The Adobe Revival Is Here

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.

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.