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  Several of these families are Supersized, crammed into ramshackle single-wide trailers or flimsy outdated single- paned and uninsulated government rectangles or middle-aged collapsing hogans.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?