Notes From Underground
Wells once designed conventional factories, offices, churches, libraries, and laboratories. “In the 1950s I was a typical successful suburban architect,” says the 74-year-old, who earlier this month left his Cape Cod home and office to speak at the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts, on West Burton Place. “I called myself a conservationist architect, but it was pure baloney. I made a lot of money and never thought a thought.”
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Of course Wells doesn’t like the way malls and subdivisions sprawl across the countryside. But his solution isn’t to outlaw them. Instead he wants us, whenever we build something new, including parking lots, to construct low-rise buildings that are strong enough and waterproofed well enough to support a foot or two of soil and vegetation on top of them. (He often uses the word “underground,” but he doesn’t actually advocate digging down into the earth.) These buildings would quickly grow a pleasant green covering, so that instead of a bungalow or a parking lot, you’d see a gentle hill with plants and shrubs and plenty of windows and doors peeking out of it on two or three sides. On at least one side, the soil would slope from the top of the building to meet the surrounding land. Wells says the smallest lot he’s done this on was 60 feet
Over the past 35 years he’s constructed more than 200 earth-covered buildings. But the movement he has long hoped to start has yet to, well, get off the ground. “In spite of my having lectured at almost every U.S. architectural school, been on network TV, and written 15 or 20 books on the subject, underground architecture is still virtually unknown.”
In the fall of 1997, Wells traveled around the country, hiring helicopters to view architecture as he says it should be seen to appreciate its destructiveness. From above, it’s more obvious that “the act of construction kills land for generations.” With a grant from the Graham Foundation to defray his costs, he flew over and photographed Disneyland, the Pentagon, the New Orleans Superdome, and the world’s largest building (a Boeing assembly plant near Seattle). Then, using watercolors, he deftly rendered each structure as it might appear if redesigned according to his principles. The result is the slide show and talk he gave on October 11, plus a strangely charming book, Recovering America: A More Gentle Way to Build, that reads just as if Wells were talking to you. He tells his travel tales, tells stories on himself, and boils his message down to a four-step logical sequence: (1) People can’t draw energy directly from sunlight. (2) Plants can. (3) Plants can’t live underground. (4) We can.
