Bacchus
Caves: This
company creates extensive caverns for commercial
wineries and even cozy amenities (such as a wine cellar,
music studio, or elegant entertainment venue) for
individuals.
Beckham Creek
Cave House: This photo-filled site
showcases a palatial underground vacation getaway in rural
Arkansas.
BioHome: See construction
guidelines for environmentally friendly underground dome
homes.
Castles
in the Ground offers custom-built underground and
earth-sheltered homes. See their website for general information and
sample sketches.
Cavern Technologies, located
125 feet underground in a former Kansas City limestone mine, offers
consulting, colocation, and disaster recovery
services.
Davis Caves
Construction: This company has been
building earth-sheltered homes since 1977. It offers general
information on earth-sheltered construction, the current issue of
"Earth Sheltered News," construction photos and descriptions, and an
FAQ page.
DJB
Architects: Award-winning underground
buildings designed by David J. Bennett, FAIA, have showcased some
innovative concepts in natural lighting.
Dobson House Bed & Breakfast: If you're curious about life in an Earthship, try
spending a night or two in a B&B suite just outside of Taos, New
Mexico.
Earth
House: Focusing primarily on residential
properties, this site contains a broad range of information
including listings of homes for sale.
Earth Log
Equity Group: This company has been designing and building
earth-sheltered homes throughout the United States and Canada since
1989, and their web site has lots of information about earth
sheltering, including home plans, photos, pricing, and financing
information.
Earth Sheltered Technology, Inc: This site offers information, plan drawings, and
photographs of earth-sheltered homes, including cost estimates for
building various designs in the District of Columbia and each state
of the USA.
Formworks Building, Inc.:
Dale Pearcey, founder of Formworks, has been building "affordable,
beautiful, disaster-proof" NestEgg homes underground since the
1970s.
Gerald
Fitzpatrick's ongoing renovation of an Atlas F missile base
in Champlain, New York.
Geodesic
Earthworks offers kits for building earth-sheltered homes based
on the geodesic dome concept.
Greenbrier Bunker: Take a
virtual tour of the once-secret bunker built as a refuge for the
U.S. Congress in case of a nuclear attack.
HGTV: Home and Garden
Television occasionally features underground houses on its
Extreme Homes program. In January 2003 it also introduced a
special program called Subterraneans, which featured seven
underground houses in various parts of the United States. This
link takes you to a summary of the program, including
photographs and descriptions.
Hunt
Midwest SubTropolis: This home page
for one of the world's largest underground business complexes
describes the advantages of its location in a former limestone mine.
The site's photo tour gives a sense of the atmosphere 100 feet below
the surface in this 400-acre industrial park.
Improving
Earth Sheltered Homes -- Rocky Mountain Research Center: Passive
Annual Heat Storage (PAHS) informational materials (from the
inventor of PAHS) enable both underground and earth-bermed buildings
to be designed to self-maintain a year-round comfortable temperature
passively. The materials also show how to deal with water control
problems effectively.
Jackson House Cave is
a lovely place to try out earth-sheltered living. It is located in
Alton, Illinois, across the Mississippi River from St. Louis,
Missouri.
Louisville Underground,
another limestone mine transformed into a business/industrial park,
is fine-tuning its mined-out space by recycling other people's
excavation materials to bring ceiling heights to a desired 23
feet
Magorian Mine
Services builds wine caves in California.
Making Wright Right: Bill
Taylor’s well-documented site describes how he meticulously restored
Frank Lloyd Wright’s partially underground "Solar Hemicycle" house,
which is also known as the Jacobs II home.
Malcolm
Wells: Meet the guru of underground
architecture in the United States. He may seem eccentric, but it’s
all tongue-in-cheek. All, that is, except the basic
message.
Moscone Center: Trade shows,
conferences, and banquets take place practically unnoticed under
street-level gardens and recreational venues in the heart of San
Francisco. This site describes, verbally and visually, the original
convention center, completed in 1981, and subsequent
additions.
Our Cool
House: This is a very informative site describing the
construction and operation of an earth-sheltered house in Maryland.
It uses passive solar heating and cooling, supplemented when
necessary by a geothermal system. There's lots of great information
here, plus links and references.
Scottish Architecture:
"Although most of us spend more than 90 per cent of
our time in or around buildings and structures - even in rural
areas, and on holiday - it is remarkable the degree to which we may
fail to recognise how the built environment affects and colours our
daily lives." This site showcases innovative architecture in
Scotland and includes wide-ranging discussions of the built
environment.
Space Center Independence:
This site describes one of the largest underground industrial parks
in the world: 4.4 million square feet of office, warehouse, and
light-manufacturing space in a Missouri limestone mine.
Subterranea
Britannica: Read about "man-made and man-used underground
places" throughout the UK.
Terra-Dome
Corporation: This company, which calls
itself "America's leader in earth-sheltered buildings since 1979,"
designs and builds modular underground structures with flat walls
and shallow, arched ceilings.
Twentieth
Century Castles: Looking for an
underground building for your business or your home? A former
missile silo just might be the right place.
Umbrella
Homes: John Hait shares his experience with underground home
construction and natural temperature control.
Underground Atlanta: Downtown
Atlanta didn’t start off being underground, but urban development
placed it there.
Underground
Homes: Sample plans and construction photos from an Ohio
architect who has been building underground houses since the 1970s.
Much of the site's material looks dated, but the architect says he's
still designing subsurface homes today.
Wabasha Street Caves: Take an
entertaining tour, or book a special event, in a former speakeasy
that is really underground in St. Paul, Minnesota.
Wine
Cave Building: An experienced geologist tells how to avoid
pitfalls when building a wine cave.