Ceramic Houses

Ceramic houses are buildings made of an earth mixture which is high in clay, and fired to become ceramic. The process of building and firing such houses was developed by Iranian architect, Nader Khalili, in the late 1970s. he named it Geltaftan; "Gel", means "clay", and "taftan", means "firing, baking, and weaving clay" in Persian. Khalili's research into creating ceramic houses was strongly based on the idea that permanent, water-resistant, and earthquake-resistant houses could be built with the implementation of the four elements: earth and water to build the forms, and fire and air to finish them. His impassioned work led to a few small scale projects in Iran, including the Javadabad Elementary school, and the Ghaled Mofid restoration project. Aside from Khalili's own documented work, there seems to be little widespread research on ceramic houses.

After having a successful architectural practice in Iran and USA, Nader Khalili's interests turned to rural desert Iran exploring appropriate technology for poor people. While there, Khalili observed how the oldest buildings around were the village kilns, and that their durability came from the fact that the adobe bricks they were made from had been fired in the pottery making process, and therefore hardened. It took years of bureaucratic entanglement, a massive earthquake, and a revolution to get his ideas implemented. In 1978, Khalili with a kiln specialist, rehabilitated twelve houses in the village of Ghaled Mofid in a rural area outside Tehran, Iran. By firing and glazing the homes they became more permanent and safe places for the villagers to live. In 1981, Khalili completed a ten-classroom school of ceramic earth architecture in Javadabad, Iran.

In 1984 Khalili, who had moved to California by that time, proposed to NASA that ceramic houses be built on the moon. Experiments were conducted by Khalili at McDonnell Douglas Space Systems laboratories to show how harnessing the sun could melt and fuse lunar soil into shapes and forms for building applications. A full-scale model of the proposed colony was intended to be built in the desert outside of Hesperia, CA, where Khalili established his training school: the Cal-Earth Institute. The research received mixed reactions. Khalili was known as "quite a visionary" and thought of as "before his time" by, among others, the mayor of Hesperia, Jim Lindley. Only a few prototypes were built. In 1986 the Geltaftan Foundation was established by Khalili in California for further research into earth architecture. Each of his projects achieved moderate publicity, but Khalili's geltaftan technology has seen little use since the 1980s. This is in part because of the pollution involved in oil firing. The Geltaftan Foundation, and Cal-Earth has since carried on experiments with ceramic housing, but Nader Khalili is most noted today for his work developing Super Adobe: an earth building technique using earth-filled bags as structural elements.

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