David Wright: Passive Solar Design
(Page 2 of 16)
September/October 1977
By Travis Brock
I'd like to know "why you"? Why have you been able to develop insights into architectural design and the use of solar energy that have eluded more experienced and occasionally much better financed researchers? What is there in your background that has made this possible? What has set you on the path you now follow?
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WRIGHT: I was born here in California . . . up in the foothills of the Sierra NEVADAS--February 13, 1941-and I spent my youth as a boy scout out in the hills gaining an appreciation of nature. I decided at about the age of 12 that I wanted to be an architect and I received an Associate of Architecture degree from Sierra College in Auburn, California in 1960. After that-in 1964came a B.S. in Architectural Engineering from California Polytechnic down in San Luis Obispo . . . and after that I joined the Peace Corps.
PLOWBOY: Why the Peace Corps?
WRIGHT: To avoid the draft and because the Corps offered an immediate work opportunity. As a Peace Corps volunteer, was instantly shipped off to Africa and employed as an architect in the country of Tunisia. I spent a year there and got several interesting projects underway. Then I was transferred to Guinea in West Africa to design a special project-an agricultural junior college-way out in the jungle.
That was where I had my first real taste of working with people on a grassroots level. We trained groups of natives to make CINVA Ram blocks from locally available materials and that was practically all we had to work with, except for some Czech, Russian, and Chinese hardware.
PLOWBOY: What were those "locally available materials" that you used in Guinea?
WRIGHT: Beautiful hardwoods, softwoods, and-of courseearth for the CINVA Ram blocks. We had a certain amount of imported cement for concrete and glazing and things like that . . . but almost all the rest of the main structural materials came from within 15 miles of the school we were building.
I was in Africa from 1964 to 1966 . . . and that's where I got my feeling for earth forms. Almost everything in Tunisia was built out of the earth-when they mixed mud and rocks together to construct walls, they called it "agglomerate"-and I grew to love the idea of taking something right out of the ground and building with it. I had never really seen that done before.
I even had the opportunity, while I was in Africa, of going down to Matmata--which is in southern Tunisia-and staying in one of the troglodyte dwellings down there.
PLOWBOY: Those are the underground communities there on the edge of the Sahara Desert, aren't they? I believe that part of the movie Star Wars was filmed in those troglodyte dwellings.
WRIGHT: Right. Matmata is smack on the edge of the Sahara, where it's not at all uncommon for the temperature to drop down to 40° Fahrenheit at night and then shoot all the way up to 120° the following day. The region has wild seasonal temperature swings, too . . . extremely hot summers and very cold winters. And a lot of wind, but very little rainfall. It's a tremendously harsh environment to live in.
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