Over the weekend I had the good fortune to “sit down” over email with Vinay Gupta, the creator of the amazing Hexayurt project that we highlighted last week.

The Naib: Before we get started could you tell us a little about yourself.

Vinay Gupta: My name is Vinay Gupta, and I invented the Hexayurt. I run what is essentially an open source design project around solving the problems of the word’s poor by bringing the cost of essential services down to a level they can comfortably afford.

I took a roundabout path to get here: I started out doing 3D graphics. In college, I helped start a company called Voxar that did medical imaging software. I had the critical insight that the entire enterprise was based on – that some throw away demo software Andrew Bissell (the founder) had written was actually the key to a whole new way of rendering. I spend about the next six years doing 3D graphics off and on, as well as a stint trying to start a Geodesic Dome company called WorldView LivingSpace with David Kinne, an incredibly talented Quality guru who taught me about Permaculture , Deming and the whole culture of quality. That left a deep imprint. WorldView had licensed a really superior dome technology from

Wil Fidroeff and I’m still surprised that Wil’s dome tech hasn’t taken over the world!

Most 3D graphics is all about triangle meshes and that’s the tie in to buildings – geodesics are very strong because of the way triangles hold forces, and fitting triangles correctly to a sphere is the core of Buckminster Fuller’s dome geometry.

1. The Naib: How did the hexayurt project get started and who else is involved in the project?

Vinay Gupta: The hexayurt had two genesis points. The first was my curiosity about how to overcome the bane of geodesic domes – not that they leak, but that the weird angles and unusual component sizes fit so poorly to standard building materials, often creating up to 40% waste. So I was playing around with 4′ x 8′ sheets in my head, trying to find a way to build domes with them, and I stumbled on the hexayurt’s basic shape: six isosceles triangles with the same base and height form a cone suitable for a roof. It’s “geodesic-like” – no longer do all the points fit on the surface of a sphere, but on the other hand, you can cut it by eye in the field with a stick and still get a building.

So that was Genesis 1. Genesis 2 was the Sustainable Settlements CharretteThis was one of those epochal meetings that RMI throws every so often where they rewrite reality by figuring out better ways of doing things. I was not at the Charrette but I was working at RMI off and on as a volunteer at the time and got a good dose of the ideas and insights, including the key insight that there needed to be a building that could be moved with the population when they were sent home, rather than being tied to the refugee camp. It all came together from there, really. Amory Lovins notions about autonomous building provided the last leg of the triangle. Over the next few years I began to assemble the system.

There are also three groups involved: the first is me and my immediate collaborators – Lindsey Darby, Woody Evans and a few other folks.

The second is the vendors: the Hexacomb cardboard manufacturers, the wood gasification stove engineers and so on.

The third group is the aid agencies and especially the US Department of Defense. I attended Strong Angel and since then the building and concepts associated have come into contact with a lot of people, particularly since a rather senior fellow by the name of Dr. Linton Wells rather likes the design (he’s a big fan of Amory Lovins work and the design is a direct extension of Amory’s thinking to a very large degree.) It was a bit surprising at first to be in such tight collaboration with those guys but they are the final resort – they’re the people the world turns to when things go really, really wrong like they did in the tsunami or the Pakistan earthquake, so they’re very much on the look out for better answers to “how do we keep these folks alive?”

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