About Robert

After leaving grad school in 1976 before graduating, I set out to build a geodesic rooftop greenhouse hydroponic garden in Nashville, Tennessee because I was a cook at the Black-eyed Pea Restaurant and needed lots of fresh vegetables.I figured why should we buy them when we can grow them ourselves? I didn’t manage to actually build the greenhouse and instead went to Kansas City where I worked with visionary architect Matt Taylor. He put me in charge of his Ecosphere project, a spherical. geodesic, greenhouse-bio-shelter and micro-farm that was designed like a biological cell in order to function as a producer of food and energy.

Eventually, as a licensed contractor, I built homes for people who could not do it for themselves over the last 40 years. For this I was grateful because I needed to support myself and my family. Yet I soon noticed that the amount of money my clients had to pay to me, the bank, and to the county in order to have a place to live, often left them seriously in debt and exhausted by the time they moved in.

Noticing this changed everything for me. I realized it made more sense to have my clients become the contractorwhen building their home even when they had no experience.

For 30 of those years I worked with the great Sunray Kelley experimenting with many types of building methods. In 1993 Sunray and I built the Forrest House on Orcas Island, Washington, (photo at beginning) Our finished projects included the Cascadian Farm Organic Fruit Stand in Rockport, WA, and many other wild-hearted works.

Additionally, we built the Birdsview Brewing Company located in the “American Alps” at the foothills of the Pacific Northwest’s Skagit Valley. Over the years, National Geographic, MTV, and Better Homes and Gardens featured our Shelters which represent the Greening of Architecture, a movement I consider to be the most important development since the Industrial Revolution.