case history: the desert home

case history: the desert home

Our ideas about building in the desert come from three months spent crossing the Sahara Desert in 2006, and from 6 years now in the Sonoran Desert of Arizona.  From the Sahara, we got a visceral sense of the difference between building with earth and building with concrete.  The bottom line was this: In the absence especially of large quantities of expensive insulation, earthen construction was almost always comfortable, and concrete construction rarely so.  In the Sonoran Desert, we've come to draw inspiration from the creatures that operate comfortably in the environment, and extract typologies from that examination.  The house discussed here draws from the Desert Tortoise, relying on a tough, insulating shell to shield the more vulnerable living space within.

...a face only his mother could love...

In this case, the shell is a reinforced thin-shell of concrete, covered by 14" of earth.  In this way we are able to benefit from the structural capacity of a modern material with the insulating value of earth.  Deep overhangs are calculated to admit sun during the winter, when the desert gets quite cold, and keep the sun out otherwise.  Liberal covered exterior space takes advantage of the opportunity to live outdoors for up to 6 months a year by providing shade.  Patios, driveways and the swimming pool extend out into the landscape, stabilizing the surrounding terrain.

The project is dug into a berm, taking advantage of underground temperatures that remain stable year-round between 50 and 60 degrees Fahrenheit.  Underneath the shell, the building is open to the breeze with a lot of surface area and large operable glass panels.

The question, especially with buildings that aren't cubic, is always what kind of urbanism would emerge if this were taken as a prototype.  In other words, what does a building like this mean for neighborhoods, and for cities?  The failures of suburbia: impoverished social structures, bland culture, enslavement to the car and to commuting, outsourcing childcare, all the gifts of Henry Ford and Frank Lloyd Wright and Dwight Eisenhower, they demand a better answer.  Our inspiration still comes from Paolo Soleri and Arcosanti and a vision of tremendous density and spatial diversity juxtaposed with great stretches of unabused land in its natural or cultivated state.