![]() ![]() ![]() On the front of a house owned by Michael Camacho and Mallory Jones hangs a single strand of Christmas lights and blue-and-white posters emblazoned with the image of a cowboy-hatted man holding a large brick. Michael Camacho and Mallory Jones with their sons, Gabriel and Lionel, at their home in Marfa in August. Yet despite those obstacles, some folks who really want to live here have turned to adobe’s old tradition and the earth beneath their feet to do something not so simple at all: commit to a place, make a life, create a home. These days, those opportunities seem harder to find, since even the cheapest adobe homes are desirable and valuable. Marfa was that place where, with a little luck, some guidance, and a permit in hand, a lot of us who were cash-strapped but plucky built lives while rebuilding our houses. Sometimes, as the dust floated between us and the thermometer’s mercury rose, we intoned the words of the architect: “It’s adobe. It was dusty work, removing bricks from one place, hefting them into our Toyota, which groaned under the weight, carefully placing them so they didn’t crumble, moving them into the house and fitting and packing them into the wall until the great gap filled, hearing the constant scrape of shovels while mixing mortar, trundling wheelbarrows of dirt, old lath, and plaster to piles by the street, loading the poor truck again for trips to the landfill, and then replastering the wall inside and out and pouring a concrete buttress along the exterior. These bricks were almost too heavy to carry, and large, twelve by eighteen inches, which matched those in our house. Too broke to buy adobe bricks from Mexico, where, then and now, a few commercial adobemakers exist, we instead cadged bricks from a friend’s derelict building in Valentine, a half-hour drive northwest. You can fix anything that’s adobe.” An adobe crew sifts dirt for a project in 2017. An architect who’d restored an adobe building in Fort Davis stopped by one day. We despaired, thinking we’d made a terrible mistake. Daylight streamed through a gash, about 1 foot wide by 22 feet long, that ran along the base of a load-bearing wall, which was itself held upright by spiderwebs and magic. ![]() And as with many local adobe buildings, the capillary action of the bricks’ earth and straw had drawn moisture from the ground, to deleterious and melty effect. As in many local adobe buildings, its walls met the ground without the structural intervention of a foundation. Taking something that was disregarded and broken and making it beautiful felt important, even if it took a very long time to fix, which it did. Our beloved house cost $9,500 back in 1996-to us, all the money in the world. Perhaps half the planet’s population lives in earthen houses. But as ancient as it is, adobe remains contemporary. Native Americans had used earthen bricks for centuries by the time the Spanish arrived. Some of the world’s oldest cities, going back to 9500 BC, were made of mud bricks. Adobe buildings have thick walls for structural integrity, and the earthen bricks absorb heat, keeping the interior cool. It appears in arid places where dirt is the cheapest and most abundant natural resource. It was, of course, ours.Īdobe is the humblest of building materials, for which earth, straw, and water are formed into bricks and then dried in the sun. “That’s the one house in Marfa that’s dilapidated and occupied,” he told me. The city administrator slid up to me, pointing at a dot on the map. It also showed which structures were occupied. I once stood looking at a city hall map that color coded the condition of every home in town-Excellent, Good, Fair, Poor, Dilapidated. Surprisingly, not everyone was so charmed. Yet despite its absence of plumbing or solid flooring, its wide dogtrot hallway and tall windows felt friendly and right, as though it had been waiting for us. ![]() Looking back, it was a falling down, spooky ruin whose chief inhabitants for untold decades were snake skins and mummified cats. This was our yard 26 years ago, when my husband, Michael, and I used our savings for grad school to buy a one-hundred-year-old house in Marfa. Then there is the house, or shed, or studio itself, rising nakedly half-finished amid a landscape bristling with shovels and ladders. Those who work with adobe are natural scroungers and re-users: a heap of leftover mud bricks from someone’s demolition over here, a pile of wooden forms stacked there, sheet metal sourced from the dump, waiting to cover sacks of plaster. The house of an adobero is identifiable by the quantity and type of stuff in the yard. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |