From the New YorkTimes
By FRANCES ANDERTON
When Shelter is Made of the Earth's Own Dust
HESPERIA, Calif. - On a windy March day in a park here, Australian Aborigines, American survivalists and members of a rain forest action group teamed up to mix a slurry of earth, water, sand and cement to help build a museum. They pumped the mixture into plastic sandbags hundreds of feet long, laying the sandbags in a large coil. Later they sat inside an intricate brick dome as the four Aborigines sang ancient songs. It was, said Samuel Parish, one of the group, "incredible to hear their voices echoing in the dome."
A New Age moment, you think. But what brought four men from Australia; two avid readers of American Survival Guide/The Magazine of Self Reliance; Gabriel Reyes, a builder sent by the rain forest group Oasis Preserve International in Costa Rica, and their co-believers to this spot was the chance to learn how to build cheap, easy, earthquake-resistant and quirkily beautiful buildings. They were learning by participating in the construction of earthen structures, including a 9,000-square-foot museum made of sandbags filled with earth and cement. The occasion was a $2,000-a-week workshop put on by the California Institute of Earth Architecture and taught by Nader Khalili, an Iranian-born architect turned sustainable-architecture guru.
For eight years, Mr. Khalili's Cal Earth Institute has taught people the art of building from raw elements. In 1974, Mr. Khalili quit designing high rises to spend five years traversing Iran and studying indigenous structures. He subsequently wrote "Racing Alone: Fire and Earth, a Visionary Architect's Passionate Quest" (Cal-Earth Press, 1983), a treatise on the spiritual power of baked-clay, or ceramic, architecture and of Rumi, the 13th-century Persian poet who he said taught "the unity of the elements and the soul."
Mr. Khalili became convinced that any effort to change global attitudes about building had to start in the United States, the place that third-world builders currently emulate. He decided to start in California, whose earthquakes would present his buildings with their severest test.
He acquired some cheap land in this dreary high-desert city northeast of Los Angeles. With its extreme climate and sandy earth, Hesperia would be, he felt, a good laboratory. Cal-Earth's center here consists of a simple cottage with a 7.5-acre yard out back and a garage. Assisted by students, Mr. Khalili and his partner and administrator, a British-born architect named Iliona Outram, used the yard to erect arches, domes and vaults of handmade adobe bricks, factory-produced bricks and earth filled sandbags. Their experiments with a building system that they named Superadobe eventually produced a spacious, three-vaulted, three-room house on the lot - an Earth One house they call it.
Superadobe building are made of self-supporting sandbags wound in a coil or laid like very big bricks. The sandbags are mildly reinforced with barbed wire and finished in stucco. Some incorporate chimneylike "wind catchers" for cooling and solar panels for heating.
Superadobe construction is strong, cheap, even fast. (With a pump, sandbags can be filled at a rate of 10 to 15 feet a minute.) And because it requires relatively little skill, Mr. Khalili maintains that it can be used in the third world and as emergency housing, as well as by Americans trying to avoid a high-consumption life style.
The city of Hesperia might be the embodiment of consumption, filled as it is with sport-utility vehicles and tract homes, each with a well-watered lawn and year-round air-conditioning and heating to fend off 100-plus highs in summer and winter chills. Hesperia is the seeming antithesis of Mr. Khalili's aspirations.
Yet this latter-day frontier town has commissioned a public building of Superadobe: the Hesperia Museum and Nature Center, now being erected in a park beside the town lake at a projected cost of $1.2 million. The Hesperia Recreation and Park District is putting up $250,000 of the total; Cal Camara, the general manager of the district, said he hopes the rest will come from grants and corporate sponsors.
The brick Rumi Dome where the Aborigines sang is the museum entryway; the sandbag coils the team laid down are the bases of 11 20-foot-wide domes that will encircle a 50-foot main exhibit dome and courtyard. In addition, the city has said it will allow Earth One houses with three or four bedrooms to be built here. (Plans for the four-bedroom model, at 2,000 square feet, are $550. Mr. Khalili estimated that the house would cost $75,000 to build, including labor, materials and utilities; plans are available from 760-956-7533.
To make this possible, Mr. Khalili had to demonstrate that Superadobe could pass stringent seismic tests and other rigorous building code standards, a process that lasted years. As Tom Harp, Hesperia's planning director, noted in an article he wrote for Building Standards, the organ of the International Conference of Building Officials, "If we hadn't been trained to be courteous, we would have laughed out loud" when Mr. Khalili first proposed making buildings out of sandbags.
But the city enlisted outside experts, and finally approved the building of Superadobe structures - "a very significant step in legitimizing earth architecture," Mr. Khalili said. Now he and Ms. Outram are trying to get the Superadobe technique included in the International Building Code.
With the museum (which was started in 1996 and will be completed in 2000, if the rest of the money can be raised), Mr. Khalili is hoping to show that brick domes and Superadobe not only are cheap and practical but also can be poetic and beautiful. Already local residents are entranced by the delightful, if alien, Rumi Dome. A group of American Indians plan a powwow there in May. (The Rumi Dome and the rest of the museum construction site are open to the public free on the first Saturday of each month. Information is available at Cal-Earth's Web site, www.calearth.org.)
But Cal-Earth has its critics, particularly among architects who object to what they see as regressive building techniques. Peter Berman, an architect working in Montana, said that earth architecture cannot possibly attain the economies of scale of conventional buildings.
"These homeopathic construction systems send technology backward," he said, adding that technology lets designers make buildings lighter, stronger and more transparent. "People do not want to live in thick, echoing domes." Moreover, homeowners might run into trouble when they try to install standard doors and windows into their idiosyncratic Superadobe homes. Home building, he said, is "best left to the professionals."
So far no one actually lives in any of the school's domes; in fact, none are equipped with the utilities that even a self-respecting environmentalist would require, though visitors regularly stay overnight in them. It has taken several years to build just a few structures, and the Superadobe system is still, Ms. Outram said, "more piecemeal and low-tech than one would like."
But enough people are convinced by the concept and the philosophy to take a leap of faith. The Aborigines flew thousands of miles to learn a technique they hope to apply on a piece of land inherited by one of their number, Michael Woodley.
The team from Oasis Preserve International - Mr. Reyes and three Americans - were introduced to Cal-Earth by their founder, Woody Harrelson. "We were interested in the technology because it's tree free," said Brian Machovina, assistant director of Oasis, the rain forest preservation group.
Mr. Parish, a Florida high school teacher, was attracted to Superadobe as a low-cost way to build his own home. He said that he and his wife wanted to be "completely self-sufficient, to grow our own food and have a strong family based on the home." He plans to start building his home in Florida if local building officials give their approval.
Over the years, Mr. Khalili has acted as a consultant to NASA, which considered his ceramic architecture as a possible habitat on the moon. And at the Cal-Earth center, Mr. Khalili has welcomed a party of Iranian scholars of Rumi, who saw the poet's essence in the Rumi Dome.
But of all the Cal-Earth enthusiasts, the survivalists - known for their apocalyptic view of world events - are perhaps the most unexpected. After an article on Cal-Earth appeared in March in the American Survival Guide, promoting Cal-Earth's architecture as not only low-cost, but resistant to gunfire and explosives, Cal-Earth received more than 300 inquires, including one from Mr. Parish. Mr. Khalili and Ms. Outram said one woman drove from Arizona and bought $850 worth of sandbags and a set of plans. Then she drove back, determined to build a house for herself in four months, before her baby was born.
Mr. Khalili said that this mode of building touches a chord in many types of people because the timeless forms and timeless principles satisfy a vast horizon of human needs." Earth architecture exists at the point, he said, "where poetry has crystallized into structures."
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Copyright 1999 New York Times
