Studio8 - Uniting the Arts

Everybody thought I had gone 'round the bend. "Lightning Rod's finally lost it. He thinks he's the fourth little pig. He's building his house of cardboard."

Part of me suspected that they were right. It was more than the assorted stimulants and narcotics that I was living on. This was 1980 and the law was on my tail and I thought that the world was going to hell in a handbag because Ronald Reagan had just been elected president. I figured it was time to get the fuck outta Dodge.

So, I went and put a down-payment on five acres of land just outside of Hillsboro, Texas. There was nothing on the land but some prickly pears and some copperheads. I needed a dwelling. I had always been interested in alternative housing, so I began paging through my Whole Earth Catalogues and my Dome Books.

I asked myself, "What does a person who has very little money and a lot of ingenuity and energy make his house out of?" I began thinking about construction methods and materials. What was strong and readily available? I remembered an old TV commercial where they built a bridge out of cardboard and a truck drove over it. If cardboard is arranged properly, it is a very strong material and very light and very cheap. So, I decided to build my house of cardboard.

The geodesic dome was the perfect design to be used with this material. Cardboard and domes both depend on integrity to provide strength. The corrugations in the cardboard and the tensegrity in the dome structure provide the strength. It was a perfect marriage of material and design.

So, armed with a matte knife and a straight edge and a jug of Elmer's glue, I began assembling the panels for my dome in a one bedroom studio apartment. There were forty triangular panels and I made some of them solid and some of them with windows or skylights. Cardboard is a very pliable building material and some very creative things can be done with it and it requires no power tools. It was like making a giant model airplane.

The obvious drawback of using cardboard as a building material is that it isn't waterproof. I solved this problem by impregnating the cardboard with polyester resin, the epoxy that they use to make fiberglass. This waterproofed the cardboard and made it more rigid.

Here is a picture of the result (still under construction). I lived in it for three years.



The front room was built of tombstones, but that's another story.

Lightning Rod wrote:

The corrugations in the cardboard and the tensegrity in the dome structure provide the strength.

I learned a new word today.

Tensegrity is an art: the art of adapting to one's own energy, and to each other's energy in a way that contributes to the integrity of the community that we are.


http://www.castaneda.com/

Hillsboro? Isn't that near here?

I feel honored to know you.

Amazing LR. Thanks for the peek. We had some houses that looked similar, but maybe weren't cardboard, located out in the boonies on an island I once lived on.

Do you still own the land? Ever think of going back?

~westie

westcoast wrote:Amazing LR. Thanks for the peek. We had some houses that looked similar, but maybe weren't cardboard, located out in the boonies on an island I once lived on.

Do you still own the land? Ever think of going back?

~westie

westie,

I haven't had the nerve to go back and look at it
it's been 25 years
I think Willie Nelson owns it now.
last I heard there were two owls roosting on the ruins

This was what impressed me about you when I first started talking to you on the net.

I thought, man, if that man can build a house like that from cardboard with plumbing and electric and live there for several years, he can do anything around the house! This is the type of man I need in my life.

That is what attracted my baby sister to my brother in law who I affectionately refer to as "the Bear". A big old friendly texan till he married my sister. He has married her two times now. I hope this one lasts, I can'f afford another divorce.

No the first thing
she noticed about him is his inky dinky cute little butt, and the way his jeans sagged down around his narrow hips.

Then when she found out he was a carpenter and handy with a hammer, well she was in her late twenties and the clock was ticking, and her mother was pressing for a grand child, and what with the old girl fighting the cancer and the two heart attacks and the stroke, and the diabetes, and the other malfunctions of the forlorn rags of old age. She was pretty near gone, she got pregnant.

She made a good choice, she is living in hell, but she is a practical woman, trying to make a life for herself. She forgave her father long ago. And she is on the verge of making peace with her mother. It seems she still needs her brother close to her. Compassion for my sister is what keeps me going.

going to be hot today
and I have pissed away the best part of a day for me
the early morning
I give up on breaking old habits
trying to make new ones
draw from the same force of habit
and maybe the bad ones will wither away like the dictatorship of the proletariat.

going to write four hours a day
no matter what
it might be a kindness to yous all
if I just keep on smoking instead

I think what draws me to people here is their "voices"
Strangers on the highway

voices on the cb, annonymous in a river of lights flowing from the port of newark to the water front in Sad Pedro.


I never seen the good side of dallas
just the wharehouses
and the sky line
down town and the produce market
Dallas down have the underbelly of NYC
Takes a city on a major shipping artery to have that I think
Or maybe Dallas just ain't old enough
God knows it is big enough.

Again, Clay I lean on your benign neglect to just ignore this mindless ramble.