Rob Pyatt featured in Architect Magazine
A Colorado professor and his students are partnering with Native Americans to bring well-designed, affordable housing to tribal lands. by David Hill
It’s mid-afternoon on the rolling grasslands of the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, in the remote southwest corner of South Dakota. In a field just off Highway 27, as dark clouds are gathering to the west on this hot summer day, three students from the University of Colorado at Boulder (CU)—Evan Palmer, Aaron Wirth, and Seth Lopez—are applying a brownish stain to the wood roof overhang of a straw-bale house. It’s quiet but for the sound of chirping birds and the occasional truck rolling down the two-lane road.
The students are building the house—1,000-square-feet and net-zero energy—as part of the Native American Sustainable Housing Initiative, or NASHI. An interdisciplinary service-learning project launched in 2010 by Rob Pyatt, Assoc. AIA, a CU instructor and research associate, NASHI is dedicated to helping solve an intractable crisis on tribal lands: a lack of well-designed, affordable housing. At Pine Ridge, about 15 students in CU’s undergraduate program in environmental design have worked alongside construction-technology students at nearby Oglala Lakota College (OLC) to build the house. It’s the first of four sustainable prototypes—designed by students with community input—for a future mixed-use development called Thunder Valley.