David Wright: Passive Solar Design

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PLOWBOY: And I'll bet you found a way to work with him.

WRIGHT: I immediately struck up a very close relationship with Bill and told him I was going to quit my job in California and come to work for him. He said OK and I showed up the following June and he gave me a job and I apprenticed under Bill. I had passed all my exams in California but I was still an architect-in-training at the time. So I worked with Bill for three years and really learned the basics of adobe and started to understand what a good low-energy material it is and what good karma and sculptural qualities it has.

PLOWBOY: Yes. Adobe can be so beautiful. And in the hands of someone who knows how to use it, it can seem to just flow out and wrap around a space and do all kinds of things.

WRIGHT: Absolutely. You can do anything with it. You can punch a window in wherever you want to. You can modify it in almost any way at any time. As a matter of fact, the old traditional adobes were just an ongoing building process. Someone would build an adobe house and then, as they had more children or the next generation took over or the place was sold to another family, it was expected that the home would be expanded or modified to suit the new tenants. The old adobes were really built for change.

This is kind of a revolutionary idea to most modern designers...but it was'nt revolutionary to the primitive cultures of this planet at all.

Traditional adobe structures-the ones with walls two or three feet thick-were also a lot more comfortable to live in than most of the adobes being put up today. It was the sheer mass of those walls that did it . . . when you put that much adobe around you, you've taken a big step toward regulating the comfort of your living space the same way the troglodytes regulate theirs in Tunisia. Those big, thick walls will retain the warmth of an inside fire in the winter and reject the heat of the sun during the summer. And then, of course, you can take that a step further when it's really hot: Close the house up tight during the day to keep the heat out . . . and then open it after the sun goes down to let the cool night air in and get a head start on the heat of the following day.

PLOWBOY: The old adobes worked well, then, not because the earth in their walls was a good insulator . . . but simply because there was so much earth in those walls that it took a long time for heat-either coming in or going out-to get through them.

WRIGHT: Yes. It's a flywheel effect and it works really well when you use it right . . . when you understand that there's very little but sheer mass working for you and you design accordingly.

But what has happened, you see, is that the unit price of an adobe block has gone from something like 30 to 25¢. And as that cost has gone up, people have been putting less and less of those blocks into the walls of new construction. An adobe block is about 14 inches long and 10 inches wide, and the old walls were built with two or three or even four of them laid side by side. As the price of adobe went up, though, people began turning the blocks longways and building their walls just one brick thick. Well, that made a wall 14 inches wide and it wasthermally-still a pretty fair structure. But then the price kept right on climbing, so the contractors started turning the blocks the short way, and that made the walls only 10 inches thick . . . and it doesn't take heat very long to go through 10 inches of adobe.

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