Sue, Please heed Turbo's advise on this one! I've read countless variations on the WHOLE EARTH CATALOG promoting everything from Mongolian Yurts to rubber tire and rammed earth Ashrams. They are all long on theory and oftentimes short on real word realities, if not thumbing their noses ( or other hand guestures) at authority, mainstream values etc. An egg may be a marvelous sturctural devise, but mix in DDT and you have peregrine falcons permanently wet nursed to avoid extinction. And that is what most of these alternative designs are, Buckmeister Fuller meets Faulty Towers. Natural or civil disasters test the best of our building codes. We want good structures to stow our gear and ourselves in. The recent tsunami is case in point. A few, very few major buildings survived. Like the 3 little pigs, our wolf huffed, and he puffed and the straw and stick houses came down. <img src="/images/graemlins/frown.gif" alt="" />