[Lapg] Sat Dec .3 Saturday Roadtrip to visit visionary Architect Nader Khalili Hesperia CA

Fri Nov 25 08:10:17 PST 2005

Dec .3  2005 Saturday Roadtrip to visit visionary Architect Nader Khalili
Calearth www.Calearth.org in Hesperia Ca. this is an all day annual trip to 
visit the demonstration site, . This is an amazing adventure to see what 
can be done with earth  and it is truly low cost beautiful housing that 
does not tax the earth's biological resources.
We will leave Santa Barbara at 6:30am . for more info call Wes Roe 964-1555 
or email lakinroe at silcom.com, potluck lunch, Other region than Ventura , 
please arrange your own carpooling
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Visiting Days for the Public to view the prototype structures: (site is 
closed during rain)

Open House interactive tour, on the first Saturday of every month, starts 10am.

Cal-Earth has held these open houses now for the last eight years, and 
every year more people come to experience it for themselves, and to teach 
their children how to build a sustainable future. Around 11am Architect 
Khalili usually gives an informal talk, and around 1pm visitors share a 
pot-luck lunch and talk/network. Cal-Earth associates give tours and answer 
questions throughout the day. Most buildings are wheelchair accessible. 
Please no pets.

Address of Cal-Earth Institute Site: 10177 Baldy Lane, Hesperia CA 92345
Follow the blue and white Hesperia City Cal-Earth Institute direction signs:
Hesperia Main Street to Topaz Avenue north, left on Live Oak Street, right 
on Baldy Lane.
Tel: (760) 956-7533. See "Directions" on Cal-Earth Homepage for maps.

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Design Down-to-Earth Housing From the Mojave to Mars
By Washington Post Staff Writer Linda Hales

Saturday, January 17, 2004

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."

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