Shelter
For their simplicity, ease, economy, strength, beauty, and elegance, I recommend the following designs/methods for shelter construction. (Speed measured in hours, days, weeks):
Self-Strutting Geodesic Plydome (weeks)
Steve Miller’s perfection of Buckminster Fuller’s design for a frameless sphere. Write me for detailed plans.
Conic Shelter (weeks)
Chuck Henderson’s sweeping, simple, brilliant, circled-square construction
Hexayurt (hours)
Vinay Gupta’s 3-hour, $200, portable pop-up shelter + autonomous infrastructure
Superadobe (weeks)
Nadir Khalili’s giant upside down coil pot shelters elegantly made from war materials
Straw Bale Dome (weeks)
my design for a frameless, superinsulated, catenary, corbelled, cheap shelter, based on superadobe
Cardboard Geodesic Dome (days)
I started work on improving this. See pics of Seattle and Sweden Domes here.
The above designs are all shell constructions. That is, they are frameless. Why? Because frames should not be used to hold up materials that can hold up themselves. That approach has no integrity. It doesn’t respect the nature of the materials. One puts up a frame, then hang on it a rigid or semi-rigid material which can hold up itself and the whole building. Now, this approach does have the advantages of requiring no imagination or economy on the part of the owner, builder, or designer. I have chosen frameless designs that embody: a dynamic elegance bordering on anti-gravity; simplicity any 5 year-old can grasp; and an economy any schmuck can achieve.
The two designs below are proper applications of the frame-and-skin method of construction. That is, a very lightweight frame supports fabric or film that cannot hold itself up. It is a thin, flexible material possessing only tensile, not compressive strength (nor their combination: cantileverage).
Pillowdome (pdf)
Jay Baldwin’s perfection of Bucky’s Skybreak concept: a very light, “ephemeralized” frame-and-skin geodesic dome, with panels of noble gas-inflated fluoropolymeric (teflon/ptfe plastic) pillows. This ultimately led to the gigantic greenhouses at The Eden Project in England. Inflatability minimizes the frame.
Warmlite Tent
Jack Stephenson’s masterful 2-5 person tents. He and his designs have had a huge influence on all my design thinking since 1995. Can you imagine, he went from being an insulation engineer on space rockets to designing camping gear! After 40 years, his stuff is stillt decades ahead of its time. Only a few of his ideas have started to be copied in the last 5-10 years. I used to talk to him for hours on the phone while buying his gear and materials. Great guy.