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Volume5 Main Introduction Page |
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Architecture and Building Interview with Nader Khalili of Cal-Earth Institute: Hesperia, California If you repeat the arch you get a vaulted house - it's based on arches placed back to back, one after another. If you rotate the arch you get a dome. If you take an arch tipped over and raise it you get a half a dome like the Hollywood Bowl. With these two or three forms you could develop the whole city without cutting a single tree. An arch is just like one choirboy. It has the tone, the beauty, and you just need to repeat it for them to make a beautiful sound together. The developers come here and they say, "Well, this is great, but..." People are used to this image of a house of a certain shape - they need to be able to take it seriously so we can sell the houses. Well, all right, so we can have some veggie burgers for you. That's OK, as long as we get the message through to everybody. I believe everybody can build these structures. We had a lady come to visit from Arizona, she's 75 years old, and she's building one herself for the first time with her grandson. Well, somebody came here as an apprentice and we taught her in one week - now sheÕs building a quarter-million-dollar house in Cabo San Lucas, Mexico near the beach. Another couple from Georgia, another couple from South Africa. They already know these things - it's just that someone needs to give them some information about how it all works together. As we're building, we just have to have one compass in the center and one piece of pipe, or a chain to trace the dimensions of the dome. We start just with sand here, and we turn sand into structures. We try to teach four thousand years of earth architecture, six thousand years of ceramics, in two hours. You have to understand it as if you're a caterpillar making a cocoon. Or if you take an apricot pit and drop it into the ground, give it a little bit of water, and look at that apricot changing the earth into an apricot tree, fruit, flowers, and everything. Is that pit there an architect, or am I an architect? I had to go through years and years of school; why can't I be like that pit? I think we have that capacity. But we are so overwhelmed by material. So we get panicked. Security, credit cards, more and more, here and there.
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