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Sustainable Resilient Building [1]
['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']
Date: 2025-02-21
My son and I have been talking about sustainable and affordable building techniques and materials to adapt to climate change and market disruptions. Just playing with the ideas, as neither of us are builders.
I grew up in Santa Fe with a long tradition of building adobe houses. Adobe makes perfect sense there because the only materials for your walls are just dirt and water. It is a dry climate, and a foot-thick adobe wall helps maintain a comfortable temperature inside the building. Maybe this is the way forward. Being just dried mud, adobe cannot burn. It doesn't require shipping materials from elsewhere. The carbon footprint of an adobe brick is almost zero.
How resilient is adobe? Taos pueblo is a four-story adobe structure nearly 1000 years old (800 to 1100 years depending on who you ask) that has been continually in use and stood the test of time.
How unique can an adobe structure be? Dar al-Islam in Abiquiú is an adobe structure in northern NM designed by an architect from Egypt and built by a friend of our family. It is all adobe--completely self-supporting arches, vaults, and domes without any wood, steel, concrete, or any other structural material holding up the roof. Nothing but dried mud in the structure. Check out the Architectural Review story, “Revisit: Dar al Islam centre in Abiquiú, United States by Hassan Fathy”. Click through the slideshow of images at the top of the article and marvel at how much light and warmth is let into the structure and how inviting the space seems.
The photo at the head of this diary is a Google Street View image of a house my father built in 1989. We used a compressed-earth adobe machine that compressed dirt into a brick sized mold at 240,000 psi. The bricks were 10" x 14" by 3 1/2" and weighed 45 lbs each. The machine created 14 bricks per minute, and my teenage job was grabbing them off the conveyor belt and stacking them on pallets. After I loaded up the pallets, we’d forklift them into place and the whole crew would start laying them to build the walls, mortared together with a mud slurry. A crew of 6 built the house from first shovel in the ground to finished move-in in just 3 months. It was a beautiful 4,000 square foot, 3 bedroom house with the living room custom designed to hold the owner's art collection. The Street View image is recent and the house still looks like that today. I love being able to look at that picture and say "I built that!"
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