It seems to me that we humans never quite decided which of these two forms we should have adopted in our daily lives, the square or the circle. We have round wine glasses that are neatly stored in square cabinets, round lighting fixtures for rectangular rooms, round clocks on walls with four corners and we serve square meals on round plates.If you're a cowboy, after a roundup you go to a square dance Most of us live in square boxes we call homes, travel to work in smaller mobile boxes with wheels and earn our pay in cubicles.
No wonder we feel boxed in. This brings me to R.Buckminster Fuller or Bucky as he was affectionately called. Bucky was a strange kind of genius and set out to prove that we had it all wrong. Why was housing square..? There are no squares in nature with the possible exception of the weekend bird watchers. The people who are closest to nature because they depend on it for their basic sustenance live in round shelters. The North American indian had the teepee or wigwam and the Eskimos had igloos. So Bucky started to experiment with spheres and soon came up with the geodesic dome. His idea was to mass produce these half globes so that everybody, even people in third world countries, could afford a nearly indestructible, weather resistant dwelling. His plan almost made it to fruition but his greedy investors who were evidently not as altruistic, pulled the plug on the project when they couldn't see eye to eye. Bucky went on with his experiments and soon found other venues for his domes, notably the US pavilion for Expo 67 in Montreal.
He also went on to produce a fantastic weird looking car that was reminiscent of an airplane fuselage, the dymaxion car. This car was so futuristic that he was barred from driving it into the city, causing a scene each time he would take it for a spin.
He also wanted to mass produce his vehicle and this certainly would have changed the history of the automobile if it hadn't been for a tragic accident involving one of his potential investors who died in a crash on a test drive. So Fuller was a visionary. He spent most of his time lecturing and underlying the need for us to conserve our precious unrenewable resources.
It was during one such lecture that he came up with the name spaceship earth, alluding to our limited resources. His dome dwellings never caught on except for a few companies strewn across the states who still produce them on demand.
However, If you've gone camping with a tent in your lifetime, you'll have experienced the transition between the square tents with the inordinate amount of ground spikes and the dome tent which seems more spacious when it's actually smaller and can easily be moved, even when set up, thanks to Bucky's ideas.
The basic idea behind all of this is that we need more efficient, climate change ready houses capable of riding out the worst of storms. Unless we want roof flying to become the national past time for the mid west during the tornado season. They also need to be on higher ground. Too much water is already a problem in some parts of the world. There is a tendency to build energy efficient partially buried houses called burmed housing. But unless it's as waterproofed as a submarine and can float out of harm's way in short notice, I woundn't consider it an option. There is a company in Japan called International Dome Design who built a whole village of domes. It's quite a sight to behold and unlike their american counterparts ( talk about bad design, some look like a hybrid between a colonial house and a dome) they have a flair for good taste and some of their products are simply outstanding. You can see them with floor plans at http://www.i-domehouse.com/case.html
So we might have to live like hobbits in a not too distant future. As for the more distant generations, I suspect their houses will be mobile, having to revert to the hunter gatherer style of life, looking for resources like water or simply escaping the wrath of a furious mother nature. Odd that we seem to be going around in circles after years of cutting corners.
