Page 78 Text: When we finished our first book, The Straw Bale House, we had used up our available credit and knew that we wouldn’t see any royalties or the like for some time. Things looked a little grim, but we were ready for anything that looked interesting and exciting. The first offer that came our way was from Save the Children Foundation in Ciudad Obregón, Mexico — a modern agricultural town in the southern part of the state of Sonora. We took the offer — a place to stay, gas, tacos, and any repairs our aging Suburban needed to get us there and back. What ensued was an eight-year love affair with the most unlikely of places and a big extended family with whom we have formed a deep and lasting friendship/partnership.

We joined together in what became an ongoing exploration of every type of local building material imaginable, mostly local, natural, and recycled. We combined and recombined them into a series of experimental small homes and an office building for Save the Children. They have all come to be referred to as “Casas que Cantan,” or “Houses that Sing,” after the exquisite book by Mexican photographer La Casa que Cantá. More than anything else, the work was fun, lots of it. People often get the mistaken idea that we went there to help poor people. It would be more correct to say that we were the ones who benefited the most, for the emptiness of our modernized poverty got filled in in countless and unimaginable ways by people who were in many ways richer than us.

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