Some notes on the ruins of a 56 year old foam house project

Recently, the ruins of an experimental sprayed urethane foam house that I designed as a student in 1967 at YSoA and built with fellow students were discovered by recent undergraduate architecture major, Will Suzuki, while taking a hike in the woods in Westville, just off the Yale Golf Course.

The ‘foam house’ project was a spontaneously generated part of the second year design studio in 1968, taught by Felix Drury under the deanship of Charles Moore. Bill Grover, a student in the year ahead of my class, had been inspired by a Union Carbide T.V. ad demonstrating the construction of a tiny igloo-like form, made from the newly invented urethane foam. The foam was sprayed through a hand-held nozzle fed by two canisters, a resin and an activator. Within seconds after landing on a surface, the foam expanded to 30 times its liquid volume as it solidified. Bill persuaded Union Carbide to donate enough of the material to enable the students to construct several experimental structures. He also acquired a generous supply of a polyethylene-laminated burlap fabric (developed for making sandbags for the Vietnam war) that could be tailored into inflatable forms. After a casual class competition, three projects were selected to be built in the woods just off the Yale Golf Course in Westville. Tailoring the fabric into the various shapes for the designs, we tested them out, inflating them in the second floor space of Rudolf Hall. The soft squishy forms flopped gently over the school’s administrative balcony space above, causing great excitement. We used electric fans, and later on the site, gas-powered leaf blowers inserted into an ‘umbilical’ chord-like tube, penetrating the flanks of the forms.

An idea that had inspired us at that time was to locate places in the world in need of quickly produced housing. (Obviously a concept at least as or more urgent in today’s world). Arriving with a package of folded up balloons and canisters of urethane foam, a high density and low volume package maybe dropped on the site by parachute. That package would be reversed into a high volume and low-density alternative as the balloons were inflated and the sprayed foam expanded 30 times its liquid volume.

These projects were purely experimental structures and not intended for permanent occupation, but they were in fact sometimes inhabited by roving hippies. This may have led the golf course bureaucracy to have had two of the projects demolished a year or so after they were built. The one I was involved with survived, probably only because it was a bit further away from the links. Upon returning to and entering it a year or two after its construction, I heard shrieks, and witnessed several naked figures darting out the back door into the woods.

Now after many years of aging, it has evolved into a ruin. Under stress, foam has a ‘creep’ factor—that plus the weight of snow had slowly transformed the dome’s top surfaces from convex to concave. Then increasing rainwater and ice began collecting in the concavities, leading to structural collapse. Large segments of the series of interconnecting, differently scaled forms had fallen to the ground, leaving behind the fragmented, doubly curved arcs of the remaining walls to form a series of spaces that open up to the surrounding wooded landscape and the sky above.

Architecture having effervescence, evolving into a ruin, has a legitimacy of its own*. In this case, what was once an introverted and somewhat hermetic form now felt like an open dynamically choreographed spatial dance, an active participant with the surrounding landscape. Lichen and moss and wood-pecker holes (hopefully not poisoned!) integrated it further into its natural surrounds. The structure had become much more spatially engaging as a ruin, not only in now looking like a piece of the natural world—something like a gigantic piece of bark—but also by performing a kind of choreographed rhythmic dance sequence as it folds and unfolds its way through this wooded site. These remains are now a mysterious tactile, spatial, experience. I want to see them as a stage set for events, integrating music and dance, ancient Druid friends might add to the ritual, especially at night under a full moon.

*I have always loved Piranesi’s views of Rome—the Forum full of vegetation and grazing sheep, or the Colosseum with medieval housing grown into the arched openings of its perimeter walls, creating a wonderful juxtaposition of scales. I probably prefer those occupied ruins more than the originals in Roman times with senators strutting around in their white robes.

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