Philosophy of Cal-Earth and What They Teach There

Interview with Nader Khalili of Cal-Earth Institute: Hesperia, California

People to come to learn about architecture, but it's not only architecture here. It's a way of life, and of building. The students learn because we've created an ambience of inspiration, and we let things happen. And you just share with them what you know. You don't hide things for later - ah, maybe in the third session I'll impress them all! If it's good, come and do it. In the schools, why do they stretch the time out forever? If you give me the schools of architecture, I'll reduce it to one year! Five years, $40,000! Then you get out of the schools five years later and you still don't know what you are doing! What we are giving people here is alternatives. In education, you just keep that spark in the students by honestly giving the information within an ambience of inspiration and let them be on their own. They always come back - young students who were here years ago keep returning because everything we discover every day is totally new. As builders, especially as architecture students, every beautiful design you have will get shut down because everyone will tell you it's not economically viable. Then you're dead. Because they have the last word. That's why we have lost so much quality in things, because everyone is trying to prove that something works economically.

It's very common for us to get calls from Australia, Japan - in fact, we got a call from a ceramicist in Japan who wanted to come here. Well, we're in San Bernardino County! They didn't know that - they'd heard about it in Japan! Thousands of people have come through here, we don't have anything to sell here, there's no one person here who's the boss, and all the other people are the followers. It's not an ego thing where I would sit and say, we're going to build it this way. We come here to discover how powerful everybody is. When I wrote my first book, I called it Racing Alone. The whole idea was that we don't have to race against each other all the time. The potential is not in how much better I can be than you, or how much faster...There is much more greatness in all of us.