The hook
A canyon behind Cal Poly holds sixty years of student-built experimental structures — a shell house, a bridge house, geodesic domes — slowly weathering where their builders left them.
01Why it's worth it
Since the 1960s, Cal Poly's architecture students have used nine acres of Poly Canyon as a full-scale laboratory: design a structure, then actually build it, out in the grass. Seventeen experiments still stand — the Shell House, the Bridge House spanning the creek, an underground house, domes descended from the campus's 1957 geodesic dome, one of the first on the West Coast — in various states of elegant decay, which is why students call the place the Architecture Graveyard. You can walk among them, through them, and (carefully) on them. Every spring the Design Village competition fills the canyon with a fresh crop of temporary structures that visiting students build and then live in for a weekend. It's a hands-on museum of ideas that were tried for real, which is the whole Cal Poly ethos in one canyon.
02How to experience it
Park near the Cal Poly campus (pay attention to permit zones) and walk the ranch road up Poly Canyon about 2.5 miles round trip with a gentle climb. The structures are unlocked and unstaffed; treat them gently, they're older than they look. Pair it with downtown SLO or Bishop Peak for a full day, or with the Madonna Inn for maximum architectural whiplash.