Category: United States

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Adobe Alliance Workshop

The Adobe Alliance is pleased to announce the 7th annual workshop in Presidio, TX. Vault building and earth plastering will be featured during the workshop which takes place February 18-20, 2005. Demonstrations on applying a water-resistant exterior plaster of clay, straw, cactus juice and horse manure which breathes with the environment, which has withstood superbly in the unseasonally heavy rains of summer 2004 in the Big Bend.

Lodgings are easily booked at The Riata (432 229 2528) in Presidio, the Three Palms (432 229 3211,) or you can explore across the bridge a few minutes into Ojinaga, Mexico, a city of 25,000 people. The Paisano Hotel in Marfa is 60 miles to the north. There are many restaurants on both sides of the river.

For more information contact the Adobe Alliance.

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Land Art/Earth Architecture

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Architects Keith Zawistowski and Marie Richard, alumni of Rural Studio, recently built two rammed earth walls as a land art installation in the New Mexico desert. For this project, they collaborated with CRATerre to reaserch traditional earth building techniques and developed a slip form system for rammed earth, which eliminated form tie holes and can be handled by only two people. Using this system and earth mined from the site they constructed 220 foot long walls.

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Design + Build in Marfa, Texas

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NEW PROGRAM DATES FOR AREA SUMMER DESIGN+BUILD

JUNE 1 – JULY 1 2005

AREA is a summer research+build workshop that engages a 90 year old abandoned mud-brick building, located in the town of Marfa, Texas, as the testing grounds for questioning the notion of occupation, the theme of this years inquiry. Through a series of explorations that examine the process of making and unmaking in architecture, participants will design and build full-scale interventions that respond to a critical examination of place and program while addressing local/global and industrial/non-industrial agendas for architecture by employing raw earth as the primary building material in these investigations. Marfa serves as an ideal laboratory from where to study these issues. It is a town constructed almost entirely from mud-brick and transformed by rich historical, cultural and geographic forces. At 5,000 feet above sea level, it is one of the oldest cultivated areas in the United States. Located 30 miles from the U.S./Mexico border, Marfa is also home to the Chinati Foundation, an internationally renowned contemporary art museum, founded by Donald Judd, whose emphasis is on works in which art and the surrounding landscape are inextricably linked. Participants will have the opportunity to visit this extraordinary cultural and geographic landscape through a series of directed and self-guided field-studies. AREA is an initiative of the School of Architecture at Clemson University and made possible in part by the Adobe Alliance, a non-profit organization committed to the dissemination of traditional earth building technologies.

MORE INFORMATION AT: www.areainstitute.org

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ADOBE 2004

The Second Annual Conference of the Adobe Association of the Southwest will take place May 21, 22 and 23 in El Rito, New Mexico on the campus of Northern New Mexico Community College in the recently renovated Cutting Hall Auditorium. It is a stately adobe building joining the two-story adobe South Dorm and Cafeteria.

Schedule:
Adel Fahmy, Cairo: “Old Traditions and New Improvements”
John Morony, Southwest Texas Junior College: “Adobe and Latent Heat; A Critical Connection”
Ronald Rael, Clemson University: “A Counter History of Modern Architecture” Luis Fernando Guerrero Baca, Univ. Autonima Metropolitana, Xochimilco with Francisco Uvina Contreras, Cornerstones Community Partnerships: “Conserving Adobe Architecture at the Camino Real de Tierra Adentro”
Dean Sherwin, Philadelphia: “Heavy and Slow, the Thermal Properties of Thick Wall Construction”
Reid Hayashi and Kristina Orchard-Hays, El Prado, NM: “Monolithic Adobe: A Viable and Inexpensive Building Method for the Southwest”
Arnie Valdez, San Luis, CO: “Adobe Education at UNM: Alternative Construction Methods and Materials”
Richard Burt and Charles Graham, Texas A&M: “The Earth Construction Course at Texas A&M University”
Barbara Narici, Milan, Italy: “Raw Earth Architecture in Italy between Tradition and Actuality; Geologika and Mud Interiors as an Ancient Energy in Today’s Immaterial Life”
Quentin Wilson, NNMCC: “Jacal y Fuerte, Wattle and Daub in NM”
Anita Otilia Rodriguez, Mexico and Taos: “La Enjarradora”
Mark Chalom, Santa Fe: “The Prisciantelli Home: Adobe Off the Grid”
Simone Swan, Santa Fe/Presidio: “Teaching Women in Obregon; Passing on the Legacy”
Pat Frazier, Abiquiu, NM: “Houses built by Pat and Felipe”
Steve Safken, Arizona: “Adobe: Compressive Structures and Materials” (Not Confirmed)
Susan Jerome, Mule Creek, NM: “Community Building at the Mudpit”
Dr. Mahmoud Ahmed Eissa, King Abdel Aziz University, Jeddah: “Ecological Aspects of the Courtyard House as a Passive Cooling System” (Not Confirmed)
Steve Burroughs, PhD, Canberra, “Affordable Earth Construction” (Pending)

Conference Schedule:

Friday, May 21, 2004
11AM to 1PM Registration
1:30PM to 4:30 PM Session I
5PM to 6:30PM Dinner
7PM to 9PM Social Hour

Saturday, May 22, 2004
9:30AM to 12M Session II
1:30PM to 5PM Tour
7PM to 9PM Session III

Sunday, May 23, 2004
9:30AM to 12M Session IV

Northern New Mexico Community College has dorm rooms, suites, and a cafeteria available at very reasonable prices. Contact Donald Martinez for reservations or local hotel/motel contacts at 505-581-4120 or donmart@mail.nnmcc.edu

The Conference registration cost is $30 for Association members and $45 for non-members. Charles Knight is the Conference Registrar at 505-581-0159 or mailto:cdkni@zianet.com

Contact Quentin Wilson, Conference Coordinator for other questions at 505-581-4156 or qwilson@mail.nnmcc.edu