Using the sand below their feet to house refugees displaced by conflict, natural disasters

Architect Nader Khalili believes millions of refugees and displaced persons driven out of their homes by war or natural disaster can be housed quickly and cheaply by using the sand or earth beneath their feet. His award-winning “superabode” design uses sandbags and barbed wire to build inexpensive dome-style homes that blend ancient and modern technologies and can withstand earthquakes, fire and flood.

Khalili’s domed design won the 2004 Aga Khan Award for Architecture. Each shelter has one major domed space with ancillary spaces for cooking and sanitary services. The system is particularly suitable for providing temporary shelter because it is cheap and allows buildings to be quickly erected by hand by men and women, young and old, with minimal training. The maximum weight lifted is an earth-filled can to pour into the bags.

In 1991, Khalili founded the California Institute of Earth Art and Architecture (Cal-Earth), a non-profit research and educational organization located near Los Angeles. Now in his sixties, he gave up a conventional career designing high-rises in Iran more than 27 years ago to become a proponent of "earth architecture," the art of building simply, cheaply and ecologically with nature's most abundant material. During a five-year motorcycle odyssey through the Iranian desert, seeking ways to preserve his country's architectural heritage while helping to house the poor, he discovered the process he calls “geltaftan”, a combination of the Persian words for “clay” and “firing”.

Near the remote desert village of Ghala Mofid, he found a 4,000-year-old kiln once used to fire clay tiles and realized the firing had fused its vaulted roof into a solid rock shell that had stood for 4,000 years. Yet nearby villagers were living in the open air because rain had undermined the roofs of their raw clay homes. Khalili repaired a single home by firing it from inside; baked for three days, the adobe turned to rain-and-earthquake-impervious stone. Soon, every home in the village was fired.

“Superadobe” grew from his realization, while teaching at the Southern California Institute of Architecture, that even in America, many poor people could not afford adobe-brick housing. "I needed to find a way to pick up any soil and build with that, taking into account those who cannot afford clay or firing. Then I realized that all over the world, from Mexico to the Sahara to the coastlines, there is sand, but nobody is doing anything with it."

Using a mortar of barbed wire, he stacked sandbags into arches and staggered the arches into vaults, forming a sort of igloo that required a total material investment of a few hundred dollars. With the middle-class in mind, he developed "superadobe," mile-long fabric tubes that are pumped full of moistened soil and coiled into structures resembling beehives; these houses cost a few thousand dollars. Cal-Earth's Superadobe prototypes have received California building permits and met the emergency housing requirements of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). UNHCR and the United Nations Development Programme used the system in 1995 to provide temporary shelters for refugees coming into Iran from Iraq.

Cal-Earth is testing a distance-teaching program for the live broadcast of hands-on instruction, and people trained there are taking the techniques to countries including Mongolia, Mexico, India, the USA, Iran, Brazil, Siberia, Chile and South Africa.

This story was compiled from materials on the Cal Earth website , the Aga Khan Award for Architecture citation, a story called “Dirt cheap houses from elemental materials” by Ted Katauskas published in Architecture Week May 17, 2000, and a story called “Design down-to-earth housing from the Mojave to Mars” by Linda Hales published in the Washington Post January 17, 2004.

Contact: Geltaftan Foundation/ Cal-Earth, 10376 Shangri La Avenue, Hesperia CA 92345, USA. Email.

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