Natural Building at the Lama Foundation

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One of Lama Foundation’s unique characteristics is its buildings: the architecture and natural building process. The buildings have all been built by hundreds of loving hands, doing service and leaving their heart’s imprint the work.

Little Joe Gomez and others from the Taos Pueblo showed the first Lama Beans how to make adobe bricks for the main Dome. The earliest building materials were mainly adobe and wood framing; in other words, using what was here on the land. By using fewer building materials, locally produced, the intention was to be harmonious with nature.

There was not a lot of building expertise in the early days, but the spirit to create buildings needed to hold Lama Foundation made up for this. They built “temporary” A-frame wooden housing that became “permanent” by default, and the winter community’s numbers was decided by the number of heatable spaces available. They primarily used 1” thick locally milled wood and so these houses were very very cold during the winters. Further, the number of buildings in need of major repair grew in the 1990’s as the buildings began to rot from the inside out.

At the beginning, Lama Foundation was built as a “spiritual” community in a rustic “off-the-grid” setting, and so rather than “sustainability”, the sacred architecture and the sacred geometric layout of the buildings was the focus. click here to read more about Sacred Geometry in Lama Foundaiton Buildings

In the late 1980’s, Ben Haggard and Tim Murphy brought “sustainability” into the mix. Using permaculture principles, Lama incorporated the greater energetic flows of such things as “cold-air drainage”, “fire sector”, and the degree of the sun from solstice to solstice into building site selection and community planning. The first major building designed with these principles in mind is the Community Center which houses the new kitchen, office space and meeting rooms.

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