Design term: Sep 2005 - Dec 2005

Construction term: Jan 2006 - April 2006

Participants: 8 students

Client:

Caroline

This team’s work is music to your ears.

The design of this home was based on the idea of two different worlds, or cultures merging together: Anglos and Navajos, reflecting Caroline’s time in the Anglo world as well as her Navajo Roots. The concept is first represented in plan. There are two central walls. One wall is straight and the other is curved. This is where the Modern Anglo rectilinear home breaks off from the Navajo Traditional Hogan. It is in this central space, between the two walls, where these two worlds merge with a central fireplace. Traditional to Navajo culture, the home features a door entrance on the east. The multi-culture idea continues through the use of materials. For example, Hardiboard is a newer product used for siding, in comparison to more traditional earthen plasters used to cover and strengthen walls. To merge the new with the traditional, a major material used throughout the building is a product called Flex-crete, a fly-ash by-product material produced on the Navajo Nation, providing a unique combination of both mass and insulation within the home while supporting the local economy.

Caroline and Audrey spent nearly every day working with us in the sun on this piece of land that holds deep cultural and familial roots. Audrey began making her bedroom into her own space when it was nothing more than a free-standing earthen wall in the expansive southwestern desert. Here in the four corners, we combine a sense of doing good with designs that are appropriate for the technology at hand, building it with our own hands, grid-less, out of natural materials: it would be LEED if we’d had the time.