For a long time I’ve been riding a roller coaster about architecture’s ability to change lives. In summary at the end of the Coen Brothers’ classic “The Big Lebowski” Sam Elliot, The Stranger, the narrator who has “that whole cowboy thing going on”, says to Jeff Bridges, the Dude, “Some days you eat the ‘bar’, some days the ‘bar’ eats you.”  One chugs up that coaster ever so slowly, gear tooth by gear tooth, and then, from that point where the visibility is crystal clear for miles and miles in all dimensions, down you dive, maybe in a swan, maybe a cannonball, maybe a bellyflop.  Today, though, I’m thinking the swan.  Today I think that architecture may very well retain the ability to change people’s lives.

For the past several years architects have been reciting the mantra that “Good design is good business.”  Before I’d ever heard that little marketing jingle, though, I think it was Pops, my father, who recounted from a developer friend that an architectural design award was a project’s certain kiss of death.  Gertrude Stein wrote that “for a very long time everybody refuses and then almost without a pause almost everybody accepts.”  DesignBuildBLUFF is like The Stranger’s [bear]; it goes over the mountain, to see what it can see.  And then it goes over another mountain.  There are a lot of them out there.  Some we can’t even conceive yet, but we’re poised and in good condition.  Like Dewitt Jones said in Hong Kong, “We’ll see it when we believe it.”

Peter Greenaway, in his film “The Belly of an Architect”, wrote:  “You can hide paintings, you can avoid literature, you can — if you’re ingenious — avoid listening to music, but you cannot avoid architecture.  Architecture is the least perishable of the arts, and the most public.  Architects (perhaps like filmmakers) are supposed to be accountable to art, to finance, to the specialist critic, to the man on the street and perhaps to posterity.”

I was up early last Sunday to kick the week off right, as is my wont, by watching the inspiring CBS television newsmagazine Sunday Morning, which tends to balance — for me, at least — the fomenting of fear found in most of the rest of the news media, even on NPR and PBS these days.  It begins a little past sunrise in the Autumn, so I usually multi-task, read the paper and tune in to the lead-in program, American Health Journal, while I wait.  It’s usually pretty stiff — you can imagine, doctors imitating talking heads — but sometimes fairly informative.  This day, though, it shot me up to the top of that roller coaster, and I’m still hanging, arms wide.  A doctor came on to explain his research toward discovering a prosthetic sheet of who knows what kind of nano-micro electronic receptors to replace disease at the back of the retina.  Because of Nick’s struggle with macular degeneration, my interest quickly piqued.  There was the unfortunate admission that it will take many years of trial and the necessary regulatory hurdles, yet somehow enthusiasm exuded through the plasma screen.  This doctor, or PhD, a bio-neurologist or neuro-biologist whose demeanor and garb were jarringly casual and comfortable compared to the aforementioned heavily starched white-coated baseline for this show, works at the Salk Institute.  Which, as he continued, explained everything.

Dr. Jonas Salk, developer of the polio vaccine, envisioned an institute to serve as a “crucible for creativity” to pursue questions about the basic principles of life.  Not exactly lightweight.  On the internet here it says that “Salk and architect Louis Kahn began in 1959 what has been described as a unique partnership to design a distinguished research facility.”  (Some might take issue with the phrase “unique partnership”, for Hib Johnson and Mr. Wright achieved a nearly identical collaboration and accomplishment at the Johnson Wax Administration Building in Racine, Wisconsin [Tower excluded].)  Midway through the AMJ segment the brilliant eyeball doctor adeptly and quite admirably shifted the focus away from himself and his research and spoke instead about the effect the facility, the Salk Institute, had upon it.  He explained that walking through the appropriately designed hallways, eddies here and there by the laboratories and offices into which geniuses wander and get stuck (as at the layman’s water cooler), he encounters any number of the best minds in the world (a whole handful of Nobel Laureates) who will happily divert and inquire, share tangential discoveries and/or hypotheses, cross pollinate, cheerfully challenge, and playfully poke and vector aside any rigid coordinates of the X, Y and/or Z axes (yet I all too easily forget that these guys might verifiably think in those crazy string theory realms of double digit dimensions).  There was a kind of dreamy quality to his musing, something extremely rare to this show, something extremely rare to our culture of the “Proprietary” (remember that Dr. Salk didn’t patent his polio vaccine, instead claiming that it was “the American people who owned it, [he guessed]”).

It is said that Salk asked Kahn to “create a facility worthy of a visit by Picasso.”

Inconceivably, almost knocking me off my stool, this doctor allowed — moreover, insisted — that his and all of his colleagues’ work was influenced by and infused with the “beauty” of his work environs!  He spent half of his allotted time effusive about how he’s inspired by merely arriving every day to this mystical, physical, man-made masterpiece that is Louis Kahn’s (and Dr. Jonas’) Salk Institute.  The change in lives here, well beyond the legacy of his polio vaccine, by an architectural vision, is exponential.

To borrow another line from the “Dude” Lebowski, DesignBuildBLUFF abides.  Reminders like this, like periodic inflations of lifeboats, help to re-sketch, for me, our Vision, squarely and indelibly chiseled here in my admittedly more often spiraling mind, namely — nutshell:  not only do we provide shelter for our recipient clients — decent, comfortable and enduring (a mission admirable enough, certainly, and provided for by the building number of Habitats for Humanity and Architecture for Humanity chapters spread throughout the country and globe), but we also strive to give them architecture, the Vitruvian triad:  firmitas (firmness), utilitas (commodity) and venustas (delight).

Our architecture at DBB does not intentionally seek the upper case ‘A’, the connotation that clearly deserves the Salk, the SC Johnson Administration, the Kimbell in Fort Worth, Fallingwater (two pretty amazing dudes, Lou and Frank), and the countless other incredible structures erected long before there ever existed a profession called Architecture.  In fact, a favorite book, given to me, signed, by three different former professors upon graduation, and then again by a practitioner mentor, is called Architecture without Architects.  To deliberately seek such spoils and recognition, of course, slides quickly and quite slimily (read politically) into that lamentable, odious framework wherein the likelihood of achieving that something so desired is inversely proportional to how intensely it is craved.  (The new biography about Steve Jobs, however, tends to refute that, or kind of.)  Not that we deny the value of ferociously hard work, obviously, nor hearts’ desires, but we whole-mindedly dismiss embracing a goal of achieving awards and recognition chiefly for their own sakes.  If you build it, with intelligence, imagination, a balance of whimsy and code adherence, and vigilant nods toward site-, client- and program-specificity, like Ty Cobb, Shoeless Joe, Babe Ruth, and Henry Louis Gehrig in the movie, they, namely, publication, certificates of Merit and Honor and the like, and more, will come.

And they have come to DesignBuildBLUFF, by the handsful.  The most recent, an AIA Utah award for sustainability for the Whitehorse house, was given us the same day I had to give two talks, the first at the Utah Sustainable (Green) Building Conference and the next at the Salt Lake City TEDx gig.  (You can check the latter out online — I haven’t, having been so nervous as to have judged the whole talk a complete and utter disaster, but friends and some other family members have provided some level of comfort that it turned out okay.)  And now, just days ago that same structure received the AIA Utah Honor Award for design.  Of course, with our now ubiquitous source of information, thanks to the aforementioned Jobs and Google, you can look that up too.

Anyway, with a tip of the hat to that one of the hundreds of Salk Institute geniuses, who might likely one and all, at least subconsciously, succumb to the influence of “beauty” on biological research (Pops, again, has always impressed upon me the fact that medicine is, at its essence, not necessarily a ‘science’, but rather an ‘art’), we offer that yes, by all means, architecture, especially that practiced by DBB, changes lives.  Rosie Joe, who for the first four months of our relationship could have been described as mute, is now veritably loquacious, and she’s been weaving rugs again, some fetching up to $6,000 at the nearby Trading Post.  Her daughter, Felicia, who was even more quiet, has become an accomplished photographer.  Caroline, while she has to care for her mother and father, who both suffer from kidney disease, a by-product of the Navajo epidemic diabetes, and alzheimer’s, lets her house out to a group of nurses who care for the elders in quite a sweeping radius.  Her original chief programatic desire was a space for a library which perhaps helped to inspire her daughter, Audrey, to apply and gain acceptance to two summer programs at Phillips Andover Academy.  She recently interviewed and is now assembling an application to Dartmouth.  Griz, the oldest son of Susie Whitehorse, helped us while we built the home for his mother, his three brothers and him, and worked with us for hire while we built the Windcatcher for Maxine and Maurice, who he now calls family, along with the staff and all of the students who come through the program, has been hired by the Utah Navajo Trust Fund to work with one of their three crews who build housing on the Rez.  Dora and Baxter Benally, who in addition to having running water for the first time in their sixty years of existence, now have room for their children and grandchildren, who are spread throughout the country, to come home to visit for weeks and months at a time.  Mention family and it brings tears to Baxter’s eyes.  Same with Janet Yanito, whose six children also now have room to return to their homeland.  Sense of place is a cornerstone of Navajo culture:  umbilical cords are buried in spaces to which he or she should always return.  Janet also has her studio that we built beside her home in which to produce her ceramics, three times as many now as before, and her ‘husband’ Merlin sells them every weekend at fairs around a 150-mile radius, bringing home the bacon.  Janet also recently won first prize at the Edge of the Cedars State Park exhibition for a basket she wove from material growing just outside in the wash.  An experienced judge suggested that it might fetch up to $10,000 in the East.  Maurice is now apart from the violence and drunkenness of his uncle’s house and is able to again joyfully attend school and to continue with his absorption of traditional Navajo cultural teachings from his mother and her sister, a ‘medicine man’.

Education, the most potent changer of lives, at DBB is, by definition, exponential.  Our own students, too, are forever changed, thanks in great part to grants and donations, led by the generosity of multitudes, have created doors inward and out, both physical and ‘of perception’.  Too, such leadership has helped to open more and more doors wherever we look:  “…almost without a pause almost everybody accepts.”

In that we all are inspired just to arrive at work — the Scorup property, our mini-campus at Bluff, now owned by DesignBuildBLUFF, is a distant distant relative to the Salk, which is not to say that it mightn’t spawn a closer cousin one day — our alumni, indeed, flourish (abide).  Still these are tough times in our little corner of providing changed lives; it isn’t infrequent that you might be served coffee or a beer or some huevos rancheros by a graduate Master of Architecture.  We’ve begun a very successful Intern program to do our best to open up an umbrella to the raining down of those cold hard facts.  We only wish we could provide an installation more along the scale of Christo’s, yet permanent.  It’s well known that one learns best when teaching, so lives are changing changing lives that are changing lives. You’ve got to love that exponential stuff.  This year we are building four houses, last year three, while as you know for all of previous years we were only able to produce one.  We architects work for the love of it; we’d probably work for free, or maybe even pay to do it, at the Salk.

Someday the bar just might have no chance at all.  And, I sincerely hope, that we won’t all have to be “assaholics” (a word a certain Frenchman at Apple coined to describe the revered Steve Jobs) in order to chew it through.

Not a score; no, not a joke cooked up by the Hippy Dippy Weatherman, namely the late George Carlin, of the cutting edge Smothers Brothers variety television show.  I’ve always wondered about that description, late.  Can it possibly intimate that being here at 60 makes me ‘early’; am I the early Hank Louis?  Sometimes it even seems so, especially here at Ghost 13 (and how ominous a conference title is that?), when the current architectural sage, the Finnish Juhani Palasmaa, publicly states:  “I did not open my eyes until I was 60, so there is still hope.”  He wasn’t talking to me specifically, but I gladly embraced the great notion.  Sometimes, I guess, I will still be ‘early’.

Attending Ghost 13 puts me squarely there.  It’s an architectural conference, but only of sorts, unlike any other dull and drab, beige and gray ballroom affair, where most architects struggle to listen and see, nodding, yet not in the affirmative, gaining their valuable continuing education credits by signing that they were there in the audience, physically if not enthusiastically.  Those are described as ‘conferences’.  The organizers are truly earnest — architects mistakenly thrust into event planning, all the while, in addition, expected to polish CDs, land clients and attend meetings.  It’s only that the canvas and the medium, the venue and the budget, are always uninspired and always, how we say, tight.  Edibility, which includes inspiration?  In the blue moon cycle of life.  We just pick up our credits and roll.  Some receive the awards for which they’ve applied (which had shockingly disappointed the even ‘earlier’, quite naive me, who had thought that a vote of excellence might merely be bestowed upon one by some august body of experienced experts).  No, Ghost 13 couldn’t be lumped into the mundane, often boondoggle, world of ‘conference’; no, it was more, it was a great deal more.

In fact, it was Architecture’s Woodstock.

I made it, finally.  All of these years I’d kicked and chastised myself for having foregone the original.  We were at Lake George, New York, a stone’s throw from Yasgur’s farm, but heard  about the traffic snafus, and we didn’t have tickets (we hadn’t heard that the gates had been stormed, though I don’t know if that would have made a difference).  Interestingly, on the way to Ghost 13/Architecture’s Woodstock, at my brother and sister-in-law’s, I’d read in the book Girls Like Us, that Joni Mitchell, too, missed the original, fearing transportation issues and other logistics, such as the schedule having slid to minus six or so hours, and counting.  She was booked for the Dick Cavett show in the city, which given her stature today seems a little bit incongruous. So, stories must have begat stories, and perhaps distance, and regret like mine, allowed her to absolutely nail the moment in song.  The headliner who missed Ghost 13 was Francis Kere, the Berlin-based Burkina Fasoan architect, whose father, a leader in that troubled country (however, show me an African nation that is not) had become ill.  Perhaps, just perhaps, Kere might now sculpt a manifesto that, like Joni’s, will urge an attitude among architects that, indeed, “we’ve got to get ourselves back to the garden.”

Here we were at MacKay-Lyons‘ farm on Nova Scotia, stardust, golden, billion-year-old carbon, debating things like Juhani Palasmaa’s ideas about possible futures (Andrew Freear mentioned during his hilariously irreverent talk that although he’d read much of Juhani’s texts at least ten times and never understood what he was talking about, but now, after Juhani’s talk, he agreed, yeah “fuck growth!”), to the consequences of the advent of the computer, which most of the presenter’s admitted to knowing little about, and it showed as they balked at glitch after technical glitch.  Heart-warming, indeed.  Moreover, just as at Woodstock, it rained buckets the first day of the conference, and though the power had gone missing all remained undaunted as we drip-dried in the octagonal barn that had been relocated during an earlier Ghost, chatting one another up as we waited for our own power source, namely coffee.  We didn’t get naked, nor orgy, nor mudslide (at least purposefully), but, again in parallel, it precipitated a bonding of the group of architect, and many non-architect (if we could believe such an animal actually existed), strangers, and, as if in Japan, business cards flew.  The difficulties of finding an emergency generator, baffling its noise, etc., etc., pushed Brain MacKay Lyons’ presentation to the end of the final day, which seemed more than appropriate — the host laughing last.  Kenneth Frampton, who’d previously lectured a pride of the attendees in school, had kicked the idea-fest off the night before.  Maybe a bit frail in physique but hardly in mind, he, remarkably, stayed until the bitter end — he even alertly joined me on the flight out at 6:10 am (which I’d bitched about loudly to whomever would listen).  Bravo.  Moreover, a great majority of the presenters joined the conference wire-to-wire, unlike any I’ve attended.  The elite behaved like anything but, a refreshing “something” that I took away.

Everyone is asking me what I took away from Ghost 13.  It’s all still swimming in my brain; it wasn’t that one could mine a nugget here and/or there, nor a single motherlode to pick at for the coming decade.  It is, simply, more like a wild, swarming school of fish shimmering at once like a blob in the sunlight, then nearly disappearing, a bunch of dashes teasing me with my analogue California (or Hawaiian) sling cocked to spear an idea-fish in order to eat.  It’s all out there, and it will be made all out there for everyone’s consumption, whether in book or video format, or more likely, knowing Brian, both.  The true delight of Ghost 13 — maybe one of the shiniest of examples of the potential health of our profession — is that nothing, at least seemingly, was/is held close to the vest.  We are all champions of the built environment, happy to share missteps as well as triumphs, details and master plans, always joking about stealing this bit or that “gizmo”, in the parlance of Tom Kundig, yet all knowing full well that architecture, and probably our species, hangs on the notion of transparency and the pre-eminence of “both/and”.  To borrow a phrase from Andrew Freear, fuck proprietary.

Seriously, peace and love, corny as that might sound, construing and construction, idea and craft, the imagination of the mind and the imagination of the hand, need weave the environment, insides and outsides surrendering themselves up to everyone, like the Glass House and Donald Judd’s sculptures out there on the ground, which were featured in nearly half of the Ghost 13 slide talks.  Pass it on.  So what if I’m 60?, there is still hope.  Listen (learn) carefully, you’ll hear them all — Rick Joy, Ted Flato, Wendell Burnette, Deborah Berke, Marlon Blackwell, Patricia Patkau, Peter Stutchbury, Brigitte Shim, Vincent James & Jennifer Yoo, Tom Kundig, Andrew Freear, Dan Rockhill, Steve Badanes, Richard Kroeker, Brain MacKay-Lyons, Robert McCarter, Peter Buchanan, Tom Fisher, and the elders Kenneth Frampton, Juhani Palasmaa and GlennMurcutt — all at/from the Ghost 13 sessions.  Yes, it’s music.

A couple of decades ago, long before the internet had taken over research, I was cruising the Prairie Avenue Bookstore, as was my wont.  In fact, cruising bookstores is  dear still, in all senses of the word, today.  I have tried most of the electronic tools, but none truly suffice, especially considering that architecture books — picture books (half jokingly my formative basic design studio instructor named our endeavors ‘Adult Kindergarten’) sometimes larger than a breadbox, or even the coffee tables they adorn — provide quite a few cc’s of my daily fix.  I even tried owing my own art and architecture bookstore for several years; it cut down by half or more the expense of each individual book I craved and devoured, of course, but the net effect was a larger annual gross cash outflow.  The eventual outcome, unfortunately, only further enforced the suspicion that I, at least, will always go belly up when assuming that a majority of others’ tastes match my own. Oh, do I ever struggle with that.  Another of my professors at that time even told me that I should have been born a century earlier, which at the time I took as unflattering (however now, when I think about it, which is often, especially when I compare the true weight of tangible pages and handwritten sketchbooks with this monitor or screen that just seems to be a logarithmic leap of further abstraction, I’m unabashedly unsure).  Besides, he just wanted to kick my brain into grinding toward a better solution to the problem at hand.  I appreciated it.  In the same way I appreciated the Prairie Avenue Bookstore, now long displaced by Amazon, surely, and Barnes & Noble.  But that one day, a couple of decades ago, I was shocked to see sandwiched between all of the colorfully, market-tested, graphically designed spines nearly screaming at me to please browse, if not buy…it was a thick, dull gray, kind of squatty, drab jacket cover that in as large a typeface point size as possible read:  Park City.

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I lived in Park City, and here I remain, so I was taken aback.  If there was a book of this physical dimension published about my hometown resort community (itself an often debated phrase, thought by some of us to be an oxymoron), it would certainly be plugged around every corner by our tenacious, pro-growth Council and Chamber of Commerce and featured European poster style in the Main Street window box at Dolly’s, our local bookstore.  Had I made a valuable find?; could I stake a claim like the old silver prospectors who picked out the first boom in our mountains?  Couldn’t be:  surely it’s a book about some other place, or theoretical, although this was long before Rem Koolhaus’s groundbreaking S,M,L,XL, and/or the genius of Tibor Kalman.  No, one glance at the photo on the gray slip cover immediately revealed that the book was  an ironically titled expose, in pictures and short essay, of a development on a Superfund  site of an old silver mining tailing dump of barren, contaminated soil.  It ‘s called Prospector Square, and my guess is that this was well before any annexation by ‘Park’, which was what many of the old-timers called the town.  Hence one portion of the irony, the other being well-described by the photo essay contained within:  perhaps the arsenic standard for how poorly land can be developed.  Here a slew of photos of multiple patches of asphalt spread out like midwestern lakes, yet surrounded by toxic sand and dirt; there a group of shots of balloon framing and mud-patched sheetrock due to become a line of short-cut, disproportionate, faux ‘Victorian‘ replications of what propaganda had envisioned as the historical ideal of Park City, not the shambles of saloons and boarding houses and establishments of prostitution and miners shacks.  It turned out that no one who I’ve ever asked through all of these years in Park City has ever heard about nor experienced the book.  I get a kick out of showing it to any of the new planners or Heads of Planning or consequent members of the board of the Prospector Square Property Owners Association.  You have to try to help avoid these mistakes of the past — short memories, memory loss or true ignorance need be damned.

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Prefabrication is a recurring trend today in the psyche of architecture.    The new magazines, Metropolis and Dwell, and now the major trades, Architecture and Record are all paying lip service to the idea, or the ‘boundaries’, of the field of architecture formalizing its longterm courtship into a marriage with the existence of mass production of housing (perhaps even continuing further to an intercourse with other building typologies).  Remember me, Bibliophile, upper case and all.  I have the equivalent of countless cement sacks full of paper and hardback glossies that you would witness comfortably hanging on the swankiest, and alternatively most staid coffee tables worldwide grazing on the topic of prefabrication:  green, hip, affordable, French — you have it.

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But then here we go again; fairly recently I was cruising the New York MOMA bookshop, on the second floor, distinct from the gift shop (where Banksy and every architectural programmer worth his fee from a funding-hungry non-profit would have you exit), and fortunately I focussed on a smallish, paperbound, blue beauty named The Prefabricated Home, by Colin Davies.  I’m interested in this world of prefab because of the plight of the Navajo clans, with which and with whom we at DesignBuildBLUFF are confronted weekly in a physical sense, and hourly if we allow ourselves to be haunted by the Fourth World conditions of that alcohol-fueled back 40 just out of reach beyond our backyard fences.  We’ve begun to experiment with the notion of prefabricating homes at what we call our mini-campus, a five-acre spread of hardscrabble, topsoil-less redrock-surrounded land, also known as the Al Scorup property, in the historic district of Bluff, Utah.  A few years ago we (the DBB students of 07/08) built a workshop, part of their project entitled Ship/Shop, because it included recycled shipping containers as expanded housing and infrastructure for the program, a bit of prefab in and of itself.  Method to the madness, we like to think.

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Mr. Davies‘ book will likely not reach bestseller status, I’m guessing, especially among architects (who at times remind me of the joke about how one keeps a secret from an orthopedic surgeon [the occupation in which my father and brother toil]; the answer:  publish it).  It’s a wonderful expose of what goes on behind the closed doors of that attempted marriage between the  field of architecture and the construction of mass-produced housing.  The introduction itself left me completely bemused, smirking, actually laughing out loud and wholly convinced that the challenge needs a shoulder, so why not ours.  It begins with a debate about what buildings ‘count‘, and which don’t, as architecture.  Of course, the common pre-manufactured house almost without fail does not.  How about this:  “…although we think of architecture as being in some sense in charge of the activity of building, for 150 years or more the prefabricated house has managed perfectly well without architecture’s guidance.  Situated outside the the architectural field, it has cheerfully ignored architectural law.  The strength of the prefabricated house lies in its popularity, its cheapness and the industrial base from which it operates.  These are precisely the areas in which modern architecture is weakest.  Modern architecture is unpopular, expensive and divorced from industrial production…The early Modernists put the prefabricated house at the centre of their programme of reform.  Architectural history may pretend otherwise, but the fact is that their prefabricated house projects all failed.”  We’re talking about Le Corbusier, Walter Gropius, Frank Lloyd Wright, Buckminster Fuller, and on and on and on.

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Yet there remains hope, of course, half-filled glasses everywhere.  We at DBB want to embrace the following excerpt from The Prefabricated Home:  “The architecture field should grow, not shrink.  But first it must reform itself.  The intention of this book is to suggest some of the ways in which architecture might re-engage with its hinterland, with its customers, with its colleagues in the construction industry and with the general public.  The prefabricated house has been chosen as a vehicle for this discussion…because it challenges architecture’s most deep-seated prejudices.  It calls into question the concept of authorship, which is central to architecture’s view of itself as an art form; it insists on a knowledge of production methods, marketing and distribution as well as construction; it disallows architecture’s normal obsession with the needs of individual and the specific qualities of particular places; and its lightweight, portable technologies mock architecture’s monumental pretensions.  But if architecture  could adapt itself to these conditions and succeed in the prefabricated house business, then it might recover some of the influence it has lost in the last 30 years and begin to make a real difference to the quality of the built environment.”

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Like me continually cruising the aisles and the stacks of a bookstore, we at DBB are seeking to unearth, or possibly even float out there (not because it is easy, remember, but because it is hard), that kind of a gem, that type of language bespoke of such a marriage beyond mere collaboration.

Curiously, the Rosie Joe House, designed and built by eight pioneering students from the University of Utah in 2004, has been DesignBuildBLUFF’s most successful home (in many regards, but not all — as in all things, it depends upon how you do your accounting).  Every month it seems to pop up in yet another publication.  And Rosie herself was a bit taken aback when her boss’s boss, who’d flown in from Denver, at Nava-Sew, a Rez-based company that assembles uniforms for our embattled troops, remarked when she explained where she lived that there was a structure nearby that he’d been wanting to visit for some time, and  handed her a magazine article about her house.  Hard to put a finger on why the house resonates with everyone who comes in contact with it, or sees it in photograph — perhaps it’s because a single photograph can capture its elegantly simple, yet richly complex song.  It shouts a clear and concise conceptual honesty.  Maybe it has something to do with the ultra-meager budget we proposed, namely $25,000, which pushed the use of discarded items such as old shipping palettes, the earth on which we stood, windows from there and here, of all kinds of cladding and style, and the predominance of reinforcement bar reinforcing nothing at all, welded into truss-like systems taking the stresses of both tension and compression, which is undesigned and unusual.  It would fit comfortably in the book about Architecture without Architects.  It’s a good story; it was the first DBB project, before even DBB was named — we built it from a model that looked like a baked carcass that had ribs made of out-of scale blanched balsa wood, and no small amount of guile.  Two girls, one who was kind of shoved into it to make the whole idea work in terms of critical mass and credit hours and the like, and six guys and two older guys who clearly had some experience with something, but maybe not necessarily this.

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We’re going to experiment again this coming semester; we’re going to do the splits, step one foot out to the future, the other toward the above-mentioned past.  Class sizes have grown to 20-plus students, which has become a physical challenge on the job site, especially considering our fairly compact footprints, people and tools and even dogs in the way of one another, but we also have to consider that there might be just way too many opinions about every little detail.  Not that opinions about every little detail are necessarily bad, and in fact can often be quite useful, indeed, but more often it will stifle decision making, critical to the success of any construction project when factoring in the fourth dimension of time, and it leads to a gridlock akin to what some of us lament about Congress (while others sincerely believe it to be consistent to what the Founding Fathers, with all of their wonderful checks and balances, intended, in the sense of the medical community’s mantra, namely:  Do no harm.)  Again, depending upon your system of accounting, the past three projects — Whitehorse, Studio 23 and the Dreamcatcher — have been wildly successful, essentially finishing on time, featuring sensory and soul-delighting detail inside and out, winding up under budget (the budgets have swelled to $50,000 in purchased materials), and, not least, working mechanically to a level quite satisfactory, all of which help sustain our program.  However — and this is merely one man’s perception — the attitude about safety (in design, not the act of construction) may have tilted the balance in recent years.  As Paulo Lugari declared about his town grown from thin air in the llanos (savannah) of Colombia, choreographed by brilliant engineers on a lark, really:  this a place where chance can incubate.  It’s actually fundamentally not the subversive nature of the notion that attracts, but the absolute freedom to ‘Fail Harder’, and idea — an attitude — embraced by the best of the best advertising agencies, depicted in a great documentary film entitled ‘Art & Copy’.  See it you must.  (Yes, it all weaves together like Yoda and The Force).  Nothing should ever be safe on the honest pitch of design.

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For this chapter in the book of DesignBuildBLUFF we’ve chosen to seek and achieve architecture with a small ‘a’, the prefabricated variety.  Truthful at the outset, we eschewed client- and site-specificity, preferring to find a prototypical reaction to the Rez (and, one would hope, beyond), but alas, we succumbed.  In the end uncertainty raised up its sheepish white flag.  Two families, both who had previously been interviewed yet passed over for a house by the students in the past, were remembered and selected by me, I must admit, because the sites and the conditions of the family units seem diametrically opposed:  both couples are a mixture of Anglo and Navajo, but flip-flopped in gender; one couple has no children, the other four; one has advanced degrees from the University and works in education and has been waiting for a home in order to bring their talents back to the Rez, while the other seems to struggle to find odd jobs; one is in the heart of Monument Valley, the other in a blight called Westwater, across a gorge from Blanding, Utah, which sports a very conservative Mormon population; one cares a great deal about space and has researched materials and their properties and assembly, the other seeks shelter of any kind, preferably comfortable, they’d suppose; one site is flat, with million dollar views, the other is sloped over garbage and detritus.  Yes, we will scour our minds and others in order to meet a system that might engage both opportunities equally well.  And yes, two smaller groups will build two houses with smaller budgets.  Could it draw lightening twice?  Could we solve the housing shortage on the Rez in one fell swoop?  It’s always entertaining, and worthwhile, to muscle and push and ‘Fail Harder’.  We can be excellent at that.

My traveling companion on this driven quest for knowledge in our attempt to build cleverly with the earth is named Jonah, and he asks me what Zion means.  Even the vast southwestern scenery zipping past seems rather biblical.  Plus, we’d just made a modern-day pilgrimage to an oasis out here in this jagged desert, a stripped down minimalist castle with an aptly sounding name, Amangiri (peaceful mountain), a stay at which can only be afforded by those who might possibly not see their so-called Bush tax cuts extended.  Lord knows I’ve planned to read the bestselling Good Book a hundred times, and had even started the trek a dozen or so, but I’ve never finished it — never even dived into it enough to fully understand most poets (I rely mostly on a rusty, rudimentary memory of Greek and Roman mythology, which struck me as being, in its seemingly blatant admission of fantasy, more realistic).  So I could have answered that I thought it had something to do with the Amangiri, really.  Instead, just to mess with him — his name was Jonah, for Christ’s sake, so you’d think he might have a better grasp on the subject — I said I think it means Denver.  I said both because Jonah is one of the graduate students of architecture from the University of Colorado at Denver who are building at DesignBuildBLUFF this semester, you know, just to mess with him and get the dialogue rolling, and because my son, who lives in Denver, calls it the Promised Land.  It, too, comes along with the notion of exclusivity.  We’re in Mormon country here, and although I do, indeed, want to go, I’ve still never been to Jerusalem, nor Israel.

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I quickly noticed the two bright-eyed young women dressed in Park Ranger uniforms as they entered among the teeming throng of mostly Europeans at the Visitor Center at Zion National Park.   Seriously, they didn’t look like the Park Rangers I’m accustomed to seeing.  Of course, Zion has a beaten path, with nice restaurants and bars stretching along through Springdale to the south, and thankfully not filled predominately with your ubiquitous trinket shops that coat-tail the incredible shrinking budget of our National Park System.  It’s a fairly sophisticated town.  And I’m sure that the girls can shed the uniforms when out on it, which is nothing but fun, I can personally attest.  It’s one of those perfectly sized outposts with a perfect complement of interesting, educated locals and interesting, educated transients infected with wanderlust and the appreciation of natural beauty, and probably no hard-core tree-spiking anarchist environmentalists in either camp, and probably only a sprinkling of nutcases from this movement which for me rivals the threat of Al Qaeda, namely, this thing they’re calling — no, shouting! — the Tea Party.  Talk about fear!  It might even be no match in my mind, although I’m merely free, and not enlisted along with the truly brave again fighting for who knows exactly what.  It’s a pisser, for sure.  And then I pick up Newsweek, whose cover reads:  ‘The Making of a Terrorist-Coddling Warmongering Wall Street Loving Socialistic Godless Muslim President’.  There’s an asterisk, and the very fine print at the bottom says “who isn’t actually any of these things’.  Yet it seems to me, judging from how able our population is to read an entire magazine article — Tweets seem to have made slugging through even a piece in the USA Today some kind of eggheaded effort — that that kind of kidding can backfire.  But down here, delightedly, agitation and cajoling come mostly from the inside.  In fact, a friend of mine, a former successful punk band entrepreneur turned successful composer of an envelope-edge sampling of the spoken word infused with musical rhythms and message — some serious, some highly comical — was the Mayor of Springdale when we first met.  He seemed to thrive in that job.  A wise man, however, he believes in term limits.  It was clear that these girls, too, loved their job.  Of course, most people do in these days of high unemployment recession, or post recession, or even instability perched at the precipitous gap between a double-dip recession, depending on what side of half-glass you sip on.

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It wasn’t a huge surprise, then, that these two girls were part of the group we had just driven six hours west along the border of Utah and Arizona to meet.  They were part of the Sustainability Team at Zion National Park, a place where its taken very seriously:  one was an expert at computer analysis, and the other a landscape architect.  They spoke LEED, although, like me, they weren’t terribly impressed by the extra cost of the stamp of approval.  It really is, we agreed, mostly a marketing ploy, and whoever leads the spin about the mentality — and action — in the park is doing just fine.  There were two men with them, one the Coordinator, who arrived as a self-proclaimed HVAC guy before his conversion to sustainability, which he would deem a smart move, indeed, and his protege, who did most of the talking.  Remember, though, as I mentioned,  they walk it here, too.  It’s Federal, and one has to be impressed by the example:  all new Fed buildings have to be LEED certified, or perhaps equally impressive, judging from the attitude of the landscape architect, merely compliant, meaning they don’t have to spend all of the extra dough to buy the plaque, which makes ultimate sense (see above:  our current economic climate stinks).  Yes, climate…yes, change.  A prospective student wrote me the other day to ask diligent questions about the DesignBuildBLUFF program, explaining that her interest in attending graduate school in architecture was provoked by the ‘rising levels of our oceans’.  That particular tack (and tact) caught my attention; it pleases me when someone can clearly point out the essence of the matter.  It makes the notion of  ‘sustainability‘ appear relatively abstract.  However, I’m giddily fond of  ‘global weirding’, too, though it’s not exactly pinpoint, I know.  There might as well be some humor involved:  we all know that the globe, or what we call the environment, is going to be just fine — it’s whether we homo sapiens sapiens are going to around to be just fine alongside it that worries us, were we to truthfully admit it.  It all plays into our fear of mutation.   But what is evolution but a matter of serendipitous, desirous mutation?

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We had come to Zion National Park to witness the wind-catching cooling towers built into the circa 2000 Visitor Center, to ask questions of the Sustainability Team about how best to implement something similar in the home we are building for Maxine, and perhaps most notably, for her son Maurice, who has been prone to the experience of severe and violent alcoholism in the house that he and his mother have been occupying with any number of aunts and uncles, cousins and hangers-on.  It’s remarkably cool, this machine, basically a new attempt at an old idea found in the vernacular mud ‘Architecture without Architects’ scattered throughout the many many arid environs throughout the world.  It’s essentially a non-mechanical swamp cooler which has been simplified along the way, as most good products will be, winding up complex but uncomplicated, like the relationship of reality to most people’s dreams, which unfortunately have a tendency to remain forever in that gauzy realm.  Yet this is real; thick mats in stainless steel frames line the four large openings on the upper faces of the four-sided, square-plan towers, and as the breezes, or winds, hit them the damp, cool air drops (aided by the pressure differential encouraged by a more or less tightly sealed building) and spreads out from openings on the two sides of the tower’s base, into the enclosed space.  Even on this still day the cooling hits us nearby as we discuss all the matters of maintenance and higher-tech, over-engineered original false starts.  So simple, like the jitterbug, it plumb evaded [‘em] — I think Jimmy Buffet sang that.

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I’ll let you be in my dream if I can be in yours, Bob Dylan said/sang that.  I was thinking, this concept of Zion sure screws everything up.  Two days later I was in Grand Teton National Park.  Leave it to the French, right?  Their name for this equally true “I’ll see it when I believe it” natural beauty conjures up women’s breasts.  At times that concept can be just as dangerous, of course, but on an infinitely smaller scale, thank God.

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.