We drove out on a Thursday with three rolls of 4-mil polyethylene in the back of a borrowed panel van, and by the time the sun dropped behind the McCullough Range the whole crew was standing inside a room the color of a swimming pool. The walls were breathing. Curtis had rigged a household box-fan against a plywood collar and taped the seam with what turned out to be masking tape, which everyone agreed was optimistic. The pillow rose in about eleven minutes.
"A building that costs forty-three dollars and folds into the trunk of your car is not a compromise. It is a different argument about what a building is." — C. Schreier, notebook, 1971
Why the vinyl won, at least for a weekend
Concrete is honest and it is also expensive and it is also, more importantly, a lie about permanence — the desert will eat a slab in three winters and no one who has driven past the Salton Sea should be pretending otherwise. What the pneumatic dome offers is a room that admits it is temporary. You inflate it, you sleep in it, you deflate it, and the site is exactly as you found it, minus a beer can we forgot behind the sagebrush and later apologized for in print.
The second night, the wind picked up around one a.m. and the whole membrane began to shudder like a lung. Doug said it sounded like the room was trying to tell us something. I think it was.