A Buckminster Fuller Geodesic Dome from the 1960s.
From Jennifer Kahn’s recent and fun New Yorker profile of tech visionary Jaron Lanier, who is best known for coining the term “virtual reality” and authoring the cautionary tome, You Are Not a Gadget:
“In Mesilla, Lanier’s father allowed him to design their new home. Lanier, who was eleven, chose a geodesic dome, and with his father’s assistance he drew up blueprints calculating the angles of the frame, plus plans for a squat, cantilevered spire that he envisaged as the entrance. (‘Clearly a subconscious phallic expression of some kind,’ he told me.) But the project proceeded slowly. ‘We’d get enough money to pour the foundation for one part of the house, and then, after a few weeks, we’d get enough to do another part,’ he recalls.
During the first two years that the dome was under construction, Lanier and his father lived in an unheated canvas Army tent that was stiflingly hot in summer and frigid in winter. Lanier remembers shivering uncontrollably at times, ‘like I was having a seizure.’ The family belongings, which included his mother’s grand piano and her antique furniture, were wrapped in plastic and heaped together on the ground outside the tent. ‘We sealed the piano in a bag, kind of,’ Lanier said. ‘It must have sat out there for a year.’”
“In Mesilla, Lanier’s father allowed him to design their new home. Lanier, who was eleven, chose a geodesic dome, and with his father’s assistance he drew up blueprints calculating the angles of the frame, plus plans for a squat, cantilevered spire that he envisaged as the entrance. (‘Clearly a subconscious phallic expression of some kind,’ he told me.) But the project proceeded slowly. ‘We’d get enough money to pour the foundation for one part of the house, and then, after a few weeks, we’d get enough to do another part,’ he recalls.During the first two years that the dome was under construction, Lanier and his father lived in an unheated canvas Army tent that was stiflingly hot in summer and frigid in winter. Lanier remembers shivering uncontrollably at times, “like I was having a seizure.” The family belongings, which included his mother’s grand piano and her antique furniture, were wrapped in plastic and heaped together on the ground outside the tent. ‘We sealed the piano in a bag, kind of,’ Lanier said. ‘It must have sat out there for a year.’”
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Buckminster Fuller and Maharishi Mahesh Yogi conduct a press conference at Amherst in 1971: