Desert Habitat Home Architecture

I did a bunch of home designs in 2006 that were based on using concrete and foam to both create the structure and engineer the hot-cold storage, being concrete and steel and a thermal mass, the walls and floors can be used to absorb and release either at the correct time during the day-night cycle.



Living in Seattle in a basement apartment with small windows it would overheat on medium cloudy days and overheat so bad on sunny ones we'd open the windows regardless of outside temperature, thermal mass and solar gain were the reasons. I helped design and build solar passive homes in the 1980's and we found we were too conservative with gain, thinking in cloudy climates you needed more, wrong. Collecting usually isn't the problem, thermal mass is the main missing piece in modern home architecture to allow it to regulate temperature in such a way that no outside inputs should be needed for the house if it all includes awareness of solar gain, shade, thermal mass and basic habaitat requirements, the habitat home. In a desert of course most of the time you're interested in staying cool and to do that you only have shade, and then you don't want too much of a breeze or solar gain on the cool area of the house, and in a wet area no wind and controlled sun.

Another part of this is to return the visual territory to the geography of the location, these were specific to the Sonoran Desert, ocotillo, saguaro, cholla, lizards and insects, eagles and ravens, mice and coyotes. Our presence here can blend in and encourage these long-time residents to treat us as a part of their world, to a habitat philosophy wild animals are the "pets" we want to husband, to take care of by allowing the real habitat to exist on the property, for the house to be populated by songbirds you know, you see every day, without the lizards and birds there are too many insects, with them there are predators, some astute observers of humans, easily surviving our best efforts to destroy them instead of not leaving food on the porch for the dog so they don't come around.

So, a home like this isn't for a paranoid family that kills every spider in the house instead of carting them outside and tossing them.

It's also probably not for people that use mass antibiotics all over the house to kill every germ, a messy house can still be healthy, normal sweeping, cleaning and mopping are good enough and for the rest the best bet is to work on everyone's health, their immune system. Many vaccines work by exposure, our bodies do that all the time but for some things the exposure needs to be limited the first time or you can die! However, the point is that by killing common things you allow uncommon things to grow in larger proportions than they normally are, setting up a scenario where more and more rare and difficult to deal with health problems occur.

From that it seems likewise that if we keep killing all the "pests" and "weeds" we don't like, we are causing more harm than good so maintaining a natural habitat is the goal, it's a messy state of affairs but our homes can attract and support a food web based on very simple inputs. Then the climate is part of the construction, the solar cycle daily and seasonally, the home is an unnatural solution to creating habitat that you can find locally assembled in one place. Habitat in a desert has layers, the surface layer is the playing field which is connected to underground so part of the habitat.




When you lay down concrete in a desert you create a habitat for ants and other insects, perfect place for them. If there is a thunderstorm season as in the Sonoran, concrete speeds up the water runoff, increasing the erosion rate 10,000x to 100,000x faster than geologic erosion rates by the ability of the water to carry more sediments, they scour the surface, the dampness removes dissolved minerals and evaporates leaving the entire surface easier to erode during the next storm.

This impermeable layer of concrete also deprives the groundwater supply input since porosity is how you recharge groundwater, anything that gathers runoff affects this and the worst thing is to put it into waterproof flood channels totally depriving the natural desert system the best chance it has at recharging groundwater all along where this happens (common in cities). The best recharge is in natural channels, take that away and all that water moves on down the line to where it's discharged, all the plants needing that deep water start dying off along the way as the watertable lowers.

Water is precious in a desert, the habitat home cycles water to keep itself cool by design, using shade and moisture, diffusing solar direct by adding the rock pile structural look from grout on wire in the shape of rocks, freeing most of the home from direct solar gain, also, shaded by native plants that are mainly watered by the catchment rate as much as practical.

In the desert, you can't use seeds to grow native plants very easily, instead plant and care for seedlings for any chance at success. The reason is that these plants evolved to never germinate unless the exact, perfect conditions exist, very hard for the home gardener to replicate and on large remediation projects near Tuscon, AZ, the only reliable success was from seedlings and their needed care for the first year or two depending on species before they were OK to grow on their own. Native plants and grasses provide low cover above the soil, adding ramadas and other shading structures to the house and lot may be more practical than trees which demand water.

Reducing wind is a big problem in many locations, with heavy blows at times of over 60-knots. Old isolated homesteads protected themselves by using the water for trees and shrubs to kill the breeze and cool it down but this idea can't be scaled up, these were isolated because there's not enough water elsewhere. A fence in the wind stirs it up as bad as not having it, but if you use the porosity idea for wind, open slats of multiple layers can kill the wind better, anything that duplicates what the plants are doing out of any material, and of course down low the native shrubs have many wind reducing forms worth growing.