Whatever Happened To Geodesic Domes?

In The 1960’s Lloyd Kahn Was a Leading Figure in The Dome Movement. Then He Realized They Make for Terrible Shelter.

You’ve been to Bolinas, or some place like it. You know, the little town of twelve hundred where tourists are funneled down one road and gas prices are a full two dollars higher than nearby cities. Little shops sell coffee, imported incense, and organic artichokes. Drive off the main strip, and you’ll find a gruff little neighborhood where fishing buoys hang from chipped fences. It is a town defined by what it is not—a sprawl of technological progress buzzing an hour south in San Francisco. Hold up a mirror to Bolinas and Lloyd Kahn will be staring back. Born in 1935, he’s a living reflection of the soulful little town, and he can still be found here, writing about one of humankind’s most ancient concepts, shelter.

I drive my old RV down Kahn’s dirt road and park outside his house. He purchased the lot in 1971 for six grand. He built his home with materials from a torn-down Navy barracks at Treasure Island. Abalone shells decorate his yard and shimmer in the gray winter light. He greets me with a matter of fact “Hello,” then offers a calloused paw. Kahn has a white mustache, long white hair, and knife holstered at his hip. He looks a bit like an outdoorsy version of Albert Einstein. When I comment on the knife, he leads me into his toolshed, showing me how I can fashion a blade myself.

“Do you want a skateboard?” He offers, pointing to three that lay on the corner

Kahn started downhill skateboarding when he was 65, and after a few internet videos profiled him carving the streets of San Francisco, boxes started arriving at his house, making him perhaps the only sponsored skateboarder who was born before the sport was invented. “This is how I slow myself down,” he says, holding a small blue kite behind him like a superhero cape. A theory that sounds great … in theory. “I snapped my arm a few years back,” he continues. “It was a little traumatic.” 

Lloyd with an original Whole Earth Catalog.

He leads me into his office. Strung over the doorway is a three-foot snake skin, and an owl wing hangs on the wall. A photo of Kahn as a young surfer, jumping off the cliff at Steamers Lane in Santa Cruz with an old balsa longboard, is pinned to the wall. A few years back, The Surfers Journal featured the photo on the cover of their widely distributed magazine. Weights and exercise bands are strewn about his office, and a book shelf wraps around the entirety of it with a holy grail of 1960s memorabilia. He pulls down an original copy of the Whole Earth Catalog, a limited-edition relic that sells for $700 dollars online. 

“Stewart Brand put all this stuff together,” he says. “You could learn about organic gardening, or building, or making sandals, or communicating with dolphins.” 

Kahn was the Shelter editor of the Whole Earth Catalog, which was sold for five dollars and distributed to millions of Americans between 1968-1971. Like a porno mag, a young hippie might hide the catalog from their parents, then flaunt it to friends. It was a directory of iconoclastic ideas. A catalog of alternative thought, a protest against blind consumerism, luxurious living, war, environmental destruction, and the white picket fence American Dream. The catalog functioned as an evaluation and access device. This was pre-internet, and each page essentially “linked to” an alternative idea, paraphrasing it, and showing the reader where the book could be sourced. I flip to a random page on Tantric yoga. Then to another on Buckminster Fuller’s geodesic dome. In addition to contributing to Whole Earth, Kahn is also a prolific author and has written about alternative forms of shelter for a good chunk of his life. His books include Tiny Homes, Shelter, Builders of The Pacific Coast, and two books on geodesic domes, which he later pulled from publication after a high-dose mescaline trip.

“Did you know Buckminster Fuller?” I ask, turning the pages carefully, afraid they might crumble in my hand. Kahn offers a tight smile. “Yeah, I knew him. I didn’t become disillusioned with Bucky for years.”

Kahn’s path into building didn’t start until his thirties. He went to high school in San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury district, then became an insurance broker, commuting to work each morning in a suit and tie. When he was 30 years old, Kahn took a leave of absence and rode the rails across the United States with a copy of “In Search of the Miraculous” by P.D. Ouspensky.

“I was trying to figure out what to do with my life,” he says. 

While on the road, he paid three dollars to see Bob Dylan in concert in Rhode Island. He had an Olympus camera with Tri-X black and white film and squeezed through to the front of the stage. The first half of the show was folk music, a genre Dylan had become known for. But halfway through the show, the musician walked off stage and returned holding an electric guitar. Half the crowd left. But Kahn stayed planted in the front row, snapping photos of Dylan, who clearly didn’t give a fuck about placating his fans. “I have a photo of all the empty seats behind me,” Kahn recalls. The concert turned out to be an early incarnation of Bob Dylan as a Rock n’ Roller, and Kahn lucked into capturing some of the first photos of the seismic shift.

By the time Kahn returned from his trip, the Nor-Cal ‘60s movement was in full swing, and thousands of young hippies were driving vans across the Golden Gate Bridge with bell bottoms, acid, and anti-war songs. “We wanted to make the world better,” Kahn recalls. “We thought that peacefulness was the way to go.” Kahn quit his job as an insurance broker and became a builder, learning the trade in lumber yards around the city. “After five years of wearing a suit, I could finally go to work in Levis and a t-shirt.”

Kahn became obsessed with alternative buildings, doing more with less, and producing shelter that didn’t scar the natural world. He got a job working on a property in Big Sur. While there, Buckminster Fuller gave a lecture up the road at Esalen Hot Springs, a retreat center that overlooks the bending horizon of the Pacific Coast. In the 1960s Esalen was a center for alternative thought, Timothy Leary, Ram Dass, and many others espoused their philosophies above those sharp granite cliffs overlooking the sea. 

“It was an electric weekend,” Kahn recalls of the night he first heard Buckminster Fuller speak. “There was a storm blowing in. The power went out, and we listened to him by candlelight.” 

‘Bucky’, as he was affectionately called by fans, was a small, gnome-like creature who suffered from severe myopia, wearing thick spectacles to correct for it. After serving in WWI, he was also partially deaf. Ever the innovator, he walked around with a bull horn, cupping it to his ear like a cell phone, when listening to others speak. Bucky may have resembled a blind turtle, but the dude commanded a room, speaking about science with the tongue of a poet: 

“Let architects sing of aesthetics that bring rich clients in hordes to their knees, 

just give me a home, 

in a great circle dome, 

where stresses and strains are at ease.”

1960s Esaelan, photo Paul Herbert.

If you’ve ever been to a music festival, you may have seen these alien structures. The shell is a system of interconnected triangles, meeting at the top to form a dome. (Picture a supersized soccer ball sticking halfway out of the earth.) Fuller believed they could be mass-produced at a cheap price and solve humanity’s housing crisis. Bucky had always been a rebel. While at Harvard, he was expelled for blowing all his money partying with a vaudeville troupe. (Think comedy theater.) 

Fuller is widely mis-credited with inventing geodesic domes. Dr. Walther Bauersfeld was the first to build the structure. But Fuller was awarded United States patents and is largely responsible for popularizing the idea.

A devout environmentalist, Fuller later coined the term “Spaceship Earth,” believing that humanity would soon destroy itself without radical new systems that blended with nature. Fullerenes are carbon molecules that were later named for their structural resemblance to geodesic domes. Fuller often told audiences that the tetrahedron shape of dome skeletons were the building block of the universe, evoking a cosmic mystique that still exists to this day.

Kahn was hooked. He returned to the property in Big Sur and persuaded the owner to let him build a full-sized dome. Over the next two years, he built 17 domes at an alternative high school in Santa Cruz, quickly becoming the go-to dome dude, a resource for young hippies. He built domes out of plywood, aluminum, sheet metal, fiberglass, Ferro-cement, cedar shingles, asphalt shingles, and even nitrogen-inflated vinyl pillows. Around the same time, Drop City, a counterculture artists community of hippies, sprung up in southern Colorado. 

"Corners constrict the mind,” one acolyte said. “Domes break into new dimensions.” 

In 1970, Kahn borrowed the Whole Earth Catalog’s production facilities and published Domebook One and, the following year, Domebook Two, selling 175,000 copies. He began to lecture about domes and even received an invitation from MIT to speak at their Responsive Housebuilding Technology conference. 

But something wasn’t right. Over the previous few years, Kahn had developed a network of builders, and complaints about geodesic domes were stacking up: They leak. Every joint between a panel poses an entry point for rain. They’re difficult to subdivide. The acoustics sucks. Professional builders work with rectangular materials, causing an expensive headache of custom interior builds. Hidden costs lie around every non-existent corner.

His epiphany arrived on a mescaline trip. One day, he hiked to a canyon near Bolinas, arriving at a green meadow, watching water skeeters dance around the grass. “I had been having real doubts about domes by then,” he said. “And I thought, ‘what if there was a plastic dome in that meadow and it was falling apart, trashing the landscape, and it was my fault because of the book?’” 

Despite the book’s popularity and Kahn’s reputation as the dome expert, he called his agent and told them to take the books out of print. “It’s like jumping in cold water,” he says. “It’s hard, but when you get out, you’re in a better state.”

Although Buckminster Fuller made enduring inventions, such as the Dymaxion map, which depicts the surface of the earth more accurately, it is worth noting that many of his inventions, such as the Dymaxion car, were an abysmal failure. “You move on,” Kahn says, “We were trying stuff out, and when you experiment some things are gonna fail, get used to it. 

After immolating his identity as THE Dome Guy, Kahn went on to write and publish many books, the next of which was Shelter, a book that celebrated the imagination of human habitat and includes more than 1,000 photographs of dwellings around the world. It featured ancient nomadic yurts, to van lifers, to domes, which he cautioned against. 

As we finish the interview, I ask what advice he has for young people seeking shelter today.

He scratches his worn fingernails on the table and thinks for a moment. “Find a place in town that needs a little TLC, where they just chased the crack dealers out, but it’s got water, septic, and electricity. Do stuff with your hands. If you’re living in an apartment in New York, grow sprouts in your kitchen and parsley on your fire escape. Self-sufficiency is a direction, like perfection. You’re never gonna reach perfection, but you aim towards it.” 

Kahn sends me off with a handful of books. As he leads me out his gate, he catches a glimpse of my RV, and asks if he can take a quick peek inside my rolling home.

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