It was one of the members of the 9/11 commission who reminded the world on NPR the other day.  He’d either been taught the wisdom in the military, or been taught it by a military man, such as someone intelligent enough to have achieved the General rank.  Although I’ve been roundly in Ghandi’s flock since the days of the students‘ striking of the Universities in protest of the Vietnam War, I’ve recognized these men as leaders, and not bloodthirsty hawks, as they seem to continue to be appraised.  I don’t think these men get us into war, but rather embrace might as a means to end it.  Really.  Don’t look at me so dumbfounded.  Stay calm; carry on.  Brilliant.

If you can think of it as fortunate, which might be difficult for many, the sites for which we design, and upon which we work, are essentially devoid of utilities.

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We are students (we are all students:  students, staff, and Professor of Practice, who founded the program in 2000 A.D.) striving to design+build effectively for the needy and nearly hopeless on the Navajo Nation, just a stone’s throw from the Four Corners, on the Utah strip of the Rez.

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First year graduate students at the College of Architecture+Planning at the University of Utah, directed by the non-profit support organization, known as DesignBuildBLUFF, spend the Fall semester in studio designing a home for a specific family that they themselves have selected after interviewing six to 10 families, selecting the one that the students believe will be best impacted by a new home.  Several of these families are Supersized, crammed into ramshackle single-wide trailers or flimsy outdated single- paned and uninsulated government rectangles or middle-aged collapsing hogans.  The chosen family most often demonstrates an ambition to improve their lives through work and study, many holding down multiple jobs which are practically nonexistent within the confines of the Rez, and also outside it, sometimes driving hours to work and essentially camping out there until their days off.  So a love affair between the students and the family is immediate.  The agony of the selection process is equally felt by the students and the unselected family.  We, the staff, can only hope that they will try, try again.  This very year, in fact, last year’s runner-up chanced it again and was selected, a potter and mother of six who is consistent volunteer at her children’s various schools, and her current boyfriend.  It’s difficult to find an actual husband on the Rez.  We can only guess that it’s just the way it is, given the strains of the life and the economy, or the lack thereof.  You see lots of 30-pack cardboard strewed across all roads.  The ambitious pick up the discarded aluminum, of course.

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For the Spring semester we all move down to Bluff, a bar-less town of 250 refugees from unintended sprawl at ski resorts scattered across the Rocky Mountain slopes, artists and writers intent on keeping their lives sustainable.  So it’s a fortuitous match of interest.

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At the end of the last semester, after a jury of hand-picked faculty and other parties the students themselves chose two to three home designs to present to the family and then the family selected the one they most likely most understood.  Even scale models are difficult to describe in this clash of cultures and language.

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Now we break ground, often frozen just a few inches to a foot deep, with shovels and our aching backs.  Very few of the students have ever experienced such hard labor, and the staff and Professor of Practice are usually put into the position of winging it because each year the design is completely unique.  Fortunately, we all learn a thing or two, or more likely, a hundred or two.  It’s January, and at 5,000 feet above sea level it is well below freezing, but the ubiquitous sunshine saves most days.  We continue to build the home, often alongside random family members — the Navajo Nation and Creation Story is comprised of strict family clan relationships — until mid-May, just before Summer semester begins, or travel home is scheduled.

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We began with eight students the first year and now the group has grown to 21.  We’ve designed+built extra housing in shipping containers, a large shop and a bathhouse on our five-acre campus in Bluff.  It began with a 1905 sandstone house built by a well-known rancher for his wife and six daughters, and it is part of the National Register of Historic Places.  Re-use could probably qualify as one of the most sustainable practices available to we who are concerned.

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That’s the story in as much of a nutshell as we can design, and it’s difficult to tell with so few images (when I’m invited to speak I usually use close to 150, plus a slick video trailer put together for a ten-part series for the Sundance channel, which was scrapped for lack of 2.5 million dollars).

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So, following are some written glimpses of what we do:

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We think a lot about and then try to utilize or absorb the resources available on the Rez, notably earth, sun, 9 inches of rainfall and wind.  Every home is designed according to accepted standard passive solar practices:  orienting the home with it’s length running east/west, providing a lengthy southern exposure, with fenestration wide open to the low hanging winter sun, and roof overhangs shading the blazing summer ultraviolet rays.  There is plenty of attention paid to providing ample thermal mass:  concrete floor slabs, rammed earth, and gabion cage-like Trombe-esque (-esque because of the gap between glass and mass) walls with penetrations to allow air movement and natural ventilation.  We realize that this is not rocket science.  We are learning from the vernacular, we we believe is the ultimate sustainability — use of the elements naturally at hand, within reach, both physically and economically.  Who was it who recently mentioned that we are on the cutting edge of a ten thousand year technology, explaining the attitude of permaculturalists.

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We find windows and doors through the demolition of homes around Park City, wisely saved and donated by eco-friendly builders and friends aware of our project and needs, and through the Community Development Corporation of Utah, who maintains a warehouse called the Affordability Project, initially seeded by HUD.

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We’ve used discarded pallets for roofing and ceilings, covered by canvas and filled with cellulose insulation.

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We utilize double roofs with extensive gaps for summer cooling, and to provide a novel north-side type of “shade structure”, which is traditional and cultural for seasonal living.

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We construct the rammed earth walls in sections in order to re-use the formwork — 3/4 inch plywood and 2×12 wailers — and then we re-use those materials as beams and roofing, the former sanded and the latter covered.

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We invent means to make windows low-tech operable.

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We often use a locally made, and Navajo Housing Authority owned, block comprised of    fibrous aggregate, which is five times lighter than a comparable volume of CMU, and fly ash, a byproduct of the nearby coal-fired electric plant in Page, Arizona, in lieu of Portland cement.  A 12-inch thick block provides an R-19 wall, just meeting Anglo code but unheard of on the Rez, and bolstered with natural earthen plaster inside and out.

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We scavenge for replaced and stockpiled, donated telephone poles to re-use as columns, rusted out iron mesh grids from abandoned gravel pits, steel pipe and rods tossed away as detritus from oil drilling and pumping rigs.

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And on and on and on.  But most important?  We send better, more conscientious and empathic architects out into the future of this profession, energetic young designers and builders out to change the world, out to shift the paradigm of easy energy and money.  Our budgets for these homes, from 1,000 to 1,300 square feet are $50,000.  Last year we came in under budget and essentially on schedule.

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We’ve learned a great deal.  We teach our students to continue to learn, to learn to learn.  And what is a more sustainably oriented attitude than that, we ask?

In September the new group of students, 21 strong (or at least we hope so), journeyed to Bluff to interview six candidates for this year’s project.  After a great deal of deliberation they have selected Janet Yanito, who happens to be last year’s runner-up, and hence the group who built Suzy Whitehorse’s home were delighted with the selection.  It was the first time that a family had taken a chance to be rejected a second time.  Several of the students also voted to work off-hours, or during those times, and they are often, that there are simply too many people for the jobs available on the main project.  In addition, a group will be finishing the Bathhouse begun two years ago on the Scorup property.
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Janet Yanito has spent time on and off the reservation, her trailer in Bluff currently scheduled for repossession.  She raised four children on her own, and through active volunteerism at every level of Bluff’s local elementary school, she recognizes the ultimate importance of education, especially for children on the reservation.  An artist and potter, she has expressed much appreciation for the vision of our future architects, and she is excited to share in the creation of an environment that will likely behave as both a launching pad and grounding base for the whole extended family to come together.

It will change your way of thinking, if not your life entirely.  Re-entry is no small picnic, especially when you really see America, or to be more exact, the United States, who asks for your weak, tired and huddled masses (although most of us fly now and bypass Ms. Liberty).  Lately it just seems like some kind of breeze and breeding ground for your fat and your slovenly.  One smirks at what we are calling ‘tough times’ when returning from Uganda and its environs.

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I learned in high school history, true or not (however it seemed plausible to that pliant mind I have to keep moving onto and along its own mini-treadmill), that revolution does not arise from the bottom-most point, but rather once the conditions begin to improve, once there is hint that things might be better without a tyrant or a ‘-garch’ or an ‘-ism’ of most sorts.  In other words, all hell breaks loose on the upswing.  I’ve always found that fascinating.  Some of the Ugandans with whom we ate and breathed with sitting on their colorful mats (the women), while men were perched in plastic chairs, might suspect as much, but no decent gusts of hint were blowing in the wind, unfortunately.  Whatever wind there was just barely helped to physically cool the senses of clean sweat were you fortunate enough to be perched outside of the automobile and boda-boda belching of soot in any part of town, Kampala, except for maybe the hill where the ambassadors live.  Perched is a good verb for East Africa — you wait.  You wait to haul something, chiefly non-potable water.  Kids do it, and they can make it playful.  Women do it, because they did it yesterday and the day before, and when they were kids with their mother.  Water is the noun, here.  In Jinja, not far away but it can seem so, bubbles out the source of the White Nile in the northern portion of Lake Victoria, where no one will swim.  Lots of creatures like worms or microscopic snails enter any orifice and burrow deep into your tissues.  No one is really all right in East Africa.  Bring a boatload of tissues if you’re sensitive in the slightest.

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Yet the children run and play and laugh loudly and dance and sing and proudly wear their bright, clean, colorful school uniforms and pose together — no shyness in front of any camera for these kids — look like a dentists dream collection of white teeth from who knows where.  It’s not the only baffling part of dropping into the culture.  There is always more.  For the most part these kids are fatherless, and in many instances motherless, too.  And in plenty of instance they’ve been abandoned to one of the biggest hearted people you’ll ever hope to meet, like Mama Dorothy, a living (albeit with the infernal diabetes) matron saint to the village of Birra on the outskirts of Kampala, who takes in ‘orphans’ to the tune of 20 or so at a time.  Life is communal.  All help in whatever way their age or health allows; all get along like one big happy family, the hierarchy fast in place, animals scurrying through the rat-rooted compound only to some time be caught to have its neck broken in order to provide a protein source to balance out all of the starch and mashed up plantain, called matoke, served at every meal.  Pretend that you like it, as will any self-respecting guest taking food from these people who have nothing but offer it all, and you’ll get a heaping ice-cream dispenser blob more.  You have to watch the East African guests, who prefer to eat with their hands, in order to understand enough to waste a little.  It will feed something else.  William McDonough’s concept ‘Waste Equals Food’ has been in play here before he was born, although the stomach squirms just a little at the thought.  Beer can serve the same purpose, but my belly stretches a little distended, even though I’m not cloyingly trying to fit in.  One learns that family here is not created by blood relationship — more it’s by where you are hauling the jerry cans full of brackish water.

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What go could possibly want credit for these places, one constantly asks himself, and yet on the other hand there exudes an innate happiness embedded into the people, always singing and preaching an undying love for one another in speech after speech after speech.  If you stumble with public speaking off the cuff go visit a widows’ group and you will get plenty of practice.  Like being served the matoke, you are not allowed, or more, you don’t allow yourself, to shy.  You are on stage, an ambassador of hope; you have to take the reigns.

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Missionaries mostly seem to get it all wrong.  Why might one’s inferred or preferred god be any different than those or it already floating above the fray.  These brightly colored people, other than the malarial eyes, don’t appear overly, poor, tired, weak — huddled sometimes, and able to en masse understand a little bit of microfinance in order to buy pigs enough to help build a collective chicken farm.  Now eggs will help make meals a lot more palatable.  One chicken coop at a time, just like Greg Mortenson’s Pakistani schools for girls, and exponential growth isn’t past the realm of comprehension — remember that the moon shots are being remembered now ‘not because they are easy, but because they are hard’.  Only those types of impossibilities (remember, everything possible has been done and the world did not change, according to Sun Ra — and that is a true story between this rock and hard place called East Africa, believe me) can inspire.  Barack told NASA that he’d go to the mat for them if they can ‘inspire‘ the nation, and the globe.  A vision can be attempted; blindness hasn’t a chance.  Working alone is alongside that blindness, is blindness, navigating the same dugout canoe, seeking ‘fished out‘ Nile perch.  No amount voodoo seems to be spawning more fish — thousands of fishermen live and shit on top of one another in order to gain some individual advantage, to get ‘one up on the Universe’, a sentiment Alan Watts so wisely howled about.  Mama Dorothy, where is your speech?  The President, now apparently in that position for life, whatever term that might mean out here, needs Mama Dorothy and her ilk, needs to learn that a rising tide can float all boats.

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Why do we cut learning and lust for whatever glitters or used to taste of salt.  Sweat tastes like salt, and tears, of course.  Just look at these obese slobs in their T-shirts and a size or two ago shorts, sitting on waxed floors in the promised land, mostly because the kids have taken the few available seats.  I’d like to stick a water jug on their heads, watch their spines bend into the ‘C‘ grade people we seem to have embraced.  Move the people in and out, listen to the clanging of the turnstyles, turn those tables, wipe away the slime.  They can’t get up, beached whales; a culture spiraling, spiraling down.  We think we need be wealthy to be healthy.  How did we get so sick?  Watch the black East African children, smiling, brimming with self-esteem — make it past the age of 20 and you’ve got it in spades, political correctness and HIV be damned.  Swing up, sweet chariot…we need a dinger.