Syeus Mottel

Photographer and author of Charas: The Improbable Dome Builders (1973), the visual record of a Lower East Side dome-building experiment.

Syeus Mottel was a photographer who documented CHARAS, a collective of six ex-gang members on New York's Lower East Side who set out to build geodesic domes as low-cost community housing and gathering spaces. His book Charas: The Improbable Dome Builders (originally published in 1973 and reissued in 2017 by Pioneer Works Press with The Song Cave) pairs his photographs with the group's own words to chronicle the effort.

Relationship to Fuller

Relationship: chronicler. Mottel's book grew out of the CHARAS members' 1970 meeting with R. Buckminster Fuller, whose geodesic dome the young men adopted as their organizing project. Fuller wrote the introduction to Charas: The Improbable Dome Builders, lending his name and his geometry to the venture, while Mottel supplied the sustained photographic record that carried the dome idea from Fuller's principles into a concrete grassroots experiment. The book thus stands as a chronicle of Fuller's ideas taken up outside the academy and the profession.

See Also

• R. Buckminster Fuller (R. Buckminster Fuller) — the central figure, who wrote the book's introduction

Sources

• Compiled from general knowledge and corpus mentions; the corpus entry for Charas, the Improbable Dome Builders records the authorship and the Fuller connection, but no single work in this corpus anchors Mottel biographically.