To build for a warming planet, architects look to nature – and the past

Fifteen years ago, Kyle Isacksen and his wife, Katy Chandler, lived in what most people in their home city of Reno, Nevada, would think of as a normal house. It was 1,200 square feet of drywall and two-by-fours in a neighborhood of skinny trees and other young families driving back and forth to work. 

It felt, to the two of them, like a completely ridiculous arrangement.  

Their lives, they sensed, lacked a connectedness – to the community, to the earth, to the high desert ecosystem in which they existed. They had just had their first child, and they couldn’t stop thinking that there was a way to live with more integrity.

“At that point, a lot of the talk was about carbon footprint,” Mr. Isacksen recalls. “But we just knew things felt off. We felt we were part of the problem, being caught up in our little rat race. We started trying to figure out how to live within our values.”

Their first move was from that 1200-square-foot tract home to a 200-square-foot straw bale cabin in a co-housing community across town. Then they went to Oregon, to apprentice with Conrad Rogue, who was at the forefront of what’s known as the natural building movement – a shift toward using Indigenous building practices and natural materials, particularly clay, to create homes and other structures.

What they learned there struck a nerve.

There is an integrity to building with the earth that exists, literally, at one’s doorstep, Mr. Isacksen says. Clay-based structures are also comfortable, he says, keeping far cooler in hot weather than more modern buildings, and using a fraction of the energy. And while Indigenous communities have used earthen techniques for centuries, the heat-adjusting properties of adobe and other sorts of mud-brick buildings have