The process of building and firing such houses was developed by Iranian architect Nader Khalili in the late 1970s; he named it Geltaftan.
While there, Khalili observed how the oldest buildings around were the village kilns, and that their durability came from the fact that the adobe bricks they were made from had been fired in the pottery making process, and therefore hardened.
In 1978, Khalili with a kiln specialist, rehabilitated twelve houses in the village of Ghaled Mofid in a rural area outside Tehran, Iran.
In 1984 Khalili, who had moved to California by that time, proposed to NASA that ceramic houses be built on the moon.
Experiments were conducted by Khalili at McDonnell Douglas Space Systems laboratories to show how harnessing the sun could melt and fuse lunar soil into shapes and forms for building applications.
A full-scale model of the proposed colony was intended to be built in the desert outside of Hesperia, CA, where Khalili established his training school: the Cal-Earth Institute.
The Geltaftan Foundation, and Cal-Earth has since carried on experiments with ceramic housing, but Nader Khalili is most noted today for his work developing Super Adobe: an earth building technique using earth-filled bags as structural elements.
The earth used for building ceramic houses is essentially a type of adobe with a higher clay content and fewer impurities.
The earth and water are mixed until the substance has "the consistency of bread dough"[3] The clay/earth mixture is worked into forms, and the blocks dry over a period of one to two weeks.
[4] The primary shapes of a ceramic building, are squares and rectangles with roofs that are arches, vaults, and domes.
This is in order to construct the entire structure of monolithic material (cost effectiveness) and also to achieve the tremor resistance and proven longevity of a shell membrane.
Adobe and clay can be sculpted into built-in forms and structures, such as seats and shelving, and fired with the rest of the house.