What Is an Adobe House? (Short Answer: A Lot More Than You Might Think)
Photo: JayKay57/Getty Images
An adobe house may evoke images of the Southwest, serapes, and the twangy keening of an Ennio Morricone soundtrack for many Americans. But there’s more to it than just this picture. In fact, the historical construction technique, which is notable for its use of natural materials, is regaining popularity as would-be homeowners look for building techniques that result not only with unique-looking homes, but with a bevy of other benefits too.
Still, it begs the question: What is an adobe home exactly? Below, AD speaks with two experts on adobe buildings, Francisco Uviña-Contreras, director for the Historic Preservation and Regionalism Graduate Certificate program and assistant professor at the School of Architecture and Planning at the University of New Mexico, and Sue Ann Pemberton, professor of practice at the School of Architecture + Planning at the University of Texas at San Antonio and fellow at the American Institute of Architects and the Association for Preservation Technology International. Here, they break down everything you need to know about this storied architectural tradition.
What is an adobe building?
Adobe isn’t the name of a specific architectural style, but rather a descriptor for structures constructed using a unique building technique and a specific material—namely adobe bricks, or blocks.
A red plum tree blooms next to an abandoned adobe house
Adobe is a type of earthwork construction, meaning it involves using raw earth, whether soil or rocks, to form a structure. It’s related closely to cob, wattle and daub, and rammed earth, but it’s distinguished from them by relying on the use of blocks, which are stacked up in the same way you’d use bricks in the kinds of stick-frame homes most Americans are used to.
These earthwork construction techniques “follow the same basic principles, but the ingredients vary slightly,” Pemberton adds. “Adobe just happens to have a shape before it’s put into a wall.”
How are adobe blocks made?
Because adobe typically uses materials local to the site, the exact makeup of the blocks vary.
“It’s 25, 30, or 35% clay, depending on the clay,” Uviña-Contreras explains. “The rest can be silt, gravel, small rocks—you can put almost anything in there, [but] you need good distribution of the sands or grains.”
Another important ingredient is some sort of fiber, typically chopped-up straw but also possibly pine needles, cow dung, or other materials, depending on where you’re building. The fiber isn’t there to add structural strength to the block, as many mistakenly believe, but to help the adobe dry more uniformly and prevent them from curling or cracking.
The mixture is tamped into typically wooden coffers and then dried in the sun for two to four weeks—unlike the fired bricks most Americans are familiar with, which are also a clay mixture but kiln-dried instead of sun-dried. Since the 1930s, the standard size for an adobe block in the US regions where adobe construction is more prevalent, including New Mexico and Texas, has been 4 inches by 10 inches by 14 inches. The resultant dried adobe block is notably strong, with great compressive strength.
Additionally, there are manufactured, factory-made adobe blocks, usually called semistabilized adobe, that are made using an asphalt emulsion or other modern materials. However, neither of our experts recommended them, as they reduce the insulating qualities of adobe, increase the project’s carbon footprint, and don’t work well with existing adobe structures—you can’t, for example, use them for preservation of historic adobe buildings or to add onto traditional adobe homes. “It’s a completely different way of building,” Uviña-Contreras says.
History of adobe houses
Adobe has been around for thousands of years and is among the earliest building techniques known to man. Possibly the oldest remnants of adobe structures discovered so far were in the Peruvian Andes, built 5,100 to 5,500 years ago.
Luxor West Bank above
Though Americans tend to think of adobe as a Southwestern or Spanish Colonial style of building, the technique has been a worldwide phenomenon for much of human history, and it’s equally at home in Asia, Africa, Europe, South America, and the Middle East as in Arizona. The oldest adobe building that is still standing is near Luxor, Egypt, the granaries of Ramesseum, which are believed to have been built by Ramses II around 1300 B.C.E.
How are adobe buildings made and maintained?
As previously stated, adobe is a building material, not a particular architectural style, so a lot depends on what kind of home you’re building—an adobe building doesn’t have to be Pueblo Revival or Santa Fe–style. There are, however, general rules about what you’re allowed to do if you’re building a modern adobe home from scratch. Though older adobe structures include large castles and 40-foot Spanish missions, for example, New Mexico is currently the only US state that allows for new two-story adobe structures, and even then only under certain conditions, Uviña-Contreras says.
“If you want a two-story [home], you need a 24-inch wall at the base,” he explains. In addition, the residence is normally built on a rubble foundation. This ensures the adobe blocks are “out of groundwater, so they’re not sucking moisture from the earth,” Pemberton adds. “A concrete foundation is fine, but you’ll have to tie [the foundation and adobe walls] together with vertical rebar.”
Native American Pueblo facade, detail, Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA
For the mortar bonding the bricks together, you must use similar earthen materials, like mud. “You don’t want to use any cement,” Pemberton says. “You have to have earth to earth so they will bond.” In addition, adobe houses must be coated in a protective layer like a limewash—again, never cement, which won’t stick or work well with the mud bricks. That means you can’t have stucco, which is made with cement.
Just like any structure, an adobe home must be regularly inspected and maintained, and the limewash repeated every few years.
Pros of adobe houses
There are a lot of reasons to consider an adobe home, from being insect-resistant to the “feeling of permanence that makes it more cozy, almost like it’s wrapping its arms around you,” according to Pemberton. “They’re energy-efficient, natural, impact-resistant, fire-safe, the material is reusable, and there’s low to zero carbon emissions from the adobe—it doesn’t take gas or electricity to make it; making concrete does,” she adds.
Plus adobe buildings have high thermal mass, another term for its ability to absorb, store, and release heat. “The sun warms the outside wall by day, and as the night cools down, it forces the heat into the interior,” Pemberton explains. “It reverses by day—the heat pushes the cool to the interior. You use the thermal mass to your advantage.”
She has worked on adobe structures that include a Trombe wall, which is an interior wall placed where it gets direct sunlight that it can absorb during the day to create a source of warmth at night.
“The adobe walls will absorb the heat and radiate it back,” Uviña-Contreras adds. “Here in New Mexico, we’re the masters of passive solar, and we’ve been doing it for centuries.”
Cons of adobe houses
Of course, there are drawbacks too. You have to take special consideration for the climate, especially when it’s wet. “It’s not right for areas where you get a lot of rain,” Pemberton says. As Uviña-Contreras adds, “moisture is the number one enemy of adobe.”
Additionally, it takes much longer to build an adobe home compared to other construction techniques. Electrical wiring, for example, has to be carefully planned out and go in PVC tubing, not metal, which will quickly deteriorate in the inherent moistness deep inside the adobe.
“You can go to the lumberyard and do a stick frame and have it built in two or three months,” Pemberton says. “Adobe could take you a year and a half.”
Southwestern Luxury Home, Albuquerque, New Mexico
Even seemingly minor tasks like hanging a picture or flatscreen TV can take on a whole new dimension with adobe walls, Uviña-Contreras notes. That can require putting in so-called gringo blocks, chunks of wood you stick into a whole you’ve drilled out of the adobe wall with a masonry bit. You hammer a nail into that wood and then hang your painting from that.
The biggest obstacle for many is the cost. Though materials are, on paper, free if you own the land, the lack of qualified adobe construction specialists mean you pay a labor premium to build adobe homes. Pemberton says that, in Texas, compared to traditional stick-frame homes, where the labor makes up perhaps 30% of the cost, the labor in adobe construction represents closer to half of your costs.
In Albuquerque, New Mexico, according to Uviña-Contreras, a 2,000-square-foot home might cost $250,000 to build. An adobe home of the same size, built by a contractor who knows what they’re doing, would cost $350,000 to $400,000. “And that’s assuming the interior of the house is framed, not just adobe,” he adds.
Finally, Uviña-Contreras points out, adobe has great compressive strength, meaning it’s good at holding stuff up but is weaker at handling tension—it tends to crack or deform when it’s pulled or twisted, though Pemberton notes that adobe’s not as brittle as concrete. That’s something to consider if you live in an earthquake-prone region.
Do you have to be in a dry climate to have an adobe home?
“You can build with adobe anywhere you want in the world,” Uviña-Contreras confirms.
That said, if you live in an area with lots of flooding, you need higher foundations. Still, it’s important to keep in mind that a little moisture in the adobe core is actually healthy. So you may find yourself actually trying to add a little humidity to the home.
“Grandma used to put a pot of water over the wood stove to bring moisture into the house,” Uviña-Contreras says of his grandmother, who had an adobe home in arid Mexico.
Notable adobe houses
Though Americans tend to think mostly of the Pueblo Revival style of architecture when thinking of adobe construction, adobe architecture has spanned millennia, and adobe buildings have been around long before many of the buildings you see in California, Texas, or the Southwest. The multistory adobe houses of the Taos Pueblo in New Mexico, for example, are between 600 and 1,000 years old, and are still home to thousands or people.
Taos Pueblo Village
In the 1930s, the Works Progress Administration built a large number of public buildings with adobe blocks in Albuquerque and in what’s now the White Sands Historic District in Alamogordo, New Mexico, and most of them still stand today.
Pemberton says perhaps her favorite adobe structure of all is the Great Mosque of Djenné in Mali.
Grand Mosque of Djenne
Frequently Asked Questions
How long do adobe houses last?
Adobe structures have stood for millennia. If you maintain your adobe home properly and regularly, then it could last for several generations.
How much do adobe houses cost?
Though the materials to build an adobe house can be anywhere from cheap to free if you’re making the blocks on site, the labor costs will be prohibitive for many. Don’t be surprised if labor takes up half or more of your project budget or if your costs run four times or more what a stick-frame would cost you. Furthermore, you have to factor in the fact that adobe buildings can take four times or longer to complete, adding to your costs.
Do adobe houses stay warm?
Adobe walls have a high thermal mass, meaning they readily absorb heat by day and release it inside at night, keeping the home warm at night and cool by day.
Are adobe structures vulnerable to earthquakes?
Adobe walls are good at compression but can be prone to cracking under the twisting, pulling pressure an earthquake puts it under. That said, adobe is still more flexible than concrete, and adobe builders have been been working on solutions for centuries, including building with meter-thick walls, double walls or flexible walls, or using a combination of adobe and wattle-and-daub techniques to try to make earthquake-proof adobe structures.
Originally Appeared on Architectural Digest
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