In the months since wildfires tore through Los Angeles County in January, destroying more than 16,000 structures in 24 days, thousands of families have begun the process of rebuilding from scratch, while also fearing what might happen when the next fire comes.
Some of those families have ventured to nearby Hesperia, just outside of Los Angeles in the southern Mojave Desert, to view model homes of the future. These are hardly your usual houses: There are no wooden frames, no metal roofs, and no siding. Instead, a visit to the CalEarth Institute takes you through a series of earthen domes and vaults formed by tube-shaped earth bags stacked and bound with mesh wiring before plastered over in a technique the nonprofit CalEarth calls “SuperAdobe.”
The technique, designed by the late architect Nader Khalili, is receiving “lots of individual interest” in the months after the Eaton and Palisades fires in January, said his son, Dastan Khalili, who has run CalEarth alongside his sister since their father’s death in 2008. “It’s much more in people’s consciousness in Southern California than it ever was before.”
Earthen structures have a deep history in the United States, from Indigenous earth mounds along the Mississippi River to the adobe homes of New Mexico’s Taos Pueblo to. In modern times, luxury rammed earth homes and are sprouting up throughout the Southwest, where the thermal mass held by earth walls keeps homes cool during hot desert days and warm during frigid nights.
Adobe construction has found yet another practical use in recent years: For all intents and purposes, dirt doesn’t burn. That means a well-constructed earthen home can withstand the harshest effects of wildfires.
SuperAdobe homes received particular attention when a photo spread across social media showing a backyard earthen dome in Altadena that survived the Eaton fire, while the home in front of it had succumbed to the flames.
While no home is fireproof, the Eaton and Palisades fires showed that even homes built by the strictest California code standards are vulnerable to intense urban conflagrations, when a fire takes longer to move, becomes hotter, and spews more embers into homes. Newer homes in Pacific Palisades had been constructed in compliance with California’s updated fire code, but for many families, it wasn’t enough. The same phenomenon happened in other recent fires, such as the 2023 Lahaina wildfire in Hawaii, showing that future construction must adapt.
“The [fires] we are seeing are more catastrophic, in much more severe conditions,” said Michele Barbato, co-director of the Climate Adaptation Research Center at the University of California, Davis. “We need to enter into a new philosophy of actually having construction that is fire resilient and not just ignition resistant.”
Barbato and his students have tested compressed earth blocks against fire, which fundamentally use the same materials as SuperAdobe: soil mixed with water and chemical stabilizers. They tried charring one block with a blowtorch and put another in a furnace, both at temperatures far hotter than the average wildfire. Instead of burning, the blocks hardened and ceramified, which Barbato says actually made the earth blocks stronger.
“The idea is to reuse the technology of soil construction that is about 10,000 years old,” he said, “but with the engineering knowledge that we have gained in the last 10,000 years.”
Nader Khalili arrived at the same conclusion when, after leaving a successful architecture practice in Iran, he ventured into the desert in search of Indigenous building methods that could help address a global housing shortage and epidemic of homelessness. “He got on a motorcycle and went on this odyssey,” Dastan said. “He realized the true solution is going to be minimal material use with maximum effect.”
After coming to the United States, Khalili worked with NASA to develop off-world structures and proposed filling long bags with lunar soil and stacking them, an idea he called Velcro-adobe. The idea translated perfectly to arid Southern California, and SuperAdobe was born. “All you really need are long bags and barbed wire and then the soil,” Dastan said. CalEarth’s designs allow for around 90% of materials to be sourced on-site—soil requires a stabilizer, which is usually cement, but can be a natural material such as hempcrete.
The end result, Dastan said, is a structure that “is fireproof, hurricane-proof, tornado-proof, earthquake-resistant, and will last for centuries.”
These designs became the basis of the designs that CalEarth now shares with the world. SuperAdobe homes have been built in more than 40 countries with varying climates, including domes in the Philippines designed to withstand the tropical country’s frequent typhoons and earthquakes. CalEarth says its designs already meet California building codes and have passed several of the state’s strict earthquake tests.
CalEarth’s Hesperia campus essentially acts as a showroom and laboratory. Its Earth One structure uses a series of vaults to create a three-bedroom, two-bathroom house that, if not for the earth walls and porthole windows flooding it with natural light, would almost feel conventional. Other homes are built as domes, from larger living spaces to small, 8-foot mounded spaces designed for disaster relief that can be built in days. For Khalili, who was a scholar of Rumi, using earth to build helps connect humanity to the Earth.
“There’s a deep sense of stillness and solidity. It feels very solid and safe,” said Lisa Starr, who built and lived in a complex of superadobe earth domes.
Starr visited CalEarth after purchasing land in the desert ecosystem of Joshua Tree, California, and was quickly hooked. “It was esoteric, divine, very magical,” she recalled. She ended up building what became a complex of earthen homes called Bonita Domes. Its central structure is made of two conjoined domes, their towering ceilings connected by drooping door frames that give the sensation of walking within an ice cream sundae. Outside, a series of domes served as guesthouses and Airbnbs.
Starr recalls how she watched from her home in 2018 as a wildfire burned about 20 miles away. “At night, you could see the mountain in flames,” she said. When frequent windstorms ripped through Joshua Tree, friends would call her to check if she was OK. “The wind could be blowing outside and I didn’t hear any shaking or rattling,” she said.
It certainly makes for a comforting place to be when facing the risk of climate disasters, and more homeowners are beginning to catch on. In Colorado, some residents who lost their homes to wildfires have rebuilt using compressed earth blocks manufactured by the local company Nova Terra.
But there are many hurdles keeping earth homes from becoming more widespread, especially in the Pacific Palisades and Altadena neighborhoods affected by the January fires.
“We hoped for political will to fast track this process. That hasn’t manifested,” Dastan said. While there has been immense individual interest, including from residents of Altadena and local officials from around Los Angeles County, the building industry and the language of state building codes have yet to embrace a form of construction still considered unconventional.
This is true for all earthen construction, but especially for SuperAdobe. “There is the problem of a major resistance in building something that doesn’t look like a home,” Barbato said. “People who are going for the natural look do not necessarily represent the majority of homeowners.”
It can be difficult to find architects and engineers with backgrounds in building with earth, even as a growing number are becoming interested in using it. And for those who can’t source their soil locally, the supply chains needed for earth homes “don’t fundamentally exist” in most of the country, Barbato said.
Barbato and his research team are planning a new series of tests in mid-June, in which they will subject a fully constructed earthen shed to fire exposure to prove its overall resilience to the type of intense fires California saw in January. If the tests are successful, they could prove that an entire enclosed structure—not just individual components—can withstand fire.
Still, there’s a lingering impression that building with earth is more expensive than using more conventional materials. This often proves true: Earth home builders generally report spending around 10 percent more, although this varies widely. But that’s not the only cost. Many homeowners in California face the prospect of living, or building, in areas that insurance companies refuse to cover, raising house prices across the board.
“We need to really innovate here,” Barbato said. “There is not yet an appetite to change the way we are doing things.”
Starr often commissioned volunteers who wanted to learn earth building to help construct Bonita Domes. In the end, her costs were comparable to building a conventional home.
“The cost is in the labor for SuperAdobe. It’s not in the material,” Starr said. “And what’s wrong with that? You’re giving people jobs. You’re supporting people.”
“There’s such a reciprocity to building with earth,” she said. “It’s a reciprocity to living on this planet. It’s an Earth renewal ceremony in itself.”
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