As I sit in the living room of the Canelo Project’s co-directors, Bill and Athena Steen, Bill explains that where my eye now takes in a scene of desert-adapted plants and expressions of human handicraft, a long wall once served to enclose the room. I see this modification, just one of many the Steens have made to the old adobe ranch house, as a metaphor for their reverence for their natural surroundings and their belief that humans needn’t subdue the earth so much as they need to embrace it. The Canelo Project is all about teaching skills essential to that lifestyle.
The Steens’ work centers on the theme ‘Connecting People, Culture and Nature.’ For nearly 30 years now, their “connecting” activities have taken the form of workshops, tours, internships and writing. As a team, they specialize in helping their clients construct handcrafted simple, small-scale and comfortable shelters built primarily with local and natural materials. They have become particularly well known for their unique straw bale and clay wall system finished with beautiful clay and lime plasters, sculptural wall carvings, earthen floors and clay ovens.
It could be argued that Athena and Bill owe their partnership to a bale of straw. Had Athena not built her first house out of straw, she and Bill likely would never have crossed paths. Athena and her first husband chose straw bale as the solution to affordable housing when she was still attending St. John’s College in her home town of Santa Fe. After his marriage failed to survive the move to the relatively remote Canelo countryside, Bill’s interest in building with straw led him to connect with Athena, whose marriage had also ended. They met, fell in love, not only with each other but with the prospect of working together, and started their small nonprofit enterprise in 1989.
Their early years together were focused mainly on doing week-long straw bale building workshops, during which 20 participants and up to ten support staff would live and learn this craft on the Canelo Project’s grounds. As Bill tells it, straw bale building “took over our lives” after a feature article on building with straw in Mother Earth News in 1993 recommended the Steens’ booklet, “Plastered Straw Bale Construction.” The workshops, sometimes offered multiple times in a year and nearly always oversubscribed, were intensive affairs requiring lots of logistical support that also afforded the participants a rich cultural experience, as people from all over the world took part.
The recession of 2008 greatly reduced the demand for the straw bale workshops, a not entirely unwelcome development for this creative couple, as it has allowed them to spend more time pursuing other interests. They now do more off-site workshops and lectures, including regular treks to Mexico, Europe and other countries. Athena loves that they are the ones being taken care of when they travel to teach instead of their having to handle all the logistics. They’re also doing more writing and publishing and have done artwork for such entities as the National Botanical Gardens, Denver Art Museum and the National Museum of the American Indian, where they collaborated with Athena’s aunt Nora Naranjo Morse to create ephemeral earthen sculptures on the grounds of the museum.
Steeped in the traditions of their Native American and Mexican heritages, the Steens have a strong connection to the Rio Sonora region of Mexico where Bill has ancestral roots and whose residents continue to teach Bill and Athena and their workshop participants their traditional ways of living. One of the manifestations of the Steens’ passion for tradition is their longstanding interest in promoting the agave as a life-sustaining native plant that is both underappreciated as a source of nutrition and in need of protection.
A visit to the Canelo Project is an opportunity to immerse oneself in creativity, simplicity, functional sustainability and the peace and tranquility of the Canelo Hills. The Steens invite you to take in one of their regularly scheduled tours, or to stay overnight as a B&B guest where you will be nourished by another of the Steens’ many talents – great southwest cooking. Go to caneloproject.com for more information.