Aitana Vargas

With an innovative vision has Nader Khalili revolutionized 21st Century space architecture. Near the Mojave desert in California lies a prototype of a lunar colony created from dust and water and shaped by fire and wind.

Not only are these Superadobe and Ceramic Houses beautiful to the eye, but they’ve also proven to be earthquake-and water-resistant, cool in the summer, warm in the winter and perhaps some of the most environmentally friendly buildings both on Earth and “abroad”.

Khalili’s source of inspiration is found in the deserts of Iran, the Middle East, and traditional cultures from the Native Americans and China, where entire communities live in total harmony with the environment.

One of Khalili’s hopes includes producing affordable housing worldwide whose construction does not require steel or concrete. He believes that any family should be able to build itself a home by using the Earth’s natural resources and simple techniques. His philosophy of “working with nature” rather than conquering it as well as the techniques’ low cost and efficient simplicity have made the United Nations see in Khalili’s work the answer to emergency relief housing and to the third world’s lack of proper shelter.

But the applications of Khalili’s vision extend far beyond the boundaries of our planet. Khalili wanted to show that it is possible to erect buildings in space using the simplest of elements (dust, air, water and fire) based on the knowledge he has developed of ancient earthen architecture techniques. His work began in February of 2000 with the construction of 6 individual buildings. His next goal was to complete a housing complex capable of hosting 100 people. With the technological knowledge and support from NASA, Khalili’s idea of fabricating a full-scale community in space could one day be realized.

This pioneering Iranian-born Californian architect argues that the use of natural materials reduces the amount of waste elements commonly utilized in buildings on Earth, and by the same token, in space.

Space junk is a concern among scientists. There is an estimated number of billions of pieces of old spacecraft and satellites in orbit around our planet. When a shuttle is launched into space, and as it makes its way up, it loses pieces of it that wind up floating in low Earth orbit. Some are big and some are very small. But regardless of size, such trash poses serious risks to the future of space missions.

A number of measures, such as the use of lasers, to destroy such debris have been calculated to be too expensive to be a pragmatic solution to the problem. And that is why Khalili’s vision for the future goes further than most architects’. His conception of manned space missions and in situ planetary housing might have provided NASA with a way of reducing space junk. The idea would be to have astronauts erect their own homes from the natural resources of each planet or satellite visited. Thus, if men traveled to the Moon, lunar soil would be the element to use. This would reduce pollution and also cut down the costs of having to fly man-made materials from Earth to the new space bases and settlements.

Original Source (s):
Space.com
Khalili’s website

Picture Credits:
The Aga Khan Award for Architecture 2004 website