Lloyd Kahn

American publisher, editor, and builder (born 1935), the Whole Earth Catalog's original shelter editor and author of the influential Domebook 1 and Domebook 2 — later the founder of Shelter Publications and an advocate of natural, human-scale building.

Kahn did as much as anyone to put buildable geodesic-dome plans into owner-builders' hands, then famously reversed course, concluding that domes leaked and didn't suit domestic life, and championed vernacular building instead in Shelter.

Relationship to Fuller

Relationship: contemporary (dome movement). Kahn popularized the geodesic dome invented by R. Buckminster Fuller, carrying it into the 1970s counterculture through the Domebooks — even as his figures drew criticism (David Kruschke's Dome Cookbook was written partly to correct the Domebook 3-frequency chord factors). Kahn reviewed that workbook approvingly in the Whole Earth Epilog and Shelter, making him both a transmitter and, eventually, a skeptic of Fuller's dome.

See Also

• Dome Cookbook of Geodesic Geometry (Dome Cookbook of Geodesic Geometry) — the workbook that corrected the Domebook figures, which Kahn reviewed
• Steve Baer (Steve Baer) — fellow dome/zome-movement figure of the same era

Sources

• Dome Cookbook of Geodesic Geometry (source reference) — a work in the dome-manual lineage Kahn helped define