Down to Earth

City boosters must cringe when architect Nader Khalili describes why he chose this sprawl of stucco tract homes surrounded by desert as the place to experiment with houses made of earth.

“There are boiling summers, freezing winters, howling winds, flash floods and lots of earthquakes. It’s perfect,” he said. “If it doesn’t break here, it doesn’t break anywhere.”

Though earthen structures, which can lower energy bills and save dwindling timber resources, have proliferated in eco-conscious Napa County and bloomed in the New Age openness of New Mexico and Arizona, stricter building codes have left little room for experimentation in Southern California.

Until now. The groundbreaking, or in this case ground-building, work of a few architects is cracking code barriers and setting the stage for the Southland to get down to earth.

In San Diego County, for example, architects Jacek Lisiewicz and Laurie Weir wrote earthen structure codes to build a house of rammed earth, a method as ancient as the walls of Jericho.

And Khalili’s Superadobe earth buildings at his California Institute of Earth Architecture in Hesperia have caught worldwide attention, including that of the International Conference of Building Officials.

If the building officials’ group includes earthen architecture in the international code it is expected to release in 2000, is that it could open the door to such buildings even in earthquake-wary Los Angeles County.

On a gusty High Desert day at Cal Earth, a group that included Australian aborigines, Texas survivalists and environmentalists with Oasis Preserve International, actor Woody Harrelson’s rain forest action group, wrapped up a weeklong, $2,000 workshop at which they learned to build homes out of earth, sandbags and a little barbed wire.

Superadobe, the architect’s term for his building system, is an adaptation of traditional adobe that begins with a fiber bag up to a mile long and 16 to 18 inches in diameter.

The bag is pumped, or shoveled, full of dirt that’s been amended with a small amount of cement, then coiled or laid in place as it is being filled.

With a cement pump, bags can be filled at a rate of 10 to 15 feet a minute. Hand-filling is much slower.

Barbed wire is placed between layers of the bag to keep it from sliding out of position. No reinforcing bar or additional support is needed because of the building’s design of self-supporting domes and arches.

The completed walls are finished with mud plaster and painted white with a nontoxic mixture of milk and linseed oil. Scattered about Cal Earth’s 7 1/2-acre yard are earlier generations of experiments in Khalili’s quest to find an architecture created from earth, fire, water and air, an undertaking he ties to the poetry of Rumi, a 13th century Persian poet who, Khalili says, “taught the unity of the elements and the soul.”

Some look like upside-down teacups or igloos. But the latest incarnation, called Earth One, is a three-bedroom, two-bathroom home with a two-car garage.

The earth walls insulate the home from outside temperatures. In addition, there are chimney-like “wind catchers” for cooling and solar panels for heating. There are tile floors, windows, skylights and vaulted ceilings.

A one-bedroom prototype was built for $5,200, Khalili said. A contractor familiar with the process could build a Superadobe house for half the cost of an equivalent wood-frame house, he said.

The original emphasis of Khalili’s work was low-cost housing solutions for impoverished parts of the world. He became a housing consultant to the United Nations and later for NASA, developing structures to be built from lunar dust.

But Khalili’s vision of the earthen house is more prosaic than mystic poets or moon houses.

“I need a mortgage company. What I’m after is a housing development with at least 500 houses,” Khalili said.

“These are houses that are more than affordable. They are warmed with the sun, cooled with the wind. We need to get them into the mainstream.”

The curves of Earth One’s domes and apses are more reminiscent of Bedrock than of the suburbs, but Khalili believes many home buyers won’t have trouble making the adjustment.

“The idea of the American dream house is changing very fast,” he said. “It’s no longer enough to live in a house built with 2-by-4s that come from cutting the forests, to live with toxic paint and toxic floors, to struggle with a 30-year mortgage,” he said.

“People are ready for change.”

Khalili, a specialist in the design of high-rise buildings, quit a lucrative Los Angeles corporate architectural practice in 1975 to spend five years traveling alone on a motorcycle through his native Iran studying its earthen buildings.

The book about his travels, “Racing Alone: Fire and Earth, A Visionary Architect’s Passionate Quest,” established him as a guru of earthen building.

Khalili sees such structures as a global solution to deforestation but is convinced that he must begin in California because “as California goes, so goes the rest of the United States and the world.

“Even children growing up in the Middle East, when asked to draw a house, will draw a pitched roof and chimney, even if they’ve never seen one outside a book,” he said.

“That image of a pitched roof has destroyed more forests. I want to teach children to think of houses in the shape of bubbles and rainbows.”

The city of Hesperia is backing Khalili.

The high desert city in San Bernardino County might not seem to be a likely cradle of alternative architecture. Nevertheless, Hesperia approved building permits for Earth One and commissioned the first Superadobe public structure, a $1.2-million museum and nature center now under construction beside the town’s artificial lake.

It’s an abrupt change from when Khalili first proposed buildings made of earth-filled sandbags.

“If we hadn’t been trained to be courteous, we would have laughed out loud,” wrote Hesperia’s planning director, Tom Harp, in an article for Building Standards, the magazine of the International Conference of Building Officials.

But the city conducted tests, under the supervision of the conference, and found that Superadobe stood up to twice the amount of weight that would crush a pitched-roof house.

City works wrapped steel cables around a dome and tried to pull it over with hydraulic jacks. The dome didn’t budge.

Now Hesperia building officials are among Khalili’s most vociferous supporters in his goal to have earthen structures included in an international conference’s building code.

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In San Diego County, architect Weir wrote the building code for earthen structures after two years of trying to convince building officials that plans for a rammed earth house would stand up to an earthquake. Writing the code was the only way she and Lisiewicz, her partner and husband, could get permits to build their house in Borrego Springs, 85 miles northeast of San Diego.

Anyone who has ever made a mud patty understands the principle behind rammed earth: put damp earth between two forms, pack it down, remove the forms and let it dry into something rock-hard.

For a house, this means building tall wooden forms, pouring moist earth with a high clay content between the forms and tamping it down.

As the walls go up, so does the crew. It’s a process Lisiewicz describes as “low-tech, high labor.”

After the forms are removed, the new earth walls are like green lumber and need about four weeks to age and reach their maximum strength.

The morning after the forms were removed from the Borrego Springs house, the 1992 Landers earthquake shook the desert, its epicenter just 70 miles from the unset walls.

Lisiewicz, who had driven back to Los Angeles the night before, reached for the phone even as aftershocks continued to rumble, a sick feeling in his stomach.

“How bad is it? Are they on the ground?” he asked the foreman, who had already driven to the site.

“It’s fine,” was the answer. “There isn’t one crack.”

The rest of the construction on the low-slung, rose-colored house took on the air of a carnival.

“There were Japanese tourists with video cameras and the city sent caravans of engineers and geologists,” Lisiewicz said. “They were smart enough to know that they would be asked to permit houses like this in the future.”

What makes a house a home is, of course, more than walls that can withstand earthquakes.

It is the look and feel of earthen architecture that has won the enthusiasm of Lisiewicz and Weir, whose firm, Arkhos-Tekton, was kept busy repairing traditional adobe structures after the Northridge quake in 1994.

“It’s different than living in sticks and stucco,” said Lisiewicz. “There’s a tangible improvement in the quality of life. When you walk in, there’s a sense of real enclosure, of permanence.”

Lisiewicz and Weir designed the Borrego Springs house as a part-time home for Weir’s parents and recently borrowed it for a weekend getaway. As the day cooled, Lisiewicz started a fire in the fireplace, and the slight chill turned to warmth.

Radiant heating is built into the concrete floor for colder nights.

There is no air conditioner, although summer temperatures in Borrego Springs regularly hit 115. The walls absorb the sun’s heat, protecting the coolness inside. There is a swamp cooler, but the architects said it is seldom needed.

Rammed earth can be covered with plaster and painted for a more conventional look, but the walls of this house were left rough and bare.

The natural variations in color echo the rose and lavender desert mountains that are framed by windows in the 2-foot-thick walls.

The windows are Weir’s favorite aspect of the earth house. “When your eye sees a view set off by such depth, it seems monumentally more important,” she said.

Lisiewicz, a native of Poland, recalls sitting in the windows of ancient rammed earth houses in Europe. “There’s something comforting about a real wall, a thick wall, you can lean against and feel the warmth,” he said.

Unlike the Superadobe’s curved lines, this house’s outer silhouette is rectangular. The corrugated metal roof with its long overhangs is 6,000 square feet (CQ) over a 2,000-square-foot house, a touch of modernism floating over a Southwestern adobe.

Inside, the ceilings are high, climbing from 9 to 16 feet. The layout is spacious and open, the kitchen and dining room stepping down into a living room with a focal point of the fireplace and picture windows on each side.

Everything is designed to work as part of a unit. The roof reflects sunlight. The overhangs were calibrated to protect the windows from the summer sun. The house is canted 15 degrees off true north, so the view from the master bedroom is of Indian Head Peak, a local landmark on the surrounding mountains.

The ceiling is made of wood used in the wall forms, and is shaped into planes and angles, origami-style.

“At a traditional job site, you’ll see a fourth of the lumber just being wasted,” Weir said. “But we wasted nothing. This is architecture that respects the environment. This is the direction we believe architecture should go.”

At $100 a square foot, the house cost more to build than a wood-frame house.

“But our energy bills are nonexistent. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out it’s cost-efficient in the long term,” Weir said.

The only disadvantage to the house, the couple said, is having to answer the same question over and over again, whether from city engineers or neighborhood children:

“What happens when it rains?”

To answer city engineers, the two architects brought in photographs of flood canals that were lined in parts with concrete and other places in rammed earth. The concrete washed away, the rammed earth held.

“For everyone else who asks,” Weir said with a laugh, “we tell them when it rains, we make soup.”

Diana Marcum is a Palm Springs freelance writer.

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Superadobe Construction Steps

1. A 12-inch to 18-inch deep by 20-inch wide trench is dug; its outlines are the basis of the structure’s exterior walls. A mixture of moist soil and cement is pumped into the bags (or shoveled by hand) as the bags are laid into the trench to form the base of walls. Strands of barbed wire are placed between layers to anchor the bags.

2. Each layer of adobe-filled bags is tamped down until it is slightly flatteneed to 6 inches high by 20 inches wide. Layers are added until the walls are 5 to 6 feet high (this takes about four days.) Openings are cut into the walls for doors and windows.

3. Plumbing and electrical lines are placed on the floor and fitted into the grooves between layers of bags. A Superadobe floor is poured. The inside walls are finished with straw and plaster (or drywall, if preferred) and painted with a nontoxic milk and linseed oil mixture.

4. A curved piece of metal mesh is placed on top of the walls, and the adobe mixture is spread over it, forming an arched roof. This process could take two to three weeks. The roof is waterproofed with tarpaper. The exterior is covered with adobe balls fixed to exterior surfaces in whatever pattern is desired.

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Rammed Earth Construction Steps

1. A concrete foundation is poured. Wood forms are put into place and secured. Spacers keep the forms 12 inches apart.

2. Soil and cement mixture is prepared and lifted to the form by bucket loader. Mixture is shoveled into the forms and compacted by pneumatic tamper. Conduits to contain electrical wiring and plumbing are embedded in the wall.

3. A cement bond beam is poured along the top, adding strength. Forms are removed immediately after wall compaction. Construction proceeds as in any home, with roof structure attached to the bond beam, and the interior details and finish work completed.

4. The natural texture and color of rammed earth walls may be left inside or a plaster coating may be used. Walls may be protected with a sealer.