I knew that I was an architect when I was eight, but as a child in the 50's, I never imagined that the tool I would use for my work would be a computer. At that time my concept of a computer was a room-filling machine illustrated in my encyclopedia.

Since early childhood, I have been fascinated by Native American architecture. But in the place where I grew up in Shiawassee County, Michigan, I can not remember ever seeing a single artifact of the original Chippewa Indian buildings or places they built--so transformative was the modern farming to Michigan's Lower Peninsula! Still, I used to wander the forests and fields near Durand in search of some evidence that the Chippewa had been there. The school library was no help--only one book on architecture titled, "The Seven Wonders of the Ancient World".

Although my architecture professors were all modernists, for most of my professional career I have marched to a different drum. Seeking a true American architecture--buildings that grow organically from this land--I have had the good fortune to meet many Native American genii who showed me, with wit, that there is an indigenous American idiom of architecture as different from the European as the European is different from the Asian, African or Australian. It is a language of architecture that is conditioned by centuries of experiment and experience with the climate and micro-environmental conditions of the American continents. This Native idiom of architecture seems to me the only appropriate way to speak of shelter on the place they call Turtle Island...

In 1973, during the first Arab Oil Embargo, I began to investigate alternative energy supports for architecture--ways to heat and cool buildings that did not rely on fossil fuels. Solar energy utilization was the most obvious solution, and was not new--having been in use around the world for more than thirty centuries. I found that bringing solar energy knowledge into a design process brought a new vitality and contemporary relevance to my architecture. Since then, passive solar architecture has been one of my passions. I believe that designing architecture that minimizes its dependence on fossil fuel is the most responsive contribution an architect can make to the global environmental crisis--including the CO2 driven "greenhouse effect". My own work and research convinced me that for most of the world, the external energy requirements for space conditioning of buildings can be drastically reduced by the use of passive solar technology. It was the receptivity toward my solar architecture by Native Americans that brought me to work with them in New Mexico in 1990.

In northern New Mexico I was astonished to see so many architectural ruins of the prehistoric Indians still evident in the landscape. Seeing the ruins of these splendid buildings and villages was like seeing for the first time the cultural landscape of a continent. As a hobby, I have been studying these buildings ever since--at every spare moment. They have become an important inspiration to me in my architecture practice here in the Southwest US. Included in my work shown here are several virtual reality reconstructions of wonderful Indian places that no longer exist, except as rubble mounds and collapsing walls, the spoils of a still-mysterious catastrophe. Whenever I can get my hands on hard archaeological data--measured wall plans and vertical dimensions with number of stories--I construct on my Macintosh computer a three dimensional model of the place and then, using an electronic process called "ray tracing", I snapshot and animate the model. The software I use to build and render all of the models is VIDI Presenter Professional--with its intense one-year learniong curve. By 1990 I realized that manual tools no longer served me, and I leaped into cyber-space without any clothes. Was it scary? No--for the first time, it is as if the medium and the designer are one. The medium is the designer.

Sometimes, late in the New Mexico night, when I work on my VR models, or when I am CAD-designing a project which will serve my Native American clients, (and without trying to sound strange) I often get a feeling that the spirits of the builders of these great places are standing over my right shoulder and guiding my Macintosh mouse--helping me to visualize and image in virtual reality what great village building was for them. It is an honor and a privilege to share with you what they have taught me.