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 t…