BOARD OF DIRECTORS

Lisa Morey (Co-President)

Lisa Morey is a professional engineer and architectural designer with experience in adobe brick construction that dates back to the year 2000. She is an author of “Adobe Homes for all Climates”, a book on how to build with adobe bricks based on her experience working in New Zealand.  Lisa also holds a patent on an innovative building system that incorporates reinforcement and scaffolding into the adobe brick wall system.

Currently Lisa is Co-Founder of Colorado Earth LLC, based in Golden, Colorado.  Colorado Earth manufacturers compressed earth blocks and adobe bricks, carries out design and engineering services, and constructs earthen walls.  Lisa is dedicated to the promotion and realization of natural building.

Dan Krause (Co-President)

Dan Krause (Ph.D., Arizona State University) is a retired Professor of Operations & Supply Chain Management. During his career he taught at several universities, including Colorado State University. He acquired a life-long love of building starting at an early age, working alongside his grandfather. Early in his adult years, he laid brick, block and stone, and worked at various carpentry jobs. He discovered adobe buildings while living in Arizona and supervised the building of his first adobe home in the early 2000s. He designed and built his second adobe home near Taos, N.M. during the recent COVID-19 pandemic. He obtained his Adobe in Action Certificate in Adobe Construction in 2020.

Ethan Novikoff (Treasurer)

Ethan Novikoff built an adobe house for his family on a mountaintop in southwestern New Mexico. He started his adobe career with Mule Creek Adobe, earned a Certificate in Adobe Construction from Adobe in Action, and his adobe house was Adobe in Action's first Owner Builder Support Project. He presented his paper on the owner-builder experience at Earth USA 2019 and has been volunteering at Earth USA since 2015. Ethan is the author of www.visioncreationadobe.com, where he writes about his owner-builder experience. He is a passionate proponent of earthen construction and believes in empowering people to build their own adobe projects.

Ben Loescher (Secretary)

Ben Loescher is the co-founder of Loescher Meachem Architects, a Los Angeles based practice specializing in creative workplace and high performance adaptive reuse projects in California, New Mexico, and Texas. Loescher is active in building code development, and committed to reducing barriers to the appropriate use of earthen construction.

Quentin Wilson (Board Member & Chair of EUSA Speakers Committee)

Born in 1943, Quentin Wilson made miniature adobe bricks at age 10. At age 27 he started repairing and building full-sized buildings ending up as a licensed construction contractor. Teaching weekend adobe and solar classes all along, he went full time at Northern New Mexico College and established their Adobe Construction Program at 52 and nominally retired at 67.

STAFF

Kurt Gardella (Executive Director & Instructor)

Kurt Gardella specializes in online and field-based adobe construction education. He holds a Certificate in Adobe Construction from Northern New Mexico College (Quentin Wilson) and is also certified as a Specialist for Building with Earth (Registration #01-208-0810) by the Dachverband Lehm (German Association for Building with Earth) and the Handwerkskammer Ulm (Ulm Chamber of Trades and Crafts). Kurt also holds an Adobe Proficiency Certification from The Earthbuilders' Guild.

Issac Logsdon (Instructor)

Issac specializes in the historic preservation and restoration of earth and stone structures, while maintaining traditional building techniques. With deep family roots throughout Northern New Mexico, learning traditional building skills has been a way to reconnect with the land-based traditions that have skipped a generation in his family.

Through Cornerstones Community Partnerships, Issac has worked on adobe preservation projects throughout our community here in Northern New Mexico and various National Park Service and Bureau of Land Management sites, including Pecos National Historical Park, Casa Grande Ruins National Monument, Joshua Tree National Park, Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument, Death Valley National Park, Lake Valley Historic Townsite, and others. He also teaches for the Adobe Construction Program at the Santa Fe Community College.

CONSULTANTS

Cornelia Theimer Gardella
(Consultant & Editor of Earth USA Conference Proceedings)

Mark Zaineddin
(Consultant & Editor of Earth USA News)

PAST BOARD MEMBERS

Jana Greiner
Carole Crews
Joanna Keane Lopez
Kirk Higbee
Mark Zaineddin
Sean Kaltenbach
Virginia Glenn
Jennifer Forester
James Baird
Mike Lopach (Founder of Adobe in Action)