Mother's Pyramid Trellis

Image Gallery PHOTOS BY ROBIN THOMAS

BUILDING NEW SPACES

Old and new are combination in a sturdy, lightweight, versatile addition to the house and garden

In 1972, Buckminster Fuller (then a respectable 78 years old) made his first appearance inMOTHER EARTH NEWS. Never the most self-effacing of men, he began by detailing a career as, in his words, "...an architect, planner, engineer, inventor, author, cartographer, educator, mathematician, scientist, philosopher, poet." It's tempting to laugh upon hearing such a statement, but a few turns of the pages reveal that is precisely what he accomplished in his long and wonderful life. In an age when the term "Renaissance Man" has been overused to the point of meaninglessness, his breadth of experience and influence fit precisely into that mold. An encyclopedia would lack the space to detail his inventiveness (sometimes brilliant, often cosmically ridiculous), but dozens of his ideas live and breathe still today. Buckminster's three-wheeled "Dymaxion Car;" which could turn 180° in its own length and transport ten people at 120 mph using a standard production engine, was light years ahead of anything built before and continues to inspire auto designers to this day. Architecturally, his legacy is the discovery (or rediscovery) of the triangular support, a system that was capable of enclosing more interior space with fewer materials than any other frame. He called his revolutionary shelter a "Geodesic Dome," and it couldn't have come at a worse time.

America in the 1940s and '50s was not only uninterested in economizing on materials and resources, it felt a manifest destiny to churn through as many resources as possible. The marketability of a home that was illuminated and heated by sun alone during daylight hours deviated completely from the saltbox shape of the average design, and a home intended to be frugal was almost nonexistent. Future generations, however, have proven that triangular supports and the structures they form might just outlive the "traditional home," practically as well as conceptually. Contemporary uses of the triangular-interdependent system include the Biosphere 11, which has a stepped pyramid as one of its primary shapes, the pyramid entrance to the Pompidou Art Center in Paris, the Geodesic "golf ball" Epcot Center at Disney World, and the Superdome in Dallas. We bastardized Buckminster's dome into a pyramid for two reasons. First, because a pyramid can be taken down and stored or transported slightly more easily than a dome of similar proportions, and second... because we thought it was fun. The finished structure was modeled after the Egyptian pyramid at Giza, which also has a pitch of approximately 55°. Read enough New Age literature on the subject, and you'll soon discover that time spent in a pyramid has been attributed with benefits as diverse as increased intelligence, inner peace, and hair growth (sadly, after careful examination, we cannot subscribe to the latter contention). Although "fun" wasn't a goal Buckminster referred to very often, we hope he would have approved.