From the Washington Post
By Washington Post Staff Writer Linda Hales
January 17, 2004
Design Down-to-Earth Housing From the Mojave to Mars
To visionary architect Nader Khalili, colonizing the moon and Mars is not a "Late Show" joke.
"I believe a lunar and Martian project will ultimately solve the problem of housing on Earth," Khalili says.
From his base in California's Mojave Desert, the Iranian-born designer has spent two decades researching habitats for extreme conditions. On Earth, he favors ancient forms, such as domes and beehives, made from sandbags filled mostly with mud. He has developed a patented system called Superadobe, in which bags are layered with strands of barbed wire to form a structure strong enough to withstand earthquakes, fire and flood. He recently approached Iranian authorities about using Superadobe to rebuild the earthquake-ravaged city of Bam.
Likewise, on the moon and Mars, Khalili believes there will be no better material for constructing shelter than the stuff beneath an explorer's feet. Five years before the first President Bush announced a program for space exploration, Khalili was invited to a 1984 NASA symposium devoted to "Lunar Bases and Space Activities of the 21st Century." He presented research on sandbags held together with Velcro for Mars and fused lava domes for the moon. In an extreme simplification of an idea researched with McDonnell Douglas Aerospace Division, a giant mirror would harness the sun's rays and melt lunar rocks into a honeycomb of room-size "tubes and voids."
Except for his credentials, Khalili might be dismissed as a dreamer. Now in his sixties, the architect gave up a conventional career designing high-rises 27 years ago. He closed offices in Tehran and Los Angeles to become an ardent proponent of "earth architecture," the art of building simply, cheaply and ecologically with nature's most abundant material. For 20 years he has taught at SCI-Arc, the Southern California Institute of Architecture in Los Angeles. Students and apprentices (Khalili sells dome kits) get hands-on experience at the California Institute of Earth Art and Architecture (www.calearth.org), which Khalili founded in 1986 in Hesperia, 70 miles east of Los Angeles.
By phone from the desert, Khalili recalls with awe the invitations that followed his NASA debut. He went to Princeton, MIT and Los Alamos National Laboratory, where he met "the gods of fire." But he makes the point -- with considerable frustration -- that he never set out to design lunar bases or Martian habitats. He wanted to design housing for displaced people on Planet Earth.
It's a tough sell. Early on, Khalili discovered that innovations on behalf of refugees and disaster victims generated little excitement in a world fixated on the future. So, like presidents then and now, Khalili played the space card. He translated his adobe domes into shelter on the red planet.
"Take a roll of bags one mile long to Mars," he says today. "It would be the weight of one passenger or less. Go up there and begin to suck in the soil right from the top. Because of low gravity, you create a dynamic structure [strong enough to] withstand a Martian storm."
Khalili traces his mid-career epiphany to a realization that 800 million people were consigned to "totally unsuitable housing," through war, natural disaster or unkind history. As an architect, he concluded that "the only thing they had in common to them was the earth under their feet." In the Iranian desert, he studied structures that had stood for 4,000 years. He found that they were largely shell structures -- domes, arches and vaults -- made from earth, water, air and fire.
Khalili's Superadobe structures respect the age-old form but include modern innovations, such as polyester bags, cement mixed in to strengthen the mud and barbed wire for structural support. They can be built for very little money anywhere relief officials and housing authorities are open to something other than steel and concrete boxes.
At Cal-Earth headquarters, a Superdome colony is rising. Students have constructed a "Sustainable Desert Village" and the beginnings of a town museum. A photo gallery on the Web shows teams of people mounding sandbags into hives. One structure has been stuccoed into a sophisticated, vaulted interior. Some have conventional doors and windows. Plumbing and other systems are fitted into cavities between sandbags. The structures were tested in 1996 for compliance with California's tough earthquake codes, and passed.
"These buildings not only didn't fail but the testing equipment began to fail, and they gave up," Khalili says.
In Bam, where a Dec. 26 quake left 75,000 people homeless and rubble plentiful, Khalili believes his sandbag system would make it easy to rebuild a safer but recognizable approximation of the historic mud-brick city, quickly and cheaply. A rudimentary 8-foot-diameter dome can be completed in about 10 hours by five people. A spacious and permanent waterproof structure, such as the 2,000-square-foot, $7,000 house now rising in Hesperia, could last 2,000 years.
"The idea is to rebuild and strengthen these towns, not to panic and tear them down," Khalili says of Bam. "I am suggesting to use the rubble to build the Superadobe. That would truly make them ancestral houses."
U.N. shelter specialist and architect Hossein Kalali fielded a query at his office in Geneva. He had just returned from Bam, where tents and blankets were distributed in the first wave of relief. Interim shelter will be needed by spring, he said, and it's not clear what materials or design will work in the harsh climate.
"The best solution would be to find a solution which uses local construction materials and techniques which the people could make," Kalali said. He had heard of Khalili's work, but said that local authorities would have to decide whether an unusual imported design "would be locally acceptable."
The Cal-Earth Web site preserves the reaction of two U.N. officials who visited Hesperia in July 2001. After spending the night in a model dome, program director Omar Bakhet hailed the design as "a hidden treasure." But his colleague, Lorenzo Jimenez de Luis, expressed concern that governments would be "reluctant to accept this hemispherical thing."
Khalili retorts that "domes and vaults have been proven again and again. These forms are the strongest forms that exist." But he has grown weary waiting for bureaucratic vision, and colonies in space are still a distant dream. For now, his sights are on Internet technology. He dreams of a day when he can broadcast step-by-step construction techniques directly to disaster areas and at last reach the people who need help.
"Bypass the U.N., bypass government," he says. "People can start building their own."
Copyright 2004 The Washington Post
