How do you build a home on the Moon?

In 1984, NASA put out a call for prototypes of lunar and martian colonies. Iranian-born architect Nader Khalili responded with what would eventually become SuperAdobe: a patented system of stacked, coiled bags filled with earth (or sand, or moon dust), held together using barbed wire and transformed into his now-signature “eco-domes.”

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CalEarth creator and architect Nader Khalili looking into a SuperAdobe. Image courtesy of CalEarth.

 

Despite these outer space origins, it was the issues closer to home – refugee camps, climate change, housing insecurity – that inspired Khalili to pivot from designing skyscrapers to founding a non-profit, the California Institute for Earth Architecture, in 1991.

Like the domes themselves, CalEarth’s vision is deceptively simple: “a world in which every person is empowered to build a safe and sustainable home with their own hands, using the earth under their feet.”