In the scrubby desert near Hesperia,
about 100 miles east of Los Angeles, a sun-bleached
sign for Cal-Earth barely hints at what goes on
behind the iron gate. A bold vision is taking shape
from the mind of the slim, bearded man who runs the
institute.
Nader
Khalili, 63, sees an end to global shelter problems
in the mud houses he builds in the backyard of the
15-year-old California Institute of Earth Art and
Architecture’s 7 1/2-acre compound. There,
Khalili and a staff of volunteer architects,
engineers and students, develop survivalist housing
from basic building materials using funds he earns by
lecturing, writing and offering apprenticeship
programs. Dome-shaped adobe prototypes, made from the
dirt he walks on, are an unlikely tool for social
change, yet they have attracted NASA scientists, the
United Nations, a leper colony in India, and
Byzantine Catholic monks building an abbey. The
appeal is mainly practical. The domes are cheap and
easy to build as well as environmentally sound.
Visions of
ecological housing for the world’s 2 billion
people who lack decent shelter came to Khalili during
a long motorcycle trip through the Middle Eastern
desert in the ’70s. He was miles away from the
corporate high-risers he had been engineering in
cities from Los Angeles to Tehran. When he
wasn’t putting up tall buildings, he lectured
about the latest architectural techniques to
professionals and students around the world. “I
used to breathe, eat and sleep high-risers,” he
says. His desert odyssey changed all that. He decided
he couldn’t go back to steel superstructures,
asbestos ceilings and walls covered with lead-based
paint.
Still, his
past and present are not as disconnected as they
seem. The skyscrapers were monuments to the latest
technology of the time; the domes, with their
mosque-like shapes, are what people need now, he
says.
A
‘Tangible Spirituality’
Once Khalili
explains that he was born a Muslim in Iran and his
grandmother raised him on Sufi mystics’ poetry,
the look of his domes begins to make sense. “My
structures are tangible spirituality.”
Ten years
ago, he began translating the poems of Jalaluddin
Rumi, who was born in 13th century Persia (modern-day
Afghanistan). An expert in Islamic law and a Persian
language scholar, Rumi’s work is generating a
renewed interest in Sufi poetry. His tomb in Konya,
Turkey, is now a pilgrimage site. Rumi’s poetry
taught Khalili that earth, water, air and fire are
the basic elements of life. For an engineer familiar
with desert climates, those elements became mud
bricks formed into half-moon-shaped houses left to
bake in the sun.
Later, when
his work caught the attention of the U.N., he used
sandbags instead of brick molds because they are
readily available in disaster areas. Now he is
experimenting with plastic-bag tubing that is light
to transport. A dome 18 feet in diameter costs about
$300 in building materials.
For all their
humble materials, the domes feel luxurious inside.
The “Rumi” dome has walls dotted with small
openings for a lacy effect, and a floor made of clay
bricks. Another house, a mud brick
“mansion” made from a cluster of nine
domes, has arched windows with latches that open like
a ship’s portholes, and a Persian carpet in the
living room. On a hot summer day, the domes stay
about 20 degrees cooler than the outside temperature,
which averages around 115 degrees.
When Khalili
presents his construction techniques to NASA, he
talks about economics. It is cheaper to build with
materials native to the planet they’re on than
haul steel and concrete from Earth. “I show them
how they can pick up what is under their feet on Mars
and build a colony.” He does not have a
contract, but talks continue.
NASA
scientists appreciate the simplicity. “We in
aerospace are a very trendy group,” says Madhu
Thangavelu, an engineer and architect who has done
consulting work for NASA and will teach a course in
space exploration architecture this fall at UCLA.
“Then someone like Nader comes along, who says
that from time immemorial humans have built the same
way, not using trendy materials, but what is under
their feet.
“Most of
his structures are built by hand by one or two
people. That system is very compatible to building on
other planets. He talks about his approach in terms
of Sufism, but it appeals to a universal
philosophy.”
For Sufis,
who make up the mystical branch of Islam, the hands
are a link to the subconscious, Khalili says.
Sometimes it is better to use your hands and forget
your head, your thinking mind, he suggests. It helps
open the way for a personal experience of God, which
is a mystic’s ultimate goal.
During his
meeting with NASA’s department of small business
research concerning a Mars housing prototype, Khalili
did not mention that Rumi is his spiritual
consultant. But Khalili has solved building problems
by reading the poet. Once, when he worried that his
adobe domes were starting to crack, the mystic’s
poetry helped him out.
“Rumi
says that we are worth no more than whatever we most
fear,” Khalili recalls. “I was afraid of
cracks. Then I noticed that nature is filled with
cracks. Look at a snake’s skin.” The
conclusion was an experiment. Let the dome continue
to crack and see how long it lasts. It is now 7 years
old and still habitable. He took it to be Sufi wisdom
applied to survival housing. “It is time to
bring the tangible and intangible worlds
together,” Khalili says. “It should not be
that now I am at the mosque and now I am at work.
It’s all the same. God can be made tangible in
the work.”
Khalili’s
romance with the desert also can’t be separated
from his work. In some ways, he seems like an ancient
prophet. A small, wiry man who lives a spartan life,
his office is a sun-battered wooden house with
corrugated metal details. He will philosophize about
rocks and dirt, water and air given half a chance. He
has been compared to a seer or a teacher of Sufism
whose spiritual quest led him into the wilderness.
“A Sufi seeker goes through phases,” says
Fariba Enteshari, who founded the Rumi Education
Center in Brentwood. “Originally, the phases
included a period of isolation in the desert, a time
of silence. That period is called ‘taking the
veil,’ when a seeker becomes closer to
God.”
He also gets
compared to modern “earth” architects who
use the elements around them to build everything from
underground houses to rocky mega-structures. More
conventional comparisons often lead back to Frank
Lloyd Wright, who used local natural materials, and
let indoor and outdoor spaces flow together.
Monks
to Build a Monastery
Four
Byzantine Catholic monks found Khalili on the
Internet two years ago. They will soon build a
monastery in Newberry Springs, north of Cal-Earth and
east of Barstow. He taught them his basic building
technique, and they plan to put up 10 individual
housing units for monks, followed by a church and
visitors center.
“Khalili’s
designs look Middle Eastern with domes and arches.
Our buildings will have that feeling,” says
Father Basil, who says all the monks took up weight
training to prepare for the monastery construction
that begins next year. He is a burly man who wears
his long black habit and skull cap even while digging
in the dirt. The main appeal, apart from the low
cost, is that adobe domes with ventilation openings
are cooler inside than conventional houses, he says.
“We like that, and the fact that building
materials will come right off our land.”
The monks
stay away from Khalili’s spiritual side.
“We don’t go there,” Basil says.
“We are very firm in our beliefs. They’re
not totally different, but he doesn’t bother us
with his beliefs and we don’t bother him with
ours.”
Other
students of Khalili’s methods include seniors at
the Southern California Institute of Architecture in
Los Angeles, where he teaches, who apprentice with
him. His son, Daston, 28, an actor and director, has
also worked with him. Daston recently made a
documentary of students constructing one of his
father’s buildings. “My dad is a mystical
guy,” Daston says. “But at the same time
he’s down to earth.”
In the short
term, perhaps the most practical use of
Khalili’s ideas are the emergency housing
structures he has been involved with. During the
Iran-Iraq war of the mid-1980s, he taught Iraqi
refugees to build his “sandbag” dome. Since
then, Nassrine Azima of the U.N. Institute of
Training and Research in New York has tried to get
funding for a prototype project. “I saw a real
opportunity after Hurricane Mitch,” she says of
the autumn storm that devastated Central America two
years ago. “I see Nader Khalili’s work most
applicable for emergency housing after a natural
disaster.”
She compares
his organic structures to the corrugated iron of
typical emergency shelters. “His work respects
the human being and the environment,” she says.
“You build it by hand with the dirt under your
feet.” Compare that to corrugated iron put up by
government workers. “What does it do to a person
to live in one or the other?”
Reprinted from the LA Times. Mary
Rourke can be reached at mary.rourke@latimes.com
