First popularized in the 1950s by the designer and inventor Buckminster Fuller, who died in 1983, geodesic domes have long been appreciated by environmentalists for their energy efficiency and the way they provide the maximum amount of space with a minimum of material. In the 1960s and '70s, hippies built them in the wilderness, painting them in psychedelic patchworks; their rounded contours were seen as a retort to all things square or right-angled in Western society.

The domes of the Flower Power era were rarely more than a standard 24 feet in diameter and cost less than $1,000 to build, according to Jay Baldwin, an early dome builder and dweller. But many new domes are sprawling mansions of more than 10,000 square feet, built on budgets of a million dollars or more.

"They want another bedroom," said Robert Singer, the president of Timberline Geodesics, a dome manufacturer in Berkeley, Calif. "They want the home office, they want the entertainment room, they want the extra space in the basement, they want the large custom kitchen."

Two years ago, Mr. Singer [president of Timberline Geodesics] said, his factory needed to run only seven months a year to meet the demand. Now it operates full time to produce more than 50 houses annually, and he still can't fill all the orders.

Yes, but with these compromises in shape and structure, do these quasi geodesic homes still have the same energy and space efficiencies that Fuller's original designs intended?

Truth unfolds in time through a communal process.