Why I live in a Geodesic Dome – Part 1

This is just one part of a larger question: Why do I live on Whidbey Island? Which is a part of the ultimate question: Who am I? The answer of which is still unfolding.

As in any problem, there are two approaches to solving it; top-down or bottom up.

Since the top down approach is defined as “still unfolding” , the only feasible approach is to start from the bottom details and deduce the top general answer.

I can trace the historical answer to a random observation that occurred to me, one day while living in Bellingham as a student, I was driving down the freeway, observing some houses or apartment buildings and how they were all just storage boxes for people. To occupy my mind I began to form a taxonomy of housing options. A house was a people storage box. An apartment building was a case of multiple people boxes, a mobile home…well, lets just not go there.  My idle cynicism implanted a deep rejection of the lack of personality that most people allowed into their residential life. This attitude manifested itself as an observation that, if I were to wake up in a bedroom, I could not tell by way of the dimensions of the room, the color of the walls, or the orientation of the door, in which of the 10 or so houses or apartments (or hotel rooms for that matter) I had lived in up to that point in my life. Furthermore, I realized that absent specific functional furniture, it was difficult or maybe unnecessary to identify the actual room in the house that I was in. A living room looked pretty much like a bedroom or a bathroom.

Another annoying attribute of residential choices was the emphasis on “standardization” that most builders and architects put on home design. The economy and efficiency of building homes that were using “standard” size and shaped parts outweighed all other decisions. This left any personalization of the living space to be carpet patterns and which shade of “eggshell white” to paint the walls. A daring home owner might paint the ceiling a slightly different shade (from the predefined color choices at their local paint store)

Jason Pryde just wasn’t that uniform or easily defined.

Another person’s take on why they live in a geodesic dome is found at  http://rigsomelight.com/2013/09/09/frameless-geodesic-dome.html?utm_source=hackernewsletter&utm_medium=email
This person has a more intellectual motivation combined with symptoms of Aspergers Syndrome

“My ideal is slow built hand crafted housing. Housing that is crafted and grown by a community with attention towards those who will be occupying it 5 generations later
We don’t live in that world right now. We live in a world of mass produced system housing that treats efficiency as primary and where beauty is tacked on as an afterthought. “

(End Part 1)