Arch Deluxe
When Nader Khalili was invited to NASA and awarded eight minutes to sell the government on the idea of home-building on the moon, he says he decided to show them a volcano. “I showed them how lava flows and changes into caves when it cools,” Khalili says. He also suggested the agency fly a giant lens to the moon, direct concentrated light onto its surface, and fuse the lunar dust into brick. “I wanted to explain to them how molten soil can become structures.”
Khalili is an Iranian-born California architect who occupies a couple of acres, just off Interstate 15 in Hesperia, dotted with Joshua trees and covered with buildings of his own design: earth and brick domes and arched houses that look like stylish Quonset huts or fantastical apartments for the Snitches and Wonce-lers in Dr. Seuss books. Khalili says his desert earth homes came out of that one meeting with NASA, and that his talk that day was itself retrieved from a different desert years earlier, when the architect rode a motorcycle deep into the Iranian wilderness.
In the 1970s, before the revolution, Khalili worked in Iran alongside American companies, building up cities like Tehran. He says he grew tired, though. “I was superimposing Western architecture onto a culture whose traditional architecture had already flourished to the highest degree possible.”
As men in personal crisis were wont to do in the 1970s, Khalili abandoned his profession and disappeared into the desert for five years. There, in small towns and villages, he studied with rural Iranian masons. He learned to construct earth buildings, to set them on fire with kerosene, glazing them, as one would a ceramic bowl, into sound structures. Like his buildings in Hesperia, the houses were beautiful, well-insulated, structurally rigid and cost almost nothing to build--they were a minor revelation to the architect.
Having bounced his idea off the moon--NASA was interested, if noncommittal--Khalili has a new plan: save the world. His earth homes could be used to shelter the world’s 47 million refugees quickly and inexpensively, if the United Nations could be convinced. Closer to home, Hesperia today is caught up in the high-desert housing boom, and Khalili’s arched earth houses are surrounded by the traditional single-family houses he sees as wasteful of natural resources, poorly insulated, overly expensive and entirely lodged in the world’s imagination. “Even when I was in the Iranian villages,” Khalili says, “and I asked the children there to draw a picture of a house, they drew a typical Western pitched-roof house.”
Khalili wants to help us get that house out of our minds. He has taken on the tiny Hesperia building department, fought to have his mud houses certified to building codes and won --they’ve already withstood a 7.5 earthquake without sustaining a single crack--and now wants to build the first earth-home housing tract. “Park some Mercedes next to them,” he says, “take pictures and show Americans it’s OK to live in earth houses. Everything will follow once the precedent is set.”
