Polycubes

In 1957, five Cal Poly students under the sway of visiting lecturer Buckminster Fuller built a fifty-foot-wide geodesic dome out of war-surplus boiler pipes. It was later relocated to Poly Canyon, a scenic swath of grassy hills and oak groves on the north end of the university’s San Luis Obispo campus. Today, the canyon is an open-air archive of experimentation and entropy—about thirty structures dot the slopes, including a straw bale parabolic arch and a swooping shotcrete canopy that once shaded a hot tub and an indoor waterfall. Kinetic sculptures, a dime a dozen in these hills, are fringed with moss. Locals call the scene the “architecture graveyard.”

In April, the canyon welcomed about ninety new temporary shelters as part of Design Village weekend, an annual competition drawing hundreds of undergrads from across California that marked its fiftieth anniversary this year. Student teams transported materials and supplies on foot, then rushed to set up the shelters—a bright blue origami-like tent, hexagonal stacking sleeping pods—that would be their lodgings for the night. (Hazards included mud, gopher holes, rattlesnakes, and structural collapse.) The following morning, judges inspected each of the builds, eventually awarding the top prize to a team from Santa Monica College for a burlap-draped folly anchored by three pentagons.

“The students’ agility and ingenuity are always phenomenal,” Cal Poly faculty adviser Dale Clifford told me. “Just seeing hundreds of young people out there unplugged, many of them camping for the first time—they have to commune.”

Pizza helps. The night before the award ceremony, a heroic man in a van arrived with a delivery of three hundred pies. Inside the aged Bucky dome—the oldest of its kind on the West Coast—students ate up and hung out. They screened films. Colorful battery-operated lights flickered to life, making the hillsides glow.