Domebook One (1970) was a handbook edited and published by Lloyd Kahn that gathered instructions, diagrams, and photographs on how to build geodesic domes. Emerging directly from the countercultural ferment of the late 1960s, it became a blueprint for back-to-the-land communities, communes, and experimental builders who sought lightweight, low-cost, and portable dwellings.
The book combined Buckminster Fuller’s geometry with field reports from people actually constructing domes in fields, deserts, and forests. Its pages were practical and utopian at once: truss patterns and load calculations sat beside photos of glowing communal structures rising out of improvised camps. The dome was framed as both shelter and symbol, a structure that embodied the ideals of collective sufficiency, experimentation, and ecological attention.
Domebook One helped launch a wave of dome building across North America and beyond. Though many of the structures proved difficult to maintain, the book’s influence lived less in technical perfection than in its spirit of possibility. It positioned architecture as a participatory act, something anyone could attempt with salvaged lumber, imagination, and a circle of friends. Today it reads as both archive and artifact of a moment when building a home was inseparable from building another way of life.
See also: Whole Earth Catalog and Shelter
Images from Whole Earth Index.
