Peter van Dresser — “The Future Came to El Rito in 1949”

Peter van Dresser’s story connects El Rito to the beginnings of American rocketry, science fiction, solar architecture, wind power, ecological planning, the back-to-the-land movement, Ghost Ranch, and the modern idea of sustainable communities.

More importantly, El Rito was not simply where van Dresser retired or happened to live. The evidence increasingly suggests that he regarded the village and the surrounding northern New Mexico uplands as a real-world laboratory for an alternative future.

Before El Rito: From rockets to a rejection of “progress”

Peter Hendrick van Dresser came from a remarkably different world. Born in New York City, he became involved during the 1930s with the fledgling American rocket movement, serving as an editor of Astronautics, the journal of the American Rocket Society, and participating in the society's experimental work. He also wrote science fiction; his first published story, “South Polar Beryllium, Limited,” appeared in Amazing Stories in August 1930, followed by stories dealing with rockets, spaceflight and technological futures.

At the same time, however, van Dresser was becoming deeply suspicious of the kind of technological future America was building.

He was involved with the Decentralist movement of the 1930s, which argued against enormous cities, concentrated industry and economic systems that made communities dependent upon distant corporations and governments. Van Dresser gradually moved away from rocketry as it became increasingly connected to military development. What fascinated him instead was a very different question:

Could sophisticated scientific knowledge be used to make small communities more independent rather than less independent?

That question eventually brought him to El Rito.

In Florida during the 1930s and 1940s, van Dresser became interested in solar water heating, which was already a surprisingly mature technology. He later visited the experimental solar work of scientist Maria Telkes in Massachusetts. By the time he headed west, he was thinking about solar energy not merely as a gadget but as part of an entirely different way of living.

1949: Why El Rito?

Van Dresser himself later gave an unusually revealing explanation.

He said he and his wife Florence came to New Mexico in 1949 because he believed that the Southwest still preserved “old human values” that industrial America was losing. He described himself, strikingly, as “a kind of refugee.”

Van Dresser was not looking for an empty landscape in which he could impose a futuristic experiment. He was attracted precisely because places such as El Rito already possessed characteristics that he believed modern America desperately needed: extended families, local agriculture, traditional building materials, small-scale economics, community cooperation, irrigation systems, practical craftsmanship and a relationship between settlement and landscape.

In other words, he did not believe the future required El Rito to become more like Albuquerque or Los Angeles.

He thought America might need to become more like El Rito.

The strange house outside El Rito

1949 — construction begins.
1952 — house, wind installation and homestead development still underway.
1954 — house still described by an eyewitness as unfinished.

By the later 1950s — van Dresser regarded it as his first completed experimental solar/wind dwelling.
TheAIA Journal reported in 1974 that:

“In 1949, van Dresser began a ‘bio-technical’ house in El Rito…”

A 1975 Mother Earth News profile went further. It published a photograph of what it described as van Dresser's first solar-heated house, dating its construction to 1949 or 1950. .

This was not a sleek Jet Age house.

It was built largely from native stone and timber.

But around that traditional structure van Dresser assembled an experimental energy system that must have looked astonishing in rural Rio Arriba County in 1949.

There was a solar-air collector outside the house. Heated air traveled through underground ducts toward the building. Behind the house stood a Jacobs wind-driven generator. A small room protruding from the roof—which from a distance resembles a dormer—actually housed the batteries for the home's independent electrical system.

Imagine what that meant in 1949.

This was nearly a quarter century before the 1973 oil crisis made alternative energy a national concern. Photovoltaic panels had not yet become consumer technology. “Sustainability” had not entered the everyday vocabulary. Earth Day was still twenty-one years away.

And outside El Rito, Peter van Dresser was experimenting with sun, wind, batteries, local materials and independent electrical generation.

That makes the title “The Future Came to El Rito in 1949” particularly appropriate.

And it didn't entirely work

This is actually one of the best parts of the story.

Van Dresser did not later pretend that his experiment had been perfect.

The solar collector was positioned too far from the house. Its panels were vertical when they should have been inclined toward the winter sun. Some of the solar design was apparently never fully realized. Van Dresser later laughed about his mistakes, saying essentially that the first house taught him what not to do.

That makes the house historically more interesting, not less.

It was a prototype.

Van Dresser took what he learned in El Rito and applied it to a later solar house in Santa Fe. That 1958 house operated successfully for years and eventually became well known among solar designers. The apparent contradiction in the sources—some later accounts call the Santa Fe building his “first solar-heated house”—probably reflects the fact that the El Rito building was an incomplete experimental system while the Santa Fe house became his first consistently successful one. The exhibit should therefore call the 1949–50 El Rito structure his first experimental “biotechnic” solar-and-wind house, rather than claiming it was his first successful solar home.

The experiment extended beyond the house

Van Dresser's idea of sustainability was much broader than energy.

After arriving in El Rito, Peter and Florence opened a small restaurant. He later said that they tried to serve locally produced foods whenever possible.

That sounds almost commonplace today: farm-to-table food, reduced transportation, local purchasing.

It was not commonplace in 1949.

To van Dresser, the restaurant and the solar house were actually expressions of the same principle. A community dependent on distant sources for its food, fuel, manufactured goods and employment would eventually lose control over its future.

A later resident, David Robertson, remembered that Peter and Florence still owned the El Rito restaurant in 1970. Robertson and another young worker occasionally operated it for them.

El Rito became his laboratory

Van Dresser eventually described his work as operating on several levels.

At the smallest level was his own household: shelter, food, energy and economic survival.

Then came El Rito and northern New Mexico.

Then came state and regional planning.

Over the next twenty years he began asking whether the principles he was experimenting with personally could be applied to whole northern New Mexico communities.

This became what he called the “biotechnic” approach.

The word sounds futuristic, but the idea was surprisingly grounded. Instead of destroying traditional communities in the name of modernization, van Dresser believed modern scientific knowledge could reinforce them.

Adobe could be combined with solar engineering.

Acequia agriculture could be combined with better soil and water science.

Forests could provide employment without being exhausted.

Local crops could be processed locally instead of shipped away as raw materials.

Young people could acquire modern technical skills without necessarily leaving their villages.

Economic development could occur without converting northern New Mexico into another urban-industrial corridor.

This thinking culminated in his 1972 book A Landscape for Humans: A Case Study of the Potentials for Ecologically Guided Development in an Uplands Region.

And look at the copyright line:

Peter van Dresser — El Rito, New Mexico.

Portions of the research had been assembled while he worked under contract with the New Mexico Office of Economic Opportunity.

The “uplands” he was writing about were not theoretical. They were the communities and landscapes surrounding him.

El Rito's traditional landscape changed his thinking

The same things we have been documenting—acequias, plazas, small farms, family lands, adobe construction and community water management—were precisely what fascinated him.

There is even a tantalizing physical trace in later water records: Van Dresser East Ditch and Van Dresser West Ditch appear among the El Rito irrigation features. The records should not be interpreted to mean Peter created those ditches in 1900; obviously he did not. But their later association with the van Dresser property shows how thoroughly Peter and Florence became connected to El Rito's agricultural landscape.

This is significant because van Dresser was not advocating a futuristic landscape of glass domes and machines.

His future still had acequias.

It still had adobe.

It still had gardens.

It still had locally owned businesses.

It still had people building things with their own hands.

Technology was supposed to serve that world—not replace it.

The “biotechnicians” of El Rito

By the late 1960s and early 1970s, van Dresser had begun attracting younger people interested in solar construction, ecology and alternative living.

David Robertson recalled coming to El Rito in 1970 and living in van Dresser's solar house in Potrero Canyon north of the village. Young people working for Peter jokingly called themselves “biotechnicians.” They sometimes traveled between Potrero and the village on van Dresser's tractor.

Architect Robert Nicolais independently remembers working for van Dresser for several years in El Rito on projects involving solar design and what he calls “energy consciousness.” Nicolais subsequently built his own adobe structure in the area and taught at Northern New Mexico Community College.

So El Rito appears to have become something resembling an informal school of sustainable building.