Assuming we are putting doodz on Mars, glass domes is about where I'd start. Glass houses anyway; illustrations of MASSIVE DOMES with the city inside of it overstate the case. Each dome would be 50 meters diameter.
The planet is cold. Greenhouses are warm, for Mars' long day. And the thermos principle should keep the heat in overnight. Glass is fluid-tight. As to where we find the glass: Mars' surface is glass, in sand form. Admittedly with some iron rust staining it, but that can be filtered out, maybe with magnets.
Robert Zubrin was talking paper-thin pup tents subject to implosion but, let's just call it: he was wrong. The most slapdash temporary mining-colony will be erecting greenhouses as soon as the aliens (that's us) find a semipermanent home there.
Later I'd prefer the colonists find and fill out some underground lavatubes or at least sandstone outcrops. I agree that people like to go house-to-house without suiting up first. But the first surface colony - even camp - will be of glass houses, perhaps connected by those plastic tubes, perhaps by more glass.
MORE 12/12: we (now) gotta talk keeping those perchlorates stable. Since we've got a use for them. SCALE 12/21: Per Casey Handmer, linked above, we all might be better off inside a big inflatable squarish mattress. But still, I want some way of keeping a blowout in one sector from killing all million Martians.
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