It looked like a bucket brigade in the desert: a line of adobe builders passing 35-pound sun-dried bricks from one person to the next, hoisting them onto a scaffolding deck and setting them into the western wall of a house made of mud. The labor continued for hours on a dusty lot of a small college campus in northern New Mexico. It was hard work: more grueling than a daylong boot camp at your local gym. But no one here was complaining. “It’s therapeutic,” says Stephanie Camfield, a clinical social worker whose unofficial job on the project is “mix master,” creating a mortar of clay, sand, and water that spun like bread dough inside a giant KitchenAid. “It’s about community and rhythm, feeling the sun move across the sky.”
In 2010, Smithsonian Magazine predicted the revival of adobe construction, when it listed mud building as Number One among the “40 things you need to know about the next 40 years.” Today, that prediction is coming true—largely because adobe construction isn’t only energy efficient and locally sustainable; it’s fireproof. “It’s a renewable resource, it’s a gift from the mountains,” says Jake Barrow, a historic preservationist who oversees the adobe demonstration house now under construction. The work is being done under the auspices of Cornerstones, a Santa Fe nonprofit that helps communities preserve their historic structures and keep traditional building methods alive.
Scaffolding is added to an adobe structure, the focus of a recent workshop by New Mexico nonprofit Cornerstones.
The 850-square-foot house on the edge of a struggling town in rural New Mexico—the Las Vegas you’ve never heard of—is a showcase for adobe in a burning world. In recent years, architects, engineers, and policy wonks from the likes of New Zealand, Australia, Germany, Saudi Arabia, and Syria have descended on New Mexico to study the revival of traditional earthen architecture. In exchange, they share the innovations that are emerging in their corners of the globe.
The use of earth as a building material is as old as civilization. Its construction was traditionally a communal experience, with family and friends engaged in the making of bricks, the raising of walls and rafters (called vigas in the Southwest), and the singular skill of applying the plaster — a task typically left to women known as enjaradoras. Though Americans recognize the style as quintessential to the desert Southwest and the missions of California, there is not an inhabited part of the world without a history of earthen construction. Germany’s stringent building codes now allow for up to six-story adobe buildings; schools, office buildings, and apartment buildings are rising from bricks made solely of mud and sand. The country’s standards—all 250 pages—have been translated into English, due to overwhelming international interest, and will be available this summer.
Until recently, California effectively banned adobe construction due to the risk of earthquakes. That longstanding policy now faces growing scrutiny: After 16,000 homes, buildings, and schools in Los Angeles burned to the ground in January, some property owners are looking to rebuild with fire-resistant materials. In response, officials have signaled a cautious openness to adobe, which, when exposed to intense heat, vitrifies and becomes firebrick.
A formwork of adobe bricks lays in the sun to dry. A student working on the house pours water into cracks to seal the bricks.
Another student trowels mud across a brick before placing another one, which will be leveled to the height of the pink string.
Ben Loescher, a Los Angeles architect, has been working to change the nation’s building codes since 2008. Two years ago, he obtained a permit for a legal adobe house in Pioneertown, a high desert community in San Bernardino County that was originally developed as an 1880s movie set for Hollywood Westerns. “Now I’m concentrating on changing the codes and building up the ecosystem,” says Loescher. “My end goal is not to build adobe homes per se, but to make it so everyone can do it.”
Demand is such that he now fields a weekly call with 20 architects, engineers, and contractors across California and the Southwest, all of whom are poised to take advantage of Los Angeles’s quest to rebuild. Jim Hallock, a Texas contractor, is one of them. “I would be dumbfounded if they ever let anyone build out of wood in Los Angeles anymore,” says Hallock, who has already begun moving two hydraulic presses, a mixer, rollers, and block machines to Southern California. “We’re not fire resistant, we’re fire proof. You can’t burn an earth block.”
There are other benefits. To hear evangelists tell it, there’s a sense of being embraced by the elements in an adobe house. The air is sweet; the thick walls breathe, keeping the house cool in summer and warm in winter. Lisa Morey of Nova Terra, an earthen masonry manufacturer in Colorado, recalls the first time she ever slept inside an adobe house in New Zealand. “I still love the simplicity of it,” she says. “I liken it to wines that are made in certain vineyards. The bricks will have slightly different colors. My bricks are more peachy tan, because of the red clay soil here.”
“My end goal is not to build adobe homes per se, but to make it so everyone can do it.”
—Ben Loescher, architect
Morey’s business today is as much about education as production. She owns a lot filled with enough mixers and compressors to produce half a million mud blocks a year. Her company, a start-up, is already shipping blocks to Utah, Missouri, California and beyond. She says she recently fielded inquiries from a national insurance company, curious to hear about adobe’s fire-resistant quality.
In times of disaster and uncertainty, there’s always been a renewal of interest in earthen construction, according to Ronald Rael, a visual artist and architect at the University of California Berkeley. Rael is the author of several books on adobe houses; his website, eartharchitecture.org, is regarded as a clearing house for information about earth building. “We as human beings invented this construction 10,000 years ago and it’s still responsive today,” says Rael, who produces adobe extrusions from a 3D printer. He likens the process to squeezing mud out of a tube of toothpaste: “I’m skipping the entire mud brick making process, which can take up to weeks or months. I’m going straight to wall construction.” In March, he created Adobe Oasis, an art installation of ribbed earthen passageways—adobe walls that are 10-inches thick—at Desert X, an outdoor exhibition of contemporary art in California’s Coachella Valley.
A traditional technique, stacking bricks this way allows them to dry properly, and if it rains, lets water naturally run off.
Forty miles away, one of Ben Loescher’s clients is singlehandedly building the first permitted adobe house to rise in California since 2008. To make his dream happen, Rex Edhlund, 60, a former publisher and graphic designer from San Diego, is erecting a 900-square-foot house out of 7,500 bricks—with his own hands. Even so, he says, the most challenging part of the project was getting the approval from San Bernardino County. It took him and Loescher 17 months to get the permit approval. When it came, the onetime publisher still wasn’t able to obtain a mortgage. “This ancient construction is considered cutting edge so I couldn’t get a construction loan,” he laughs.
“I ended up being the test-pilot on what is the first fully-permitted, legal adobe in San Bernardino County in years,” Edhlund says. “It changed my life in many, many ways. Now, I’m hand-building the house. And the building is going to be the easy part.”
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