El Sombrero

As part of a graduate design/build studio through the University of Colorado’s School of Architecture & Planning, Glen Camuso and a team of nine others participated in Design Build BLUFF’s housing program on the Navajo reservation outside of Bluff, Utah.
Having received a home build kit, the clients had already completed a CMU foundation to accept a traditional rectangular gable-trussed home. Preliminary design meetings focused around the decision whether or not to use the existing foundation, whose orientation was not optimum for the site and whose footprint was too large for the students tackle. Consisting of basic framing materials needed to build a home, the kit also included roof trusses designed to span thirty feet. Two weeks of vetting all of the options ultimately resulted in the decision to utilize the existing foundation and virtually all of the build kit materials stock-piled on site. Resisting the traditional gable roof form, the team chose to do what any normal group of architecture students would then do – turn the trusses upside down. This decision alone generated the dominant form of the home, which resembles a large-brimmed sombrero in the vast, exposed desert landscape.