the affordable self-sufficient housing units make use of the tepee design. a tiny fire in the middle of a tepee keeps one cozy in winter (MA, USA) with most of the smoke going out the top. materials are pretty cheap, too (few thousand, depending on quality and versatility interested in; a strong storm can topple one if not done right)
On the way back from a summer in Alaska, I met a couple that was squatting on some land in northern British Columbia -- so far north that the fastest way to get there was through the Yukon. The woman spent their first winter there in a teepee and had their first child in it. The man descirbed the subsequent events as: Then she picked me up by the shirt and said, "YOU WILL BUILD ME A CABIN!"
That was a really nice looking cabin!
(The town was Atlin, for those of you who want to look it up.)
The dymaxion house was not exactly a tepee design. He recognized that most interesting materials are stronger under tension than compression -- steel, for example. This is part of the power of the geodesic (tension spreads throughout the structure, yielding global tension and localized compression). The houses were designed with a load-bearing center shaft, and the structure pulled from it. At least in the designs I've seen -- and in the aluminum building shown in the article (look at the "foundation").
But similar to a tepee, the top would also open (and rotate) for ventilation purposes -- domes and round structures have useful air circulation patterns.
By making vents in the bottom of the structure it was found to be self-cooling in the summer too as the hot air rose and left vie the top sucking in fresh moving air.
