Solar Design & Construction

Building for the People

Flagstaff, Arizona · By Ashley Rood and Peter Friederici

When Ed Dunn was a nine-year-old boy growing up in the then small city of Phoenix, his aunt came out from Kansas and rented an old adobe house for the summer. Ed still remembers how that traditional building was much cooler than the cinder-block house his own family lived in. It was beautiful, too. “I really loved going over there,” he says.

Ed is still enraptured by houses, especially by houses built with the environment in mind. Designer, builder, educator, and visionary, Ed is now a tall, slender man who plays the guitar and bass on his time off, and is one of the leaders of the sustainable-building movement in northern Arizona.

What does sustainability mean to Ed? “It’s about people,” he says. “It’s about improving the quality of life.” Ed studied architecture at Arizona State University, but switched to a major in urban planning when he realized that most architects in Phoenix were designing nothing but strip malls and tract homes.

Ed became a teacher and taught inner-city students. He wrestled with the question: How do you communicate sustainability and tell students how they should live when they are afraid of going home – when they don’t know where their next meal is coming from? “My students taught me that sustainability is about more than the environment,” he explains. “It involves a myriad of questions about how to live.”

Ed and his wife Teri moved to Flagstaff in the late 1980s. It was here he began to focus on creating spaces that truly worked for people. He began working as a handyman, and eventually began building houses. It wasn’t long before he became interested in straw-bale houses. “What got me into it was the beauty of the thing,” he says. “These homes have soul.”

Not only did he like the way straw-bale houses looked, with their thick walls, earth-tone coatings, and hand-finished textures, there was also the fact that homeowners can really save energy with such homes. “Straw-bale houses built according to the principles of passive solar design,” Ed states, “are three to four times more energy efficient than conventionally built homes.” While these houses are not any cheaper to build, over the lifetime of the house the savings in energy is substantial – as is the savings in wear and tear on the Earth’s resources. This long-term, holistic view of building materials is at the heart of a sustainable paradigm; it requires looking beneath the surface and beyond the moment.

Ed has come to love that sort of holism. “Many conventional homes,” he says, “look like they don’t fit in – they bear no real relation to their surroundings, or have an ill-thought out relationship.” As an example, Ed cites the many houses east of Flagstaff that have stunning views of the San Francisco Peaks to the west – and that grow far too hot on summer days, and far too cold on winter nights, because of their huge windows. “More will be spent on such a home’s energy in its life than on the cost to build it,” Ed observes. His homes, instead, feature large windows to the south that trap solar energy, keeping the interiors warm at night. They still provide a scenic view of the mountains, just through smaller windows.

Each of Ed’s straw-bale homes is unique. The straw structure and plaster finish allow for infinite creativity, from curvilinear walls to built-in custom benches. A recent project was an octagonal house east of the San Francisco Peaks that was modeled on a traditional Navajo hogan and designed according to Feng Shui principles. Its peaked metal roof echoes the diamond shape of the Peaks. Its walls are covered with straw-embedded earthen plaster that is beautiful and nontoxic. It is also low in so-called “embodied energy,” or the combined “fossil fuel use” of a material over its lifetime, including extraction, transport, manufacture, installation, maintenance, and disposal. Inside, a cob wall built of dirt and straw curves around a bedroom; an indoor graywater system uses wastewater from the kitchen and washing machine to nourish plants. A highly efficient wood-pellet stove provides heat during infrequent periods of insufficient sunlight. It is a house that taxes the Earth’s resources much less than a conventional house, and that very much belongs to the environment in which it is set.

Ed is still very much a teacher. He regularly offers workshops where participants learn the fine points of stacking straw bales or applying earth or cement plasters. He is a regular at local energy fairs and community gatherings and is a founding advisor of the Coconino County Sustainable Building Program. A few years ago Ed helped build the Willow Bend Environmental Education Center in Flagstaff, designed by local architect Paul Moore. Perched on the edge of a scenic canyon, this beautiful straw-bale building includes a south-facing wall covered in windows. In two places the windows are backed by dark “trombe” walls made of twelve-inch-thick concrete. The sun heats those walls during the day, and they release their heat all night long, maintaining consistent warm temperatures.

“It’s amazing how constant the temperature is in here,” says Center director Glo Edwards. “If we get two cloudy days in a row we might have to light a little fire in the woodstove, but that happens only about ten times a winter. It’s so bright that we never have to turn the lights on.” And the building is a teacher, too. Glo estimates that they probably get as many people dropping in to look at the building as to see the exhibits.

As a builder who cares about what happens to the Earth, to people, and to his community, Ed Dunn might well become dispirited by the direction of the building profession – build it fast, build it cheaply, don’t worry about the long term. But he doesn’t. He retains his steadfast involvement in the community and with the people whose homes he builds. Inspired by the creativity that exists in his profession and by the continual learning curve it offers him, Ed continues to strive for sustainability of the people, by the people, and for the people.

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This is one of many stories from the Four Corners region that were printed in A New Plateau: Sustaining the Lands and Peoples of Canyon Country, edited by Peter Friederici and Rose Houk. This book was a project of the Center for Sustainable Environments at Northern Arizona University and Renewing the Countryside, with assistance from the Museum of Northern Arizona. A New Plateau can be purchased at the Renewing the Countryside online bookstore or the Northern Arizona University bookstore, or request it at your local bookstore.