Bernalillo County hosts binational adobe workshop

Sep. 19—Beneath the arms of aged trees outside of the Gutiérrez-Hubbell House in Albuquerque's South Valley on Tuesday, men and women in broad-brimmed hats knelt and pressed a clay, sand and straw mixture with their fists into a wooden frame. Once the mud mixture was packed tight, a man lifted the wooden frame with a wiggle, leaving behind a pair of adobe bricks.

After a day in the sun, the bricks will be firm enough to set on end to continue drying.

"Beautiful," a woman said as the frame pulled free.

"Nice," said Jake Barrow. He was teaching the group, many of whom are national park rangers or preservationists, how to make adobe bricks. He looked prepared to work, with kneepads, a straw hat, large sunglasses and a blue bandana tied around his neck.

Adobe. Spanish for "mud brick" and one of the earliest building materials, it's still inside the walls of many New Mexico homes and churches. Historic sites like the Gutiérrez-Hubbell House are examples of adobe architecture.

Tuesday's brick-making class was part of the Taller Internacional de Conservación y Restauración de Arquitectura de Tierra or TICRAT, a binational adobe workshop series that began in the 1990s in Chihuahua, Mexico. The U.S. National Park Service and Mexico's Institutio Nacional de Antropología e Historia (National Institute of Anthropology and History) partner on the event. The workshops were hosted by Bernalillo County at the Gutiérrez-Hubbell House for the first time this year.

The TICRAT started under a different name with a focus on offering adobe seminars to professionals, but it has evolved to be a hands-on experience according to Francisco Uviña, who has been to more than 30 of the at least 50 adobe workshops that have been held over the decades. On Tuesday, Uviña was teaching a small group how to evaluate soil quality.

The workshops are about keeping earthen architecture techniques alive, said David Ottaviano, cultural and historic resources specialist at the Gutiérrez-Hubbell House, and about celebrating the shared history and culture between the U.S. and Mexico. The four-day TICRAT had 73 students and 10 trainers, who came from Mexico and the U.S.

A $50,000 grant from the National Parks Service and the Southwest Border Protection Program helped pay for this year's workshop series.

So many New Mexicans grew up building homes with adobe bricks, Barrow told his students. He works for Cornerstones, a nonprofit that helps communities preserve historic structures and encourages traditional building practices.

Before the adobe mix was shoveled into the wooden frame, the class started with dark clay in a wheelbarrow, then added straw and sand, until the adobe seemed like the right consistency. Class attendees used hoes to pull the mixture back and forth across the wheelbarrow bottom, mixing in the straw and sand.

"You want a high clay concentration?" a student asked.

"As much clay as you can get before cracking," Barrow told the class.

After bricks are released from the wooden frame, the frame is washed in a plastic barrel, so that it will be ready to shape another set.

Some people use lime, asphalt emulsions, polymers or cement to stabilize and add durability to their adobe bricks, Barrow said, but he discourages inorganic materials. In Mexico, people use a nopal, prickly pear cactus, juice to prevent erosion.

Adobe bricks are heavy and durable. Barrow's class was making 35- to 40-pound bricks. The material also holds up well as long as it stays dry underneath a well-kept layer of mud plaster.

While adobe is an ancient building technique, it can respond to contemporary problems, according to Barrow, like the need for low-cost housing, fire-resistant housing and green building materials. Adobe provides passive solar, because it absorbs heat during the day and releases it slowly at night, keeping homes warm when High Desert temperatures drop.

Along with making bricks, the workshop attendees learned how to evaluate soil, repair adobe, assess the causes of adobe deterioration, construct an adobe wall, apply mud plaster, stitch structural cracks and apply lime pigments.

The workshop series wrapped up Thursday with field trips to Old Town, Casa San Ysidro and one of the last commercial adobe brickmakers in New Mexico, New Mexico Earth Adobes in Northwest Albuquerque.

Although the workshop series officially came to a close, the community can still get its hands dirty with free adobe making for adults and for kids taught by some of the workshop trainers at the Gutiérrez-Hubbell House from 9:30 a.m.-noon on Saturday.