David Wright: Passive Solar Design
(Page 3 of 16)
September/October 1977
By Travis Brock
But people do live there. And they live there in amazing comfort, considering all they've got going against them. What they do is they just dig holes about 40 feet across and approximately 30 or 40 feet deep in the ground. And then they tunnel their homes out horizontally from these pits.
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There's simply a wonderful system of caves running back from these big holes in the ground, and they're absolutely delightful to live in. The temperature down in those underground homes stays about 65° year round. The people who live there are in out of the wind, and they've rigged up ways to collect the rain that falls into the pits. It's just a very simple, straightforward-but absolutely terrific! -solution to their problems.
PLOWBOY: A solution, probably, that was evolved over a fairly long period of time.
WRIGHT: Oh sure. That's what's so good about the indigenous, or native, architecture that has developed naturally in so many parts of the world. It frequently just evolves and evolves and evolves . . . a little bit at a time, as the lifestyle in a given area advances. And by the time it's really served the people living there for a few hundred years, why, it's pretty good architecture. It may look simple and even crude compared to the architecture of the industrialized world . . . but everyone who lives there understands it, it's comfortable, it probably doesn't cost much, it uses only indigenous materials, and it requires very little energy and no complicated tools for its construction, repair, and operation.
PLOWBOY: Let's see now. You were in Africa from 1964 to 1966 ...and then....
WRIGHT: And then I came back to the States and "paid my dues", so to speak, to the architectural profession here. I worked at several different jobs, just gaining experience . . . but all the time trying to put my finger on something that was bothering me . . . trying to figure out what it was that, deep down, I somehow knew had to be done.
This all came to a head along about 1970. I was working in Santa Cruz-down below San Francisco-just putting up little redwood jewel-box houses on the California coast . . . and I got sort of disenchanted. It was very much a money trip, instead of the peopleserving thing I wanted to do. I was also ge tting really turned off by what I saw happening to the environment down there.
Santa Cruz County, for instance, granted something like 500 building permits in a single week. A very fragile, beautiful area was being jammed with houses and people. And Monterey Bay-a huge body of water-was suddenly closed to all swimmers because of typhoid that had come out of Fort Ord, a military base there on the coast. And then San Francisco Bay Area smog started pouring down along Highway 17 and through the pass to Santa Cruz.
That smog was the last straw. I had a friend in Santa Fe, New Mexico that I'd been in the Peace Corps with, and I went to visit him. This was Christmas time and while I was there in Santa Fe I met Bill Lumpkins, who is sort of "Mr. Adobe" in the Southwest.
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