped by imagination, not mathematics, and built of materials appearing naturally on the earth, than from any further extension of whiteman technoplastic prowess. In May, 1972, about a year after we published Domebook 2 , I received an invitation to participate in a conference at MIT Responsive Housebuilding Technology. Out of curiosity I decided to go, not thinking too much about the fact that I’d been invited as the editor of the Domebook , and that since that time I’d more or less given up on domes and was disillusioned with new materials and high technology as applied to building. I decided to bring along slides and videotapes of house building in Northern California: shacks, driftwood buildings, interviews with real builders, and on video, the contrast between a crane dropping in a prefab and 25 men picking up and moving a small building: Machine vs. human energy. So my son Peter and I took off for Cambridge. Our first helicopter ride, from Sausalito, smelly exhaust, a dreadful machine, to the SF airport. Then in a 747, five hours to cross the country! The huge jet was not 1/5th full, a terrible waste of fuel. When I went into the bathroom, the finely built one piece aluminum washbasin and toilet stand gave me an insight into Buckminster Fuller’s ideas of housing. Since Bucky has been constantly traveling now for many years, he spends an enormous amount of time in planes. He has always loved machines and metal (see the Phantom Captain chapter in Nine Chains to the Moon ) and his fascination with air flight and aerospace technology lead him to dig aluminum efficiency such as the 747 in-flight bathroom Bucky and many others (see Le Corbusier: Towards a New Architecture) think of houses as machines. Probably because machines were just beginning to demonstrate their remarkable clanking capabilities when Bucky and Le Corbusier were at impressionable ages, their image is of houses being mass-produced, standardized, and now computerized. But I’m getting ahead of myself. Robot Architect The conference turned out to contain some ideas of architecture which made me gasp. Even though MIT has published some excellent books on native structures, the dominant theme (ironically) of Responsive Housebuilding Technology was computerized plastic flash. Right around the corner from the conference room there was a large computer being worked on by students, staff and others. It’s in its own suite of rooms, with homey looking exposed wires running between machines, plexiglas panels so you can see the electronic wizardry, and rock and roll on the radio. The computer is called “The Architecture Machine” and its creators seek to build an intelligent machine, one that they can have a dialogue with. Robot architect. It took me few days to figure out what the machine could do, and was being trained to do, but here it is, and realize dear reader, that this is architecture at a leading American university, and that the project is well funded, and well respected: Meet the robot architect and its functions (with code names): SEEK is a mechanical device hooked into the computer that will pick up, stack and rearrange cubical blocks on command from the computer. In a museum exhibition two years ago, the machine, which can handle 300 cubes, and a colony of 60 hamsters were put together. The idea was to have the computer stack the blocks in a way the hamsters liked. The hamsters tended to knock over the blocks, running in and out (looking for their natural environment, but this was overlooked by the researchers) and SEEK was to figure out which way the hamsters liked the blocks stacked, and arrange them in that manner. Apparently what happened was the hamsters didn’t like any way the machine stacked blocks, they didn’t like the blocks, they didn’t like being in the museum, and they just knocked blocks over. But the idea of it all, in the words of one of the computer team ” …If this idea was carried out in a peopled world, perhaps a giant SEEK could sense the behavior and actions of its people and provide a responsive, useful and friendly living space, better than what now exists …” GREET is a doorway device of photocells which will recognize whoever passes through the doorway. Work is now in progress “testing the machine for ways of recognizing height, weight, stride, foot size, i.e. relatively constant characteristics.” A series of photocells will sense the silhouette of passers-through the door and will compare it with a dictionary of well-known silhouettes and say “Hello Richard,” or whatever, as you pass through. The voice part of the computer is called SPEAKEASY. HUNCH is a project whereby the computer will be able to understand sketches. In this way the architect can feed his rough sketches in to the machine and the scribblings will be made into perfect curves or angles and speed up the design process. There are other things the machine can do, like a three-TV screen unit which can display multi-images of the same scene from different points of view. But that is just a quick layman’s view of it. Now, also hanging around at MIT are pneumatic structure designers. Air buildings have been used at fairs, exhibitions, ice rinks, and now the technology is well enough along so that architects are able to construct them. Artists started out several years ago with polyethylene, and some designers made nice enough looking structures so that now plastic manufacturers, schools, etc. are interested. They appeal to the consumer-oriented US public, as they are even newer than domes, and are flashier media architecture. This computer/airbuilding/plastics thing that seemed to be on so many of these architects’ minds jarred me, as it seemed roughly parallel with a logical extension of some assumptions I’d made 3-4 years earlier on the idea of housebuilding technology. The assumption, encouraged for a time in my mind by Bucky Fuller, was that we will have to depend upon new technologies, new materials, new designs to solve the housing crisis on an overpopulated earth. Some scant background: Looking for new solutions to making family sized houses led me into building and helping others with a good number of geodesic domes, We were inspired, we had a vision, and we were in a hurry — we had people waiting for a roof over their heads. We tried every material we could get cheap enough wood, plywood, cardboard, sheet metal, aluminum; fiberglass/Veetra cloth/ polypropylene/all manner of horrid chemical-caulks/vinyl/polyethylene/plexiglas/Lexan/ABS plastic/steel and on and on. At this time I was intrigued with the space program, video, computer art, the Moog synthesizer — and I decided we would try any hi-tech application we could get our hands on. Our work at Pacific High School, as described in Domebook 2, was exploring materials. We stuck to geodesic geometry as it was simple and gave us a rather neutral framework to work with in each case. Our main work, often missed by people thinking of the dome work in architectural terms, was in the realm of materials. With each material, the builders there tried to create as aesthetically pleasing a space as possible. In all this work, we tried just about any plastic we could obtain. What I found out is that compared to the publicity by oil/chemical/plastic industry, plastics are going to have a very limited application in housing of the future. While plastics have certain limited building applications (such as plastic sewer pipe, which an amateur can assemble), it is highly unlikely that the use of oil/chemical derived materials will ever be of significant use as structural or cladding construction, for these reasons: Plastics Have Short Lives First, there are practical disadvantages to the use of plastics in building. They are extremely expensive compared to conventional building materials. This has caused me to think that the cost of a material is roughly proportionate to the ecological damage done to the earth in removing and refining it. To find, for example, a plastic material that will resist sunlight without cracking is extremely difficult, or expensive, or both. There are virtually no plastics developed that are cheap and durable enough to cover buildings on any scale. I recently went back to look over the 17 domes we built at Pacific High School, so these observations are based on experience plastic foam gets easily damaged if not coated with something hard, and to coat it with something hard is expensive; it gets knicked and gouged very soon. It also turns an ugly oily brown color if not painted. Polyurethane foam is said not to burn by foam salesmen, and it is true that it doesn’t catch fire easily. But it is also true that once it does catch fire, it explodes like gasoline and releases poisonous cyanide gas. I’ve concluded that foam is strictly an insulation material, and even then to be avoided if possible due to cost, fire danger, pollution in its manufacture, and Poison danger to the applicator. We used vinyl for windows and in some cases to cover entire domes. After living and working with it for a few years I have become repelled by the material. It-never loses its objectionable smell, it attracts and collects dust and although at first you think it is clear, after a while you realize that you are looking at trees and stars through a film of chemically rearranged oil. Vinyl continually loses molecules from its plasticizer, which accounts for the film you see on auto windshields — from vinyl seat covers. In Viet Nam some GI’s died from blood transfusions from vinyl bottles. This molecular migration probably also works subtly on your nervous system. Fiberglass does a lot of things other plastics can’t, but I don’t like to work with it smells, has itchy glass fibers. Though it looks O.K. on surfboards, it is hard, shiny, unattractive to me as a building surface. We had some spectacularly bad results trusting in caulks. Of course our 16-year old workmanship at Pacific High School was not that accurate, but even with super fitting, we were trusting too much in claims of manufacturers and salesmen. After working with every possible kind of plastic clear or semi-clear window material, I’ve rediscovered glass. It is true that plexiglas doesn’t break and is easier to cut, but it scratches easily and permanently, attracts dust and dirt, and just never has the sparkling clear, image-transmitting capabilities of glass. Secondly, here are some personal aesthetic discoveries I’ve made in spending a few years around various plastic materials (I’d lived previously with more conventional materials such as wood, concrete, glass, brick, etc.) I’ve found that the less molecular rearranging a material has undergone, the better it feels to be around. Wood, rock, adobe as compared with polyurethane foam and polycarbonate resin windows. Oil or Wood It occurred to me lately that there is a profound difference between the way wood and rock are produced, and the way plastic foam and flexible vinyl windows are manufactured. Consider that a tree is rendered into “building material” by the sun, with a beautiful arrangement of minerals, water, and air into a good smelling, strong, durable building material. Moreover, trees look good as they grow, they help purify air, provide shade, nuts to squirrels, and colors and textures on the landscape. And wood is the only building material we can regenerate. On the other hand, most plastics are derived by pumping nonrenewable oil from the earth, burning/ refining/ mixing it, with noxious fumes and poison in the rivers and ocean, etc. Of course, saw mills and lumber companies rip stuff up with gasoline motors and saws, and smoke fumes, but it-strikes me that the entire process of wood growing and cutting is preferable to the plastics production process. What is called for is tree-respecting forest management. However, there are obviously many people who feel comfortable with items such as Tang, pink plastic hair curlers and the disposable dishes on airplanes. Discover your ideals as you take your choice. I tend to feel uncomfortable around any oil-derived or highly processed plastic material. Polyurethane foam seem as if it would be better than the others, but it, too, turns out to be ugly. In addition to the practical and aesthetic disadvantages I’ve found in plastics there is the idea that one is dealing with Dow, and the oil industry — that is the people N