Down to Earth
The work of a few earthen home architects is cracking building code barriers in Southern California.

By DIANA MARCUM, Special to The Times

     HESPERIA--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.