Los Vientos

LOS VIENTOS Flowing form and sculptural expression in adobe

It's ranch and arid rolling-hills country here, just north of the shadow of Granite Mountain, near Prescott, a short drive past the suburban ranchettes into the open country to the northwest. A parcel set among the Williamson Valley undulations, a place called Quinta El Santuario, "the fifth sanctuary," attracts me back to the unperturbed hills to revisit a builder in adobe.

Quinta El Santuario is Mike Belshaw's ranch, and I think he named the place well. A sanctuary it is indeed, a naturalist's delight, with a great deal of breathing space and elbow room. The seclusion and the harmony of breeze with the surroundings induces musing and meditation, but hard work rather than reverie orders the owner's day. He has been giving shape here on the ranch to some rather extraordinary ideas about architecture and its kinship with the earth.

The economics lessons Dr. Belshaw(a Ph.D. from Columbia) gives these days are built on the earth, of the earth. Belshaw, Don Miguel, or just Mike, has become a sort of oracle on building adobe dwellings in earth-tailored designs that harmonize with rather than dominate nature. His designs intermix esthetics, rather extravagantly, with beneficial economies and put a crown of distinction on Southwestern archi-tectural traditions. One can read the lessons in the valley landscape.

Mike is currently putting the valedictory touches on his adobe house which he calls Los Vientos, "the winds" which hunches like a pueblo dwelling over the hump of a hill, resplendent with its turquoise-painted sills and jams reflecting the afternoon sun.

Dressed in denims and a rolled-brim gray hat with about a million miles on it, Mike is laying the stones for a stairway up to a sleeping loft, inside a French door near where I approach. He doesn't much want to be disturbed at his intricate work and says to make myself at home, so I join a plasterer in raising a scaffold to trowel along a high wall, then go inside.

The north door where I enter opens onto a sunken greenhouse, a downsloping curve of room that bottoms on the low west slope of the hill. Light permeates this space, with a doublethick pane of floor-to-ceiling glass surveying the gray-green loft of Granite Mountain and passing the full sun of a southern exposure through to an indoor garden. The entrant descends a terracotta stairway there into a riotous community of potted vegetation.From the entry, an adjoining doorway leads to the kiva. To call it a living room would be like saying car when you mean Mercedes. This is musical space, but with a subdued mood, evocative of quiet conversation and serene reflection. It has no receptivity to nettlesome influences from the world outside. The 30-inch-thick adobe walls would, I think, guard the silence against the apocalypse.

The walls, in addition to being curved through the main plan, also exhibit a contoured profile, being considerably thicker at the ground level than at the viga. The resulting shapeliness pleases the eye, and it also contributes a considerable structural plus. In Belshaw's words, "the thrust of the walls is all against each other." The adaptability of adobe in this regard increases the visual appeal in the same stroke as it strengthens the structure.

The northern kiva wall flows with an arc that sweeps around the whole eastern flank of the house. On it, a friend of the house, renowned Navajo artist Dave Paladin has painted a mural depicting themes of creation, fertility, and harmony with the infinite through the artist's masterly representations of Pueblo Katcinas.

Below the mural, a built-in ledge for seating, with hollows for firewood interspersed, follows the arc of the painted wall. The beehive fireplace built into the east wall stores a layer of white juniper ash, the spent reminder of an evening's congenial conversation. Though the fire has long since expired,its warmth still radiates from the adobe hearth. The hearth bricks constitute a "heat sink," storing heat from the fire and releasing it over surprisingly long periods of time, as much as six days. The walls of cured adobe, in like manner, store energy from the warmth of daylight, releasing it to warm the night. In hot weather, the thickness of the earthen walls blocks passage inward of the heat, precluding the need for a manufactured cooling system and a great deal of expense.

Down tiled steps from the kiva, one enters the flagstone-paved dining room with its own fireplace and double-thick glass wall facing Granite Mountain. The grandeur of the view and the warmth of the innerspace make breaking bread here something special, as it should be and too seldom is.

The eastern kiva doorway leads down a curving hall past a bathroom to the master bedroom. An upstairs sleeping loft there opens onto an outdoors sun deck, and the downstairs layout centers on a tiled jacuzzi. A curve of stonework stairs, where Mike is fitting pieces of granite, like an artisan of the Spanish colonies, ushers upwards from below. He describes his own design here as "utterly Sybaritic."

From the loft a passageway leads back along the curving wall past an upstairs bath to a large studio, which also opens onto a sun deck. Large windows face in three directions. The southerly surveys Granite Mountain and the narrow valley of Mint Wash below it, while the west window looks over the uninhabited hills of Yavapai as far as the eye can wander.

Below the north studio window sits the drafting table from which new adobe designs recently have been springing. The blueprints resting here now detail contours of houses which will incorporate Belshaw's "pouring in place" process, which makes building less expensive, faster, and feasible on a larger scale. For this he has won the recognition of the Department of Housing and Urban Development.

With the "pouring in place" process, Belshaw has broken ground in the figurative sense, of contributing an advancement, as well as in the literal. Like the style of Los Vientos, the technique of pouring adobe harks back to the architectural traditions born in Southwestern prehistory, but with a difference. The Pueblo Indians of New Mexico and the Hohokam of central and southern Arizona raised their earthen walls by pouring successive layers of puddled adobe. The monumental Casa Grande in Pinal County was so constructed in the 14th century. Only centuries later did the Spaniards introduce bricks into adobe construction.

Belshaw's process utilizes a portable form, a kind of collapsible box three-feet by two-feet by one-foot, into which viscous mud is poured and tamped along the course of the wall. When the adobe sets up, he removes the form to a new section of wall and there repeats the process. This way, walls can be built more quickly and very thick with only marginal cost, and they can be more easily contoured into sinuous forms suggested by the earth from which they rise. This last concept may be difficult to grasp at first and in need of a bit of exemplification.

When Mike was living comfortably in the first adobe he had built, drawing the original plans for Los Vientos, he drew "a kind of compound house, a hollow square." The idea was to build a place with an inner courtyard, in the Latin tradition. He says, "that design just didn't fit on the top of a mountain."

He then drew a detailed contour map of the building site and the five acres around it. "I concentrated my attention on the contours," he says, "and very, very quickly the design of this house evolved. It took no more than three hours then to come up with the design itself."

He says, "every house should fit its site" and that "it's a mistake to make a preconceived design fit every site. Everyone tends, I think, to design the house in the abstract and then fit it to the site, which is - back asswards.

"One of the things that most appeals to us about nature," he says professorially, "is that so little of it is linear. It's very subtle, with all sorts of shapes and gradations. This is also true of this kind of architectural style. Adobe is unique in its ability to mold into a very flowing form of sculptural expression.

"This house is an expression of the major traditions that have formed the culture and character of the Southwest. The forms and methods originated many centuries before the coming of the white man, in the pueblos along the Rio Grande. The coming of the Spanish brought a commingling of cultures, andthis style of architecture represents a fusion of the two."

Belshaw had the idea to build with adobe when he first arrived in the Southwest from New York, where he had been teaching economic anthropology and economic planning at Hunter College. "But I was absolutely ignorant of how to build with adobe and awed by it to some degree, so the first house I built here was not adobe, it was that log cabin you see down there," (this in the tradition of Prescottonians since the first territorial days). The cabin sits down below, just over a volcanic ridge from Los Vientos, and it is lived in now by a proud new owner.

"We're going to see a tremendous amount of adobe from now on," Mike says. "I think the interest has been latent for a long time, but people were somewhat frightened of it, overawed by it technically, as I was. There are probably many who would like to be able to enjoy adobe but who haven't had the opportunity to, and I think its use will probably be accelerating."

As for his own future, Mike says he may "take a couple of days off" on final completion of the house, he's been working on it "nine days a week," and he may even decide to move on to someplace more secluded, there to build again. He is outlining a book to make his techniques for pouring adobe more readily accessible to others who could find the process useful, and he would also like, in the not distant future to construct a retreat for artists and writers, out of adobe, of course.

Belshaw's Los Vientos, the winds, is an affecting statement in the art of architecture and an exercise, highly advanced to be sure, in applied economics. Here he has created a superabundance of comfort, peace, esthetics, domestic warmth - utilities for graceful living, in harmony with the moods of nature and people - using scarce resources efficiently. Using the land itself as the basic resource, he has thoroughly enhanced the valley landscape, giving it an appealing texture that it lacked before he built. And the space created for dwelling within brings out the humanist within the spirit of the beholder.

Leaving the ranch, I think, yes, he named it well, Quinta El Santuario. But more than a sanctuary, it's really a sort of living ideal of Western life.

Belshaw's nearly completed adobe home, nestled into a hilltop, is kept cozy by its passive solar design plus fireplaces at the base of a winding flagstone stairway and in the kiva-living room, where Hopi Katcina paintings by artist David Chetlahe Paladin add a mystique of their own. Val Stannard