Architecture
Most of the buildings are straw bale, adobe brick, and straw clay structures and were built by residents of Lama and/or participants in natural building workshops. Common structures were adobe with vigas and latillas, or a-frames – with names like "Muffin House", "Tower House", and "Orange Room". A massive forest fire in 1996 destroyed 24 of the community's buildings, though the central complex survived.
During its early days, the Lama Foundation was an early innovator within New Mexico in greenhouse design, constructing a so-called "pit greenhouse" with added heat storage to reflect biosphere principles. It permitted year-round cultivation of the community's crops.
Read more about this topic: Lama Foundation
Famous quotes containing the word architecture:
“The two elements the traveler first captures in the big city are extrahuman architecture and furious rhythm. Geometry and anguish. At first glance, the rhythm may be confused with gaiety, but when you look more closely at the mechanism of social life and the painful slavery of both men and machines, you see that it is nothing but a kind of typical, empty anguish that makes even crime and gangs forgivable means of escape.”
—Federico García Lorca (1898–1936)
“They can do without architecture who have no olives nor wines in the cellar.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“All architecture is great architecture after sunset; perhaps architecture is really a nocturnal art, like the art of fireworks.”
—Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874–1936)