Domebook One

The 1970 counterculture dome-building manual inspired by Fuller—later renounced by its own editor.

Domebook One was published in 1970 by the Point Foundation, the entity behind Stewart Brand's Whole Earth Catalog, whose production facilities the editors borrowed. It grew out of a Fuller-inspired dome-building program that Lloyd Kahn oversaw beginning in 1969 at Pacific High School, an "alternative" school in the California hills that needed to house some fifty students and a dozen teachers. Kahn's group experimented with domes built of plywood, aluminum, sheet metal, fiberglass, ferro-cement, shingles, and even nitrogen-inflated vinyl pillows, and quickly became a clearinghouse for the late-1960s and 1970s counterculture domebuilding movement. Domebook One was followed in 1971 by Domebook 2, which sold roughly 175,000 copies and collected the mathematical chord-factor information dome builders needed.

The books carried Fuller's geodesic geometry to a generation of owner-builders drawn to his exhortation to solve "mankind's" housing problems with intelligence and modern materials. Kahn kept geodesic geometry as a neutral framework precisely so his real subject—materials and their livability—could be explored across seventeen domes at Pacific High School.

Kahn ultimately turned against the dome as a home. After building one carefully finished dome of his own (featured in Life magazine), he concluded that domes were not practical, economical, or aesthetically tolerable as dwellings: curved shapes were hard to make livable, modern materials had short lives, and weatherproofing remained unsolved. He let Domebook 2 go out of print in 1973 and turned to the books Shelter (1973) and Shelter II (1978), which documented vernacular and rectilinear building. In 1989 he assembled the long out-of-print material and his critique into Refried Domes, summarized in his verdict that the work had been "smart, but not wise." His account also records a formative visit to MIT's "Architecture Machine" conference that crystallized his disillusionment with the high-tech, plastics-and-computers approach to shelter he had once shared with Fuller.

See Also

• R. Buckminster Fuller (R. Buckminster Fuller) — the central figure
• Lloyd Kahn (link) — editor of the Domebooks
• Whole Earth / Portola Institute (link) — the publishing milieu
• Dome Cookbook of Geodesic Geometry (link) — a kindred counterculture dome manual

Sources

• Domebook One (Internet Archive)
• Domes / Refried Domes (Shelter Publications)