The Father of Earth-Sheltered Design

Enlarge Image Image Gallery Malcolm “Mac” Wells, the father of earth-sheltered architecture. SHAREEN DAVIS/CAPE COD VOICE

Malcolm “Mac” Wells has been called the father of modern earth-sheltered architecture, the guru of underground building and the gentle architect. Born in 1926 in Camden, N.J., he became an architect in 1953 and, by his own account, spent the next 11 years winning awards and earning lots of money by “spreading corporate asphalt.”

Around 1964, though, three events completely changed his approach to architecture. An underground house exhibit he saw at the New York World’s Fair “put a spark in my head.” On a visit to Taliesin West, Frank Lloyd Wright’s compound in Scottsdale, Ariz., he stepped into a small underground theater and found it delightfully cool and comfortable. Finally, he says, three men died who had been deeply important to him: John F. Kennedy, Pope John XXIII and Malcolm’s own father, John D. Wells. “That made a little more of an adult out of me,” he says. “It kicked me into getting serious about life.”

Serious thinking led him to conclude that the Earth’s surface was meant for living things rather than dead buildings and asphalt, and that buildings therefore should be underground. It meant building downward rather than upward. He became fascinated with the possibilities of underground and earth-sheltered construction, and soon was convinced that this was not just another way to build — it was the best, perhaps the only, way to build.

He tried to spread the word. In 1965, he published an article in Progressive Architecture that he now calls a “polemic against everything that had ever been built on the surface of the earth.”

In a 1971 article in Architectural Digest, he wrote, “The act of building, whether it involves giant hydroelectric dams or a single small home, is an act of land-destruction. Buildings destroy land for as long as they stand.”

That article sets out 15 properties of wild land that Wells thought buildings ideally should emulate: create pure air; create pure water; store rainwater; produce its own food; create rich soil; use solar energy; store solar energy; create silence; consume its own wastes; maintain itself; match nature’s pace; provide wildlife habitat; provide human habitat; moderate climate and weather; and be beautiful.