CASA AGVA

SANTA FE WATER + XERIC LABORATORY

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, poetry slams, and interventions, Casa Agua aims to galvanize conversation about important issues for the Southwest.

BOTH/And
ART + ARCHITECTURE
Symbolic + Practical

Sustainable STAMM Ranch House

Casa Agua reimagines the Santa Fe post-war ranch house as a model for water conservation, a critical aspect of sustainable living in New Mexico, rapidly undergoing increased aridification with climate change. Casa Agua demonstrates the full range of water-saving techniques for the modest, ubiquitous, frame, faux-dobe, pueblo-revival ranch, known in Santa Fe as a STAMM. Named after prolific midcentury builder, Allen Stamm, these modest homes form a large portion of the vernacular housing stock in Santa Fe. Combining residential water conservation with extensive native xeriscaping and experimental cultural programming to galvanize conversation, the Casa Agua model is BOTH architecture AND art.

Casa Agua is the latest of three dwelling projects, each exploring aspects of sustainable living through Adaptive Reuse, embracing De-Growth and Post-Development principles. 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.

Beam into the arid future!

CULTURAL EVENTS + PUBLIC ENGAGEMENT

Casa Agua opened its doors for the 2025 summer season on the Summer Soltice, with a new water-focused 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 at Casa Agua supports Whitehead's NOPALOGY project, providing a field trial site for NM candidate species of culinary Nopal.

Upcoming events include Poetry Readings with the IAIA Creative Writing Program and Nopal Tastings.

Reuse everything!

Casa Agua Details

With Casa Agua we continue our focus on adaptive reuse of existing structures. Following our guiding principle: reuse everything, the concrete driveways are cut up and lifted, increasing site permeability and producing thick rustic concrete blocks for terracing, repurposing their heavy carbon footprint. Existing garage roofs are flipped up into a “butterfly”, funneling rainwater into a galvanized cistern, highly visible on the street. The residence is re-plumbed to send all greywater to the adjacent landscape, possible on any home with a crawlspace. Small drops in elevation allow passive distribution of each type of water which drives the landscape design. 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.

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, which focuses on native succulents such as yucca and opuntia/

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.