A Stately Pleasure Dome

Cambridge zoning makes strange bedfellows indeed. Across Bow Street from Adams House sits Father Feeney's headquarters and, comfortably alongside it, Matrix Structures Incorporated, designers of a novel geometric Play-dome. In contrast to its neighbor's statuary, Matrix inhabits a neat concrete and glass building where delicate wooden figures are propped, balanced, and hung throughout. Inside, five architects work in a somewhat less ordered atmosphere of strewn blue prints, building materials, and incomplete, matchstick-like models.

The Play-dome is the most recent of Matrix' brain-children. Built on the "geodesic principle" of interlocking triangles, the dome is a hardwood and pressed plastic affair which stands 5 feet high and ten feet across--when the pieces are fitted together properly. The Play-dome is intended for 3 to 13 year olds who, utilizing its vinyl-plastic cover, can make it a clubhouse, cave, mountain, trampoline set, igloo, or inter-stellar space station depending upon the relative imaginations and precocity. "Little girls," claim its inventors, "can use it for their own Teahuose of the August Moon."

It would seem that the architects have been having almost as much fun with the geodesic dome as their youthful clientele. At this time, their structure is being used in polar weather stations, radar shelters, tents, and even a restaurant. The Play-dome hasn't hit the Harvard market yet, but it is only a matter of time and warm weather before the Charles is lined with hemispheres and sunbathers. The only problem in such a beach umbrella substitute would be its transportation--but geometry may have solved that too. Two geodesic domes fastened together make a geodesic sphere. Couples could climb into this Double Play-dome, seal themselves in with the plastic cover, and roll down Linden or Holyoke Street to the river, before hatching into the sun. Matrix Structures Inc. has the answer for spring escapism: Back to nature via the egg--a geodesical one with a tough vinyl plastic shell.