Behind rows of cookie-cutter tract homes in Hesperia, California, at the southern edge of the Mojave Desert, hides what looks like a playground for grown-up hobbits. Arches, perfectly round dome-shaped structures and emergency shelters sprout from the sand.
Among these fanciful-looking constructions is a fully permitted 2,300-square-foot three-bedroom house, with a two-car garage and two bathrooms that are hooked up to the city’s sewer and electricity. The bedrooms and living rooms are painted in earthy tones. Arched ceilings and curved walls lend a coziness to the dwelling, which features modern amenities like an oversized closet and a conventional kitchen.
This home — called Earth One — and the surrounding structures were created by the California Institute of Earth Art and Architecture, better known as CalEarth. The institute is at the heart of a growing movement grounded in the belief that the future of housing lies in the oldest material on Earth: the earth itself.
At first glance, the structures resemble adobe, the traditional mud brick homes in desert communities for centuries. But they are what their late founder, Nader Khalili, calls SuperAdobe. Unlike their sundried ancestors, these homes are constructed by filling sandbags with earth, coiling them into layers and reinforcing each row with barbed wire. The result is a series of strong, curved and fire-resistant structures — plastered for waterproofing, but humble in composition: dirt, sandbags, wire and water.
“This whole village was built using this earth. We dug this courtyard from material right here, under our feet,” explains the founder’s daughter, Sheefteh Khalili, now CalEarth’s CFO. “That’s the beauty of it. You’re building with what’s already there.”
On a recent Saturday morning, more than a hundred people made the trek to remote Hesperia for the monthly open house to get a first-hand look at the unique structures. Several of them were wildfire survivors or contractors from Los Angeles on a mission to find fire-resistant, cost-effective alternatives for clients who lost everything in this year’s megafires. “I read that these SuperAdobes survived 7.2 [magnitude] earthquakes and fires and Hurricane Maria,” explained a grey-haired contractor who wants to check if his research pans out. “And they cost about a third of what traditional homes do.”
In response to growing demand, CalEarth now offers free educational materials to wildfire survivors, hoping to spark a broader shift in how we think about building homes.
A visionary architect with a poetic mission, Nader Khalili’s path to SuperAdobe began not in California but in the deserts of Iran — and in the verses of his favorite poet, the Persian mystic Rumi, who once wrote: “Earth turns to gold in the hands of the wise.”
Born into poverty as one of nine siblings in Iran, Khalili studied architecture in Turkey before hitchhiking across Europe. In the 1950s, he arrived in San Francisco with a Persian-English dictionary and $70. He became an architect, specializing in high-rise construction in California before returning to Iran as an urban developer. “He was a successful architect, but he was absolutely miserable and hated what he was doing,” his daughter Sheefteh recalls. “So he bought a motorcycle and spent five years traveling from Tehran into the deserts to study earth architecture, which is indigenous in Iran and many parts of the world.”
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Khalili built several experimental structures and schools in Iran, but when war broke out between Iran and Iraq in 1980, he returned to the U.S., where he gave lectures at universities about building with natural elements. In 1984, he responded to a call for papers from NASA about how to build on the moon and Mars. Khalili learned that the soil on the moon was rich in glass content and suggested melting it into shells with magnifying lenses, or using tubing systems, similar to the structures found at the institute today. NASA accepted his paper, and when he went to present it at the NASA conference, scientists from the Los Alamos National Laboratory invited him to test his ideas at their research facility near Santa Fe in New Mexico. “We’re in the middle of the Iranian Gulf War, and my father is given the highest security clearance in the country to go to Los Alamos and do this research,” Sheefteh says with a chuckle. “He was like, ‘This is it. This is what I want to do.’”
He further developed and refined his ideas there for CalEarth, which he founded in Hesperia in 1991. The CalEarth staff says Khalili chose the remote location on purpose because of its rough desert climate. Temperatures climb up to 120 degrees in the summer and snow falls in the winter. It’s also near the San Andreas Fault, so he could experiment with seismic activity. There, with a small team of students and donated materials, Khalili began turning his lunar ideas into earthbound homes.
Part of the appeal is the simplicity of the construction process. “Anybody who can hold a coffee can full of earth can start building these structures,” Sheefteh Khalili explains. “It’s accessible, it’s affordable, and that’s what makes it truly sustainable. My father dedicated his life to providing housing for people in need.”
Since their father’s passing in 2008, Sheefteh and her brother Dastan have been carrying on his vision at CalEarth. They offer workshops to teach the construction method hands-on as well as blueprints for domes and houses.
“My father was really inspired by things he could find in nature,” Sheefteh says. “For him, it was beyond just building. If you really understand the natural elements and work with them, rather [than] against them, you can create something that is beautiful, functional and withstands the elements.”
The EcoDome, for instance, a simple one-room dome, has a wind funnel that faces the mountains to direct cool mountain air into the structure in the summer. “When it’s 120 degrees out there, it’s in the high 80s in here,” programs manager Michelle Toland asserts.
The blueprints and the SuperAdobe method are open source, deliberately not patented so anybody can go and construct a building with the technique.
No official numbers are tracked, but there is evidence that SuperAdobe buildings exist in over 60 countries, including in Venezuela, Japan and Colombia. Khalili received the renowned Aga Khan Award for Architecture in 2004, and the United Nations and the U.S. Army have endorsed and used the system for emergency shelters.
Anecdotally, SuperAdobes have survived fires, earthquakes and other disasters, including Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico in 2015. A 40-dome orphanage in Nepal survived a 7.3 magnitude earthquake; one in Ojai, California, emerged intact after the 2017 Thomas Fire; and another stood firm through the Eaton Fire. “Earth doesn’t burn,” Sheefteh Khalili says. She explains that the buildings get their durability not only from their materials but also from the dome shape that offsets seismic forces. “We’ve seen proof of concept all around the world,” Sheefteh Khalili states. “Now what we have to do is push it to the next level and make it really accessible by putting it into the code.”
CalEarth has succeeded in gaining International Code Conference (ICC) approval, and the nonprofit is hoping to get International Residential Code approval soon. “When the city of Hesperia tried to strength-test our structures, [it] had to stop because its machines failed,” Toland says. The small nonprofit is currently fundraising to raise the half a million dollars necessary for the scientific seismic shake test.
Sheefteh Khalili feels the tides changing in the aftermath of increasingly devastating California fires: “People are seeking solutions, including city planners and architects.” Her brother Dastan agrees, noting that “everybody from the U.S. military to politicians, to doctors, to lawyers, fellow environmentalists, earth builders — everybody and anybody from all over the world is interested in this concept of self-empowerment and the ability to develop the skill to build your own shelter. There is simply not enough steel and brick in the world to build; we have to use the material that is already here, the earth.”
The SuperAdobe method scales with need. In post-disaster zones like Haiti, 10 people can build a dome shelter in a day. But the method can also be used for customized luxury homes like Earth One, or even whimsical retreats. “Just a few months ago, I discovered this place in Colombia on the internet, called the Khalili Cantina and Spa,” Sheefteh Khalili says with a laugh. “The spa has a SuperAdobe dome. Even the towels have the Khalili name on them, but we don’t know these people. I should go there to check it out.”
As her father once said: “You don’t build a shelter with earth. You build it with love. The earth is just the beginning.”
The post The Whimsy and Practicality of ‘SuperAdobe’ appeared first on Reasons to be Cheerful.
