These are the hands that mixed the mud that glomped it and mooshed it and spread it on straw. These are the hands that belong to the students, who mixed the mud to ease the life, to proffer the hope to a family named Kunga, who will live in the house that they built.
On a cloudy Saturday last October, a half dozen Utahns came clad in work clothes to a construction site in downtown Salt Lake City. They came because they wanted to learn to build houses with straw bales.
They came out of idealism, believing straw bale is energy-efficient, sustainable and an ethical way to build. There are straw-bale houses in other parts of Utah, to be sure. But the students were excited because the house they were working on that day, called the Kunga house, is the first bale project ever built in Salt Lake City.
The house is post-and-beam construction, with straw bale infill. The walls are stuccoed with earthen plaster from the soil on the site. A durable lime plaster goes over the outside walls, and gypsum plaster goes inside. The roof hangs out several feet over the straw-bale wall to protect it from snow and rain.
After he put the first coat of earth on the outside of the house, University of Utah architecture student Patrick Sinclair described the process. "It's funny," he said. "Here are these massive walls and there you are smoothing, kind of caressing the walls."
Hands-in-mud building is so much more exciting than just reading about it in a textbook, he says.
Of course, Sinclair is excited about the house for more reasons than just the materials.
And other people are excited about the house, too. Take attorney Larry Stevens, who says the Kunga house is one of the highlights of his practice. Stevens and fellow attorney Dan Hindert (both of Parsons, Behle and Latimer) got involved with the Kunga house through friends in the Tibetan resettlement project.
In 2000, their Tibetan friends came to them for legal advice. Phurbu Dolma had been in a serious car accident. Dolma was a passenger in the car and had been ejected as it rolled. She became a paraplegic.
Dolma and her husband, Thupten Kunga, are the parents of seven children. At the time of the accident, Dolma was working full time. The family needed both parents' incomes. To make it worse, the Kungas were renting a two-bedroom apartment that was impossible for someone in a wheelchair.
Hindert and Stevens took the case on contingency. They began negotiating with the driver's insurance company. The coverage was limited, says Stevens. Next the two attorneys talked to IHC about medical care for Dolma.
Stevens and Hindert offered to donate the money they'd received from the case to IHC if the hospital would reduce its charges to the Kungas. The hospital administrators went one better and offered to care for Dolma for nothing.
Stevens and Hindert then went to the Community Development Corp. — this time with their fees and the Kungas' share of the insurance money — to see about getting the family into a wheelchair-accessible home.
Bruce Quint, director of the agency, says they came to the right place. "We are a nonprofit agency that provides homeownership for the low income. And
we specialize in working with families with disabilities."
Using federal and private money, CDC helps about 250 families each year and actually builds about four homes every year.
Quint called the U. Graduate School of Architecture. He'd worked with the architecture students before, on house plans for wheelchair accessibility. But this time when Quint called, he talked to a visiting professor named Hank Louis. Louis was doing something new.
This is the teacher named Samuel Mockbee, who taught his students to donate their artwho then left his campus to help the poor . . .
And this is where Hank Louis' part of the story begins. Not in Utah, but in rural Alabama.
Mockbee was a social pioneer. An architecture professor at Auburn University, Mockbee started something called the Rural Studio, where he took students to live in the Alabama countryside to build homes for poor people. These folks had been living in shacks, had been living without plumbing.
Mockbee saw architecture as a merger of art and social responsibility. And Louis ascribes to Mockbee's idea that beauty is for everyone. The houses the Alabama students designed and built were not big. Typically they'd be 600 square feet. Innovative. Energy-efficient. Made of salvaged materials.
At first, a few folks thought Mockbee was crazy. A tall white man comes strolling down a dirt road and to offer a free house to the descendents of slaves? Mockbee had to do a little talking before a family from Hale County, Ala., would believe he wanted to build them a house.
Now Mockbee's projects dot the countryside in several states. His students have built houses and a chapel, a community center, a playground. Also one amazing chain link fence, it's whimsical lines inspired by the sagging wire around a local baseball field.
Mockbee died of cancer in 2001 at the age of 57. In the book "Rural Studio," his biographers call his legacy "the architecture of decency." Mockbee is remembered not only in Alabama but by the professors of architecture, especially at the relatively few universities that have design/build programs.
At the University of Utah, the students in Louis' design/build class were asked to draw plans for an energy-efficient, wheelchair-accessible home. From a dozen student plans, a jury of experts selected four plans. Then the Kungas were asked to pick their favorite.
The family was humble and did not want to put themselves forward, Louis recalls. Their translator was the one who mentioned they might like to have a Buddhist shrine in their home.
That could be arranged. Contractor Dennis Caulfield, who is co-teaching the class at the U., supplied the students with a picture book of Tibet, and they added a room for daily worship in the front of the house.
All of the students helped with the final drawings and permits. By the time the building started, many of the architecture students had graduated. Some came back to work on the Kunga house as volunteers, others as paid labor.
One day last December, architecture student Jane Barrett helped the electrician and waxed enthusiastic about the shiny aluminum siding that had just been donated for the front of the house.
The design/build program makes her proud of her profession. "You can actually help people rather than building a monument to yourself," says Barrett. The act of building has made her a better architect.
Unlike the homeowners in Alabama, the Kungas will have a mortgage payment. (Their low-interest mortgage was arranged through the city.) Their house is financed like a Habitat for Humanity house. If the Kungas want to sell next year, the CDC would recoup the money that was donated and use it to help other low-income families buy a house. The Kungas would get their share of the initial investment as well as any appreciation.
Louis feels good about what the U. has accomplished in Salt Lake City. But urban poverty is one thing and rural is another. Now Louis wants to take the program to Bluff, Utah, to the Navajo reservation.
About their lives since their mother's accident, "it's been hard," says Tenzin Lhazey, 20, Kunga and Dolma's oldest daughter. She and her dad are the only breadwinners now.
But so many people have been so helpful, Lhazey says. The family moves into their new home at the end of March. There, Lhazey says, "it will be very easy for Mom to get around. She will be a little more independent."
In his 12 years as director of CDC, Quint says the Kunga house has been the most satisfying project. Because so many people in the community came together for it. Because the house itself has enlivened a street in the central city. And because the family had a true need.
Here are the people who fled their country and lived in a camp and resettled in Utah and suffered again and never expected to own a home with strong thick walls, room for a shrine and a porch to shade them from the sun.
E-mail: susan@desnews.com