Bye, bye, American Pi: The world owns Pi Day on 22/7

Only three countries in the world, including the USA, write dates M-D-Y. Everyone else can party on the true International Pi Day on 22 July.

Many Canadians are trying to reduce their consumption of products, services, and cultural influences from the United States. Paris Marx just did a terrific guide for getting off US tech (it’s hard!) I have written about how we should stop buying American food and try a local, seasonal, low-carbon and all-Canadian diet. We should also wean ourselves from USA holidays, even silly ones like Pi Day.

Canadians already observe a different Thanksgiving from the USA, so why not celebrate a different Pi Day? It is observed in the USA on March 14 (3.14), based on the USA’s idiosyncratic way of writing dates as M-D-Y. According to translations.com,

“The D-M-Y (day, month, year) format is the most widely used around the world, whether we count the number of countries that use it or number of inhabitants of these countries. The M-D-Y (month, day, year) is almost exclusive to the United States. It is also the main way of writing dates in Belize and Micronesia.”

In the D-M-Y calendar, 14 March is nothing to celebrate, but 22 July or 22/7 is a very close approximation of Pi. According to mathematician and author Ben Orlin, it is more accurate. He is interviewed on Inverse:

“We have these languages for talking about in between numbers like fractions and decimals but neither one can quite express pi exactly. Pi is not 22/7, but pi is also not 3.14. Both of those are wrong. But technically, 22/7 is just a tiny bit less wrong. If you look on a number line, pi’s just about halfway between 3.14 and 22/7, but leaning a little bit closer to 22/7. So that's a more convenient way to do it. It is also a much older way to think about pi. Decimals are a pretty recent mathematical invention in the scheme of things, whereas fractions are the way that people have thought about mathematics as long as we've had mathematics.”

I will acknowledge that Pi Day originated in the USA; it was first celebrated on 14 March 1988 at the San Francisco Exploratorium and was organized by physicist Larry Shaw, who should have known better; 3.14 is irrational because physics is international.

When it comes to dates, Canada is confused. French Canada is solidly D-M-Y; English Canadians vacillate between D-M-Y and M-D-Y largely due to the cultural influence of the USA. The Federal Government avoids taking sides by officially using the ISO international format of YYYY-MM-DD. However, it used D-M-Y on passport stamps, with a two-letter code for the month to avoid confusion.

In these times when we are trying to assert our Canadian identity, we should all get behind D-M-Y, celebrate Pi Day on 22/7, and have some pie.

Just don’t try to eat it on the subway in Toronto; according to this sign I saw in the St. Clair West station, it is apparently illegal.

I am tired of the USA’s hegemony over Pi Day. It belongs to all of us, and in most of the world, that’s on 22/7. So bye, bye, American Pi.

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Back in the day when I worked for Treehugger, a USA-based publication, I would celebrate Pi Day on 14 March, usually with a celebration of round buildings. The reason:

“Why build a round house? Because of the magic of Pi, or πR² to be precise. A circle encloses the largest area for a given amount of perimeter, reducing the amount of material needed.”

Of course, most of these have been deleted. After all, I am an architect, not a mathematician, so what do I know about Pi? But I have reconstructed this Pi Day post from the Internet Archive. I started it in 2009 and did a few updates.

Eight Rotating Houses and Towers That Turn Our Crank

Passive solar through windows or active solar though hot water or photovoltaics work best when perpendicular to the sun. So cue up Paul McCartney's "I'll follow the sun" and see eight houses and towers that are designed to do exactly that.

Heliotrop House

By Andrewglaser, CC BY-SA 3.0,

Architect Rolf Disch built his own home as a test bed for solar systems. The house tracks the sun, so that its triple-glazed front can face the warming sun in winter and show its well insulated back in summer.

The balcony rail is a solar vacuum tube to heat water. Photovoltaics on the roof rotate independently to track the sun, generating four to six times the energy needed for the house, making it beyond zero energy and into "das Plusenergiehaus" or a "Plus-energy House."

It not only rotates and is solar powered, generating 5 to six times what it needs to run the house, it is prefab, using pre-manufactured parts and pieces. The primary structural material is glue-laminated wood beams. Spruce was chosen because it is grown regionally and is a rapidly renewable material.

If that is not enough, there is on-site composting, chemical free sewage treatment and rainwater catchment. More in Wikipedia

Villa Girasole

The oldest rotating house we have found is Angelo Invernizzi's Villa Girasole (Villa Sunflower) near Verona, Italy. "The two storied and L shaped house rests on a circular base, which is over 44 meters in diameter. In the middle there is a 42 meters tall turret, a sort of conning tower or lighthouse, which the rotating movement hinges on. A diesel engine pushes the house over three circular tracks where 15 trolleys can slide the 5,000 cubic meters building at a speed of 4 millimeters per second (it takes 9 hours and 20 minutes to rotate fully).”

Everingham Rotating House

This Australian house rotates around a central pivot point. "It also encapsulates many aspects of ecologically sound building principles, such as optimising on natural light and heat, while rotating 180 degrees to take advantage of sunshine and shade at different times of the day and year."

The Everingham Rotating House is a 24 m (79') diameter octagon with a 3-metre (10'), 360-degree verandah. It weighs 50 tonnes, but can rotate a full 360-degrees, around a central core of plumbing and electricals. Within this core is also a geothermal piping system (120 metres long and 2.5 metres deep), supplying a constant 22°C to the house.

Massau Rotating House

In 1958 François Massau built this rotating house so that his sickly wife could enjoy sunshine and warmth any time of the year. Massau was an eccentric builder who does not appear to have been very nice, and spent his last years fighting in court, dying alone and penniless at 97 in 2002. However his house survives, with its fixed roof and house that turns beneath it. [The New York Times covered it here]

Around the Sea

Rotating round houses are a great idea if you are running a B and B like Around the Sea on Prince Edward Island; nobody has to fight for an ocean view, they just have to wait for it to come around. The builder claims:

“A round home is more energy efficient than a conventional rectangular home because there is less dead space (i.e. corners) for cold air to collect and there is less drafting because the wind diffuses around the building rather than catch a large solid wall.”

Domespace by Solalaya

Solalaya offers the Domespace, home, and says: "Our planet rotates, why not your home?" One can probably think of a few good reasons right off the top, but there are also some real advantages, notably that it can follow the sun (or turn away from it.) They claim that their homes are anti-cyclonic, anti-seismic and have "Unparalleled structural integrity." It shows up one of the problems of round homes: they are hard to furnish. [Solalaya appears to be out of business]

Maisons Labbe Turntable House

We now enter the realm of speculation, of proposals that are not yet built. I wrote in 2009:

Rotating houses are not a new idea, and have some real advantages; they can follow the sun to maximize passive solar heating in cool weather and shading in warm; solar panels can track the sun along with the house and generate power and heat more efficiently. It doesn’t take much power to move a house that slowly. In Nice, France, Frederic Plazar has designed a series of turntable houses ranging from 80m² (861 SF) to 140m² (1506 SF). The Maisons Labbé website calls it a “Bioclimactic house”, that uses 60% less energy than a conventional house.

The house rests on a turntable that can be up to 12 meters (39 feet) in diameter. Sales manager Xavier Prieur told a french newspaper that “The cost, around 2,300 euros m² ($308 PSF), is equivalent or even lower than that of a traditional house because the construction does not require foundations, so no heavy earthmoving work,” which doesn’t make much sense to me, the turntable would have to sit on something solid. [none appear to have ever been built]

Dynamic Tower

We have been dubious about Architect David Fisher's rotating tower for Dubai, with its wind turbines built in between each floor, and its claims that "the building will generate 10 times more energy than required to power it." We also wondered about how "The new tower is the first building of its size to produced in a factory. Each floor, made up of 12 individual units, complete with plumbing, electric connections, air conditioning, etc., will be fabricated in a factory. These modular units will be fitted on the concrete core or spine of the building at the central tower."

[This was never built; Wikipedia notes:

In 2008, Fisher said that he expected the skyscraper to be completed in 2010. In 2009, Fisher said construction would be complete in late 2011. Fisher did not "say where the tower would be built, [...] because he wanted to keep it a surprise." Fisher acknowledges that he is not well known, has never built a skyscraper before, and has not practiced architecture regularly in decades. By 2019, construction had not started, and there has been no official announcement of the building site.]

Happy Pi day to all who celebrate it!

Bonus: I was curious about how the plumbing works in a rotating house and found this fascinating video about a house in California: