Is the Next R. Buckminster Fuller Emerging from a Yurt in Harpersfield?

Photos and article by Lorcan Otway

HARPERSFIELD — Is the next R. Buckminster Fuller emerging from a yurt in Harpersfield? I'd not be surprised. As a visitor rolls up on Pete Abram's barn, there is a scene reminiscent of the pioneer days, when the world was shaped by people with their two hands and an idea. There is an oil drum set at a forty-five-degree angle over a wood fire. The smoke makes one think of a shipyard steam box. A closer inspection reveals that the barrel is set on one of my favorites of Pete's creations, the fire bowl, the rebar and steel cable baskets which he makes and sells. 

But I am getting ahead of myself. To start at the beginning of the day, I am driving on a backroad between Stamford's Main Street and Hobart. My better 3/4ths and navigator, Genie, is looking for house numbers. "Don't bother with house numbers," I remind her," Just look for a yurt." 

Pete lives in a yurt, a Mongolian herdsman’s tent, behind his barn as he renovates his house. I spot a yurt and Genie asks if it is Pete's. I assure her that it is unlikely that there is a Mongolian yak herder living in the Catskills, and so, we drive into the driveway. From the barn I can hear the sounds of hammering and Bob Dylan on the hifi. 

I had come to find Pete’s workshop, knowing that he was an artist who worked in metal, as I had admired his steel cable baskets. They reminded me of the turf creels of my younger days in Ireland, which we would use to bring peat bricks down from the high bogs to burn in our fireplace. I had seen Pete burning firewood in one of his baskets on the street near the coffee house on Stamford's Main Street. But I was not prepared for the exuberant breadth of Pete's creativity in his workshop. 

Entering the barn, I find Pete hard at work on a large, long wooden form, which I think may be a project to build some kind of pillar.  I am way off the mark.   

In order to describe what it is, Peter must first tell me from what it is made. Plasticrete. Plasticrete is Pete's own invention. He points to the smoking barrel sitting over the fire in front of the barn.  He says "I cover the form with plasticrete." First he applies a light plastic wrap and heats an aggregate, Aggregate is defined, for many readers, as a "loosely compacted mass of fragments or particles." in this case sand, or ground glass, and applies it to layers of light plastic wrap, the aggregate and the wrap fuse. "It doesn't melt,"   Pete insists. If you apply the aggregate at too high a temperature, you don't get the desired result, a light, durable, tough covering that looks like natural stone.       

He hands me a sample of the material. It looks like a granite rock, but it is hollow and light. I am thinking of all the possible uses. Is this wooden form a gate post? I could see it standing upright at the entrance to a park or great home's driveway.   While I am picturing all the uses of this material Pete starts to walk back towards the far end of the wooden object. I start to follow him. "No, go around the front and look inside. 

I follow his suggestion and Pete is sitting inside the form. It is comfortable to sit inside; the sides rise at an angle just right for back support. He says,” there could be room here to store your belongings, outlets for lights. And you could stretch out. It can be shelter for our unhoused neighbors, not just for homeless, but an efficient shelter  or for so many uses. This one would be the 'sur-thrival' size." I take his meaning to be a more positive word than survival. Not just getting by but thriving when in need. "Just big enough for one person to close off and be safe.  One can be fun, but... you can tessellate." 

I nodded... then later looked up tessellate. Easily replicated and fit together without gaps or overlapping. 

He crawls out and shows me a model of a multi-level circle of these forms. Joined together seamlessly.  "You now have a torus; you have a ring. “They get bigger as you go down," he explains. There can be standing headroom in the bottom. “There can be other geometries where you are pulling them together, making spokes inside the circle.”

"It is like a beehive for people."

"Exactly he replies".

"What do you see as the use?" I ask.

Anything and everything, I see it as homes for the less homed people, shelter for upscale festivals...."

I picture this in the desert, at 'Burning Man,"

I remember how Bucky Fuller began promoting this crazy idea about geodetic domes. Today you see them everywhere, used for anything and everything. 

The art of function. Pete began his art studies, at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. His journeys through the world of art took him to France, and then Oakland, to Brooklyn. But his place of true discovery was his studio in Trenton, the birthplace of wire rope. Wire rope made it possible for Roebling to connect Brooklyn and Manhattan with the magnificent Brooklyn Bridge as he immersed himself in creativity to put the horrors of the Civil War’s hatreds and carnage behind him. It was where another Pete, Peter Cooper opened a factory making this remarkable cable. Wire rope can’t be ignored by those lucky enough to learn its qualities. My own first introduction to wire rope was an old salt at South Street Seaport in the very early 1970s. I was detailed to work with Ed Moran. Ed had sailed around the world on the square-rigger Joseph Conrad, as a young man, spent a life at sea, learning everything a capable seaman should know in the last years of iron men and wooden boats. He would often remind anyone around him of the fact that he was one of the few men left who could splice steel cable, wire rope.

Pete fell under the spell of this useful and potentially dangerous stuff. As a young sailor I had a piece of ancient, rusty wire rope gouge my leg, leaving bits of rusted splinters in the wound, causing grief for the young intern who tried to clean the injury. It is not stuff to work with without knowledge, skill and caution. Pete hammers rebar into the “warp” or spokes of the fire bowl and then weaves the “weft” the wire rope body of the steel basket about the warp, welding the ends together to complete this piece of functional art, which may last for years with minimal care, for centuries under the right conditions.

So, when this tessellated human environment is completed, I ask Peter, what is your part in its future? Are you going to produce them? Copyright the idea and live on that as the concept catches the eye of industry? In short, get rich from finding the next good idea? “No," he replies, "I’m open sourcing most of the elements. I’m not doing this to get rich, but to design something to make the world a better place for the people I love, and that’s pretty much everybody.”