On the ground
Campus immersions and field study
Some of this can be read. The rest has to be built. Students come to northern New Mexico and put the curriculum into the ground on buildings that are actually going up.
Taos, New Mexico
The campus
The campus is at the new Pangea Community, at 7,000 feet. Students stay on site through immersive sessions and work on live building systems — wall assemblies, bond beams, cooling tubes, botanical cells and the interior growing zone.
At this altitude the building science is not theoretical. The daily temperature swing is large, the winters are cold and bright, and a building detailed wrong tells you so within a day.
Pangea Community · two builds
ICF Earthships, two bed and one bed
A two-bedroom and a one-bedroom Earthship, both with insulated concrete form walls rather than tires. Same thermal logic, same water and waste systems, a different structural route to getting there.
Worth understanding why: ICF gives you continuous insulation and mass in one assembly and goes up fast, where a tire wall gives you mass for nothing but takes the labor. Building both is how you learn which question a site is asking.
Angel Fire, New Mexico
Retrofit — log cabin and greenhouse
Applying Biotecture systems to an existing log cabin, plus a large attached greenhouse. Most of the buildings that need this work are already standing, and retrofit is a different discipline from new build.
You are working inside somebody else's decisions: an envelope you did not detail, an orientation you cannot change, and moisture behaviour in a log wall that punishes the wrong answer. It is the most transferable work on this list.
Taos · affordable housing
Chamisa Verde
Seven deed-restricted homes with 3D-printed walls. Students can join us on site.
This is the one where the constraint is money. Every decision is made against a cost per square foot that has to land somewhere a working household can reach — which is a very different exercise from building the best house you can.
More coming
Further sites
Other projects are lined up and will be announced when they are confirmed. If you are working on something that could host students, we would like to hear from you.
What a session is like
You work. Sessions are not lectures with a site visit attached — you are on the building, with tools, for most of the day, alongside people who do this for a living.
The online courses are the theory and the numbers, and doing them first makes the field time far more useful. You will get more out of pounding a tire wall if you already know why the course height matters and what the bond beam is doing.
Days start early and the altitude is real. Bring work boots, gloves, sun protection and layers — a 40°F daily swing is normal here.
Ask about a session
Tell us which program and roughly when, and we will write back with dates, costs and what to bring.
Start online, finish on site
The foundation course is free to everyone, permanently, and it is the right place to begin. Booking a session also opens the whole online curriculum to you — before you travel and after you leave.