The 'Foundation House' experimental housing masterplan is sited in California City, a half built complex of roads and infrastructure located in Southern California. Set to rival Los Angeles, a sprawling grid of roads were laid across the desert landscape ready for California City to grow in the 1970s. The plots were sold but the houses were never built, leaving a ghost city grid like a geoglyph in the Mojave desert.

The project questions how a new experimental housing typology could restart the economy of California City through the use of boron as a building material and experimental forms of construction that are influenced by mining processes. The typology seeks to become a new house building mechanism for populating California City, where the construction and firing of materials for one home generates the materials to begin constructing the next.