The office under the meadow
Malcolm Wells buried his own architecture office beside the Cooper River in Cherry Hill, New Jersey, and spent the rest of his career arguing that a building should leave the land no worse than it found it.
Most buildings take a piece of ground and cover it. Malcolm Wells spent most of his career, in drawings, books and cartoons, asking a different question: what if the building gave the ground back?
From a pavilion to a meadow
Wells did not start underground. His early career was conventional and corporate. At RCA he designed radios and showrooms, and he designed the RCA Pavilion for the 1964 World’s Fair in Queens. According to AIA New Jersey, learning that the pavilion would be torn down after two years was what turned him. He began working toward what he called “gentle architecture,” with a simple test: leave the land no worse than you found it.
That test led him under the soil. If a building’s roof could carry earth and plants, the site would keep most of what it had before construction: rain soaking in rather than running off, habitat on top rather than tar.
The office
Wells put the idea to work on his own practice. He built semi-underground offices in Cherry Hill, New Jersey, at the corner of Cuthbert Boulevard and North Park Drive, beside the Cooper River. Accounts of the building describe large timber beams, sloping roofs and concrete work with the feel of Frank Lloyd Wright. A quotation attributed to General Omar Bradley was printed on its original concrete wall, warning against leaving children a legacy of costly roads that lead only to more congestion.
We have not yet confirmed the year the office was finished, or whether it still stands as Wells left it. Those checks are open, and this entry will be updated.
What the soil does, and doesn’t do
It is easy to overstate what earth sheltering achieves. Soil is a large, slow thermal mass, so a buried room sees much smaller swings in temperature than one exposed to wind and sun. But soil is a poor insulator, roughly R-1 per foot. Wells himself recommended about R-10 of insulation between deep soil and heated spaces. Left uninsulated, a buried wall keeps leaking heat into cold ground all winter.
The harder problems are water and weight. Wet soil presses on walls and roofs for months at a time, and a planted roof can weigh many times more than a snow load. Those are engineering questions, not design flourishes.
If you want to build like this
Earth sheltering is labelled case by case in the Atlas. It is buildable and has been permitted many times, but almost never without professional help. Expect to need:
- a structural engineer for any roof that carries soil;
- a check of the soil and the water table before you commit to a site;
- a waterproofing and drainage design, and a plan for inspecting it later.
Why start here
Wells is a fitting first story for Leafhouse because he documented as much as he built. His books and drawings, from Gentle Architecture (1981) to How to Build an Underground House (1991), were meant to be copied. He did not claim underground building was simple. He claimed it was worth the trouble.
Sources
- Malcolm Wells. Wikipedia. · accessed November 4, 2026
- Wells: The Garden State's Most Iconic Architects. AIA New Jersey, 2013. · accessed November 4, 2026
- Malcolm Wells Office, Cherry Hill, NJ. Waymarking.com. · accessed November 4, 2026
- Earthship. Wikipedia. · accessed November 4, 2026
Fact-checked November 4, 2026. Spotted an error? Tell us.
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