Mesa Sky Disk

Architects Cate Leger and Karl Wanaselja describe this new cabin in the Mojave desert: “Like two petals on a flower the two sides of the house rise out of the desert inclining toward the rich and subtle vistas of the Mojave Desert. Built with straw bales, which lend themselves to the curved form, and other natural insulation like blown in cellulose and lava rock, this building creates a refuge from the dramatic temperature extremes typical of desert life.”

Given the obvious challenges of building appropriately for the extremes of California’s high desert, a group of collaborators has designed, engineered and built a strawbale house using an unusual approach that treats this new building as an active laboratory for California’s climate future. The project faces competing needs head-on: the desire to reduce carbon and toxic materials while making a liveable space, to implement genuinely new ideas while making a practical building, to build affordable and beautiful spaces in the desert while meeting California’s stringent seismic and energy efficiency codes.

The little story of this house tells a larger story of Los Angeles’ changing relationship with the high desert. In the coming years, a significant number of greater Los Angeles’ estimated 20 million people will migrate inland to desert wilderness. Many Angelinos know Joshua Tree as a patchwork quilt: a vacation destination, a National Park, or a muse for artists from Noah Purifoy to Gram Parsons. It is also, and almost without notice, becoming an increasingly important part of California's future. Increasingly, Californians find themselves living in the high desert. The inflow of people has prompted a fresh reckoning with how the small towns of the high desert will grow. Until recently these were tiny hamlets without stop lights. Now, they are swelling in size and the continued propagation of suburban houses ill-suited to the desert is no longer tenable. This is unacceptable both to conservationists and California's increasingly tough energy requirements for new buildings. The arrival of new people brings long-simmering environmental questions to the fore, and changes the calculus in long-running battles for protection of keystone species like the Joshua Tree.

SEQUESTERING LANDFILL IN OUR FOUNDATION

The building’s board-formed foundation uses a very low fly ash concrete recipe and a unique engineered void within a rebar cage, both to lower embodied carbon. Many tons of salvage materials, from old radios and appliances to car parts, are sequestered within this engineered void to remove them from landfill. The architects joined in to collect this infill, choosing items that cannot be reused or that do harm to the environment as they disintegrate in the elements, but are not reactive and therefore can be encapsulated in concrete safely. This building is the first we know of to engineer this approach into the foundation design.

DESIGNING WITH NATIVE PLANTS AND WILDLIFE IN MIND

The project is sited on a 20,000 square meter lot adjacent to hundreds of acres of unbuilt land. Out of respect for the environment, no vegetation was moved to accommodate the house. The structure's footprint was intentionally designed to the 70 square meters minimum allowed by the town of Yucca Valley. The building's size and siting are meant to encourage existing wildlife corridors on the property despite the human additions to the land. Grading was kept to an absolute minimum for the same reason.
The site is unusually rich in native flora, including Joshua Trees, many cacti and yucca, sages, brushes, as well as edible and medicinal plants. Some of the vegetation, including Blackbrush, can live for more than 1,200 years: their density on site attests to many tens of thousands of years of propagation. The building itself is contoured around a group of Joshua Trees, including more than twenty pups which are increasingly rare as the climate changes. No plantings have been added on site, to preserve the existing ancient forest.

AVOIDING TOXIC MATERIALS BY BUILDING WITH STRAWBALE

The building's strawbale walls are more than half a meter thick, built around a core of clean barley straw provided by stawbale builder Cadmon Whitty, from a specialty grower in Colorado. On either side of the bales the walls are finished with three coats of plaster, including natural lime from St. Austier, France. This lime forms a mortar with water without requiring cement, gypsum, ash or other common additions to modern stucco.
To promote air movement and quality no vapor barriers or toxic materials are used within the straw walls. The walls rest on untreated redwood sills rather than pressure treated lumber to ensure no tebuconazole, arsenic, formaldehyde or fungicides enter the living space. The house is designed with non-toxic materials so that the building's water runoff is not compromised for plants and animals on site. Boulders on the East side of the cabin form the perimeter for a cask for the building's own construction waste, in order to minimize the landfill required to build the house. This area was designed to be finished as a patio using pavers made on site from construction surplus.

The strawbale house on Yucca Mesa was completed in 2024. For more information please contact Kevin Cain, kevin@insightdigital.org