CASA AGVA

Casa Agua is an experimental xeric laboratory, a water conservation demonstration site with Xeric Garden, Art pop-up, Cactus Lab, and Gathering Ground for public events large and small. Founded by artists Frances Whitehead and Jim Elniski, along with a loose collective of erratic creatives and provocateurs, Casa Agua operates under the reciprocity and generosity paradigm. Opening its doors for short term events and interventions, Casa Agua aims to galvanize conversation about important issues for the Southwest.

Beam into the arid future!

Casa Agua opened its doors for the 2025 summer season on the Summer Soltice, with a new soundscape by Jim Elniski in The TANK, engaging the acoustics of the cylindrical chamber, sited in the xeric terrain of "Future Garden", a native xeric landscape in the high desert of Santa Fe, New Mexico. The WaterWorks invitational art project series and commissioned cultural interventions, take place in and around this repurposed water tank, to galvanize thought.

The Cact Lab supports Whitehead's NOPALOGY project, providing a controlled site to study and breed NM candidate species of culinary Nopal.

Experimental landscape + architecture as sculptural practice

Casa Agua is the latest of three such "dwelling projects", each exploring aspects of sustainable living, BOTH art AND architecture. Created over the last twenty years by Whitehead in collaboration with life partner, Jim Elniski, these projects include the energy generating Greenhouse Chicago and the edible landscape of Modest Modernism in ex-urb Gary, Indiana. Each has had a laboratory garden to explore the landscape dimensions of the thematic focus.

Reuse everything

With Casa Agua we continue our focus on adaptive reuse of existing structures, following our guiding principle: reuse everything. Choosing a common type of vernacular, pueblo- style, post-war ranch house known locally as a Stamm, we began by flipping up the garage roofs into a “butterfly”, creating a studio, and capturing rainwater into a galvanized cistern visible on the street. The residence was re-plumbed to send all greywater to the adjacent landscape. All water capture and distribution is passive, including greywater cisterns, and swales.

The site is developed into two sides, residential + studio, present and future. The residence follows the neighborhood spatial pattern and hosts The Present Garden. The future oriented studio and xeric laboratoy is public, rhetorical, and accessible for small events and discussions.

Deploying a zero net spoils approach, learned from the civil engineers on The 606, the site soils and hardscape became a giant cut and fill operation, moving soil and masonry around for reuse. Most ambitiously, we cut up the excessive concrete driveways, increasing site permeability and producing thick rustic concrete blocks for terracing.

The planting design is driven by water type, availability and site grade. Rules for plant selection are simple: they must be native, edible or existing. Vegetables are watered with clean cistern water and the fruits use the greywater. Planting zones include a micro-orchard, a Piñion/Juniper woodland The Present Garden, and the xeric demonstration garden attached to the studio, The Future Garden, focused on native succulents such as yucca and opuntia, serving as a research LAB for the NOPALOGY project.

Santa Fe straddles the border between the montane forest ecology above 7000 ft elevation and the shrubland below, affording a striking aesthetic contrast between evergreens and succulents, including the extremophile bristlecone pine and the sculptural tree yucca. These larger native species form the backbone of our xeric garden, which also hosts smaller native shrubs, cactus ,and agave.