Prefabrication experiments - 189 - Exhibition houses - 10 - The modern pit dwelling : architecture, ecology and technology

A dwelling’s basic function is to mediate and protect interior conditions from external forces, climatic or predatory. Using the existing site elements to develop a site-specific architecture was lost to high modernism and industrialization. The mass-produced house rarely considered anchorage to its site as it was envisioned as a globalized product adaptable to any situation. Trying to bridge the gap between modernism and a type of ecological regionalism, Paolo Soleri developed a dome house which incorporates the basic elements of an archaic pit house with modern technology.  Soleri, an Italian-born architect who spent time at Taliesin with Frank Lloyd Wright is perhaps best known for his own architectural utopia, Arcosanti, an experiment in uniting architecture with ecology intended as a prototype city for 5000 people. 

Conceived with Mark Mills, another Frank Lloyd Wright alumni, Soleri’s dome house could be described as a modern earthship, using architecture and place to form a symbiotic relationship.  Soleri and Mill’s adaptation of a traditional pit house is composed of an excavated living space one floor below the ground, lined in masonry and covered with a glass dome. Benches, living spaces and bedrooms are carved from the desert. The Glass dome acts as a solar chimney in the winter is composed of two mobile sectors, which can slide and rotate over one another to open the house to its surroundings. The dome’s southern sector can act as a shading device.  When open, the space beneath the dome captures winter sun and warms the masonry’s thermal mass keeping the house warm at night. The masonry’s thermal inertia, maintains relatively stable temperatures. Water evaporation pools, tubes and sprays cool exposed elements during summer heat. The living room is circular in plan and is directly beneath the dome, while the sleeping spaces are tucked in the ground beneath a flat roof, which is also sprayed with water to cool it in the Arizona heat. The dome structure is a simple aluminum meridian and hoop skeletal structure that could be produced both simply and economically. As in a traditional pit structure, this roof can be disassembled, replaced, or even moved. 

photo by Julius Shulman © J. Paul Getty Trust. Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles (2004.R.10)