Category: United States

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Donald Judd and Adobe

Donald Clarence Judd (1928–1994) was an American artist best known for his role in the development of Minimalism. His work has had lasting influence on art, architecture, and design.

Donald Clarence Judd © Judd Foundation.

Judd was born in Excelsior Springs, Missouri. He studied philosophy and art history at Columbia University and later painting at the Art Students League in New York. He worked as a painter until the early 1960s, when he began producing three-dimensional works that challenged conventional definitions of sculpture. These works emphasized repetition, clarity, and structural logic rather than representation.

By the early 1970s Judd had become dissatisfied with the temporary nature of gallery exhibitions. He believed art needed a permanent and carefully defined setting. In 1971 he moved to Marfa, Texas, where he began purchasing buildings and land in order to establish long-term installations under his own direction.

Downtown Marfa, Texas, 1942. © Keith Archive. Courtesy Marfa and Presidio County Museum.

In Marfa, adobe was part of the existing building environment. Rather than bringing industrial construction methods from New York, Judd worked with local builders, reused salvaged adobe bricks, and sometimes produced bricks on site.

For Judd, permanence was not only about duration but about spatial stability. Works were meant to remain in fixed positions, in spaces with consistent proportions and light. Adobe, as a load-bearing and materially durable construction system, allowed the architecture itself to remain stable over time. The walls were not temporary partitions but structural enclosures, creating fixed spatial conditions for installation.

Adobe bricks for The Block/La Mansana de Chinati, 1975. © Jamie Dearing.

One of the clearest examples of this approach is La Mansana de Chinati, commonly known as “The Block,” located in downtown Marfa. Judd began to install work in the east building of the Block in 1973. Instead of demolishing the three existing buildings, he altered them to suit the purposes of living and working. He constructed a 9-foot adobe wall on the south side of the property using existing adobe bricks from the former Toltec Motel and Virginia Hotel.

Drawing for La Mansana de Chinati/The Block, October 29, 1982. © Donald Judd
The Block/La Mansana de Chinati Plan

Between 1973 and 1979 the remainder of the exterior wall enclosing the property was constructed, totaling 1,441 feet and approximately 30,000 bricks. Within this perimeter, a second U-shaped wall further articulated the courtyard. Together, these walls establish a sequence of outdoor rooms and reshape the relationship between street and interior space. Openings are carefully proportioned, and the thickness of the walls creates deep recesses and strong shadow lines.

Donald Judd, untitled, 1976-1985, adobe bricks and cement, La Mansana de Chinati/The Block, Judd Foundation, Marfa, Texas.
Winter garden at The Block/La Mansana de Chinati, 1982. © Lauretta Vinciarelli.
Interior view of the south room of Donald Judd’s, La Mansana de Chinati West Building (artwork © Judd Foundation / Artist Rights Society (ARS), New York).
© 2024 Judd Foundation / JASPER, Tokyo E5493

The Block accommodates residence, studio space, a library, and open courtyard areas. Domestic life and artistic production are not separated but integrated within a continuous spatial framework. Adobe functions simultaneously as structure, boundary, and climatic mediator in the desert environment. The geometry remains restrained—rectilinear volumes, planar walls, orthogonal alignments—yet the earthen material introduces weight and physical presence distinct from Judd’s earlier industrial works.

Interior, Print Studio, La Mansana de Chinati/The Block, Judd Foundation, Marfa, Texas, c. mid-1980s. © Adam Bartos.
Interior, Second library, La Mansana de Chinati/The Block, Judd Foundation, Marfa, Texas, 2012. © Flavin Judd.

Another important project is the adaptation of what is now called the Chamberlain Building in central Marfa. Here Judd transformed former warehouse structures to house the permanent installation of works by John Chamberlain. Although the existing buildings were not constructed entirely of adobe, Judd introduced adobe elements to clarify enclosure and spatial hierarchy, including the construction of a new west-end wall. Roofs were rebuilt, skylights installed, and openings adjusted to refine the quality and distribution of light.

John Chamberlain Building, 2022. © Alex Marks
John Chamberlain Building restoration, 2022. © Alex Marks.
Courtyard of the John Chamberlain building with adobe wall. © Alex Marks.

Across his projects in Marfa, adobe was used as a structural and spatial material rather than as decorative reference. It serves as a means of achieving permanence and spatial definition. Its thickness reinforces enclosure; its method of construction shows labor and process; its mass anchors the buildings to the desert landscape. These interventions create measured and continuous spatial fields in which art, habitation, and landscape coexist.

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David Easton’s Rammed Earth Works

Photo by U.S. Green Building Council

Californian David Easton (1948-2021) was a pioneer in the use of rammed earth in contemporary construction. David Easton first learned of rammed earth through a book titled “Build Your House of Earth” by G.F. Middleton. Trained as both an engineer and architect at Stanford University, Easton was surprised to learn that the “moist soil compacted directly into movable forms wielding immediately load-supporting walls,” claiming it “seemed too good to be true” [1]. 

Enamored by the little literature and research available on rammed earth, Easton set out to perfect the methods and applications of the material and founded his company, Rammed Earth Works, in 1976. In the 50 years since, Easton and Rammed Earth Works have worked on hundreds of both residential and commercial projects across the nation, cementing themselves as one of the world’s leading firms in the research and application of rammed earth construction technologies [2]. Easton’s company has also helped push the envelope to make the building codes around the nation be more accepting of rammed earth construction and developed various rammed earth technologies such as PISE (pneumatically impacted stabilized earth), Terratile, and the Easton (California) Forming System for rammed earth and cast elements [3].

 

Easton Forming System in action, photo by Cynthia Wright.

 

PISE in action, photo by David Easton.

In 1996, Easton published The Rammed Earth House, an exploration of the history and modern use of rammed earth construction with beautiful photographs taken by Cynthia Wright of both modern and historical examples [4]. Easton has since revised The Rammed Earth House, and in the years since its initial publication, it has been widely accepted as one of the most informative and influential works on rammed earth, showing an ancient building technique that is exactly suitable for today’s resource-conscious and environmentally friendly building needs.

One of David Easton’s most notable rammed earth projects is the Windhover Contemplative Center at Stanford University. This project, designed to be a spiritual refuge on the college campus, was created in collaboration with architects Aidlin Darling and Andrea Cochran, as well as artist Nathan Oliveira.  

Photo taken by Matthew Millman.

The project contains three large rammed earth walls designed to be a backdrop to Oliveria’s paintings. In the center of the largest wall, a 234,000 pound rammed earth wall 20 feet tall and 60 feet long, sits a large diptych painted by Oliveira. 

Photo taken by Matthew Millman.

The project was extremely labor extensive: each wall was built “in 42 six-inch lifts pounded to four-inch courses by eight men on rammers.”

Credit Aidlin Darling Design.
Credit Aidlin Darling Design.

Sources: 

  1.  Block, David. “Looking at the Legacy of Legendary Earth Builder David Easton: February 25, 1948 — February 12, 2021.” Medium, 6 June 2021, davidyblock.medium.com/looking-at-the-legacy-of-legendary-earth-builder-david-easton-february-25-1948-february-12-b63e8c7677be. Accessed 16 Feb. 2026.
  2. English, Mark, AIA. “David Easton – 45 Years of Rammed Earth.” The Architects’ Take, 16 Nov. 2018,thearchitectstake.com/interviews/david-easton-45-years-of-rammed-earth-construction/. Accessed 16 Feb. 2026.
  3. Rammed Earth Works. “About Us.” Rammed Earth Works, www.rammedearthworks.com/about-us. Accessed 16 Feb. 2026.
  4. Aidlin Darling Design. “Windhover Contemplative Center.” Aidlin Darling Design, aidlindarlingdesign.com/projects/windhover-contemplative-center/. Accessed 16 Feb. 2026.

 

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Solar Adobe: Energy, Ecology, and Earthen Architecture

Solar Adobe: Energy, Ecology, and Earthen Architecture by Albert Narath

Against the backdrop of a global energy crisis, a widespread movement embracing the use of raw earth materials for building construction emerged in the 1970s. A new book, Solar Adobe: Energy, Ecology, and Earthen Architecture by Albert Narath , examines this new wave of architectural experimentation taking place in the United States, detailing how an ancient tradition became a point of convergence for issues of environmentalism, architecture, technology, and Indigenous resistance.

Utilized for centuries by the Pueblo people of the American Southwest and by Spanish colonialists, adobe construction found renewed interest as various groups contended with the troubled legacies of modern architecture and an increasingly urgent need for sustainable design practices. In this period of critical experimentation, design networks that included architects, historians, counterculture communities, government weapons labs, and Indigenous activists all looked to adobe as a means to address pressing environmental and political issues.

Albert Narath charts the unique capacities of adobe construction across a wide range of contexts, consistently troubling simple distinctions between traditional and modern technologies, high design and vernacular architecture. Drawing insightful parallels between architecture, environmentalism, and movements for Indigenous sovereignty, Solar Adobe stresses the importance of considering the history of the built environment in conjunction with architecture’s larger impact on the natural world.

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Observatory in the desert…in Wurster Hall

The observatory in the desert was a project brought on by the Contemporary Architects Association that sought to revive tradition of clay and mud construction in the Esfahan Village in Iran with a beautiful communal piece. This work is described thoroughly in the following post. What is there not to love about this project? In this work of art, meticulously arranged mud bricks and rammed earth walls make a seamless experience.

Our group, Eryn King, Lucy Knopf and Camilla Faustinelli were blown away by this project when it was presented by one of the students in the class Earthen Material Practices in Contemporary Art and Architecture . We just had to recreate it.

The final pushed groups to build a model at 1/2” = 1’  scale, focusing on a specific building technique with earth we had studied.

Our group decided to focus on the mud brick.

For such an endeavor, we decided to change the design a bit. Because we weren’t going to focus on rammed earth walls, we made all of the construction  using mud bricks even if the interior circle is supposed to be a rammed earth wall in the actual project.

Construction process:

  1. Collecting the mud : Mud for the bricks was collected in the San Pablo coastline area, as well as a backyard in Elmwood, Berkeley.
  2. Making the bricks: Mud was pressed into silicone molds, then left to dry in the sun for several days.
  3. Building: With a concrete base, we stacked the bricks in a 45 degree angle on the outside, and not angled on the inside to act as the rammed earth wall on the actual project. This is where texture and consistency of our collected dry mud came to play, making some pieces more fragile than others.

Building this observatory was a meticulous project, but it’s incredible how making something makes you understand why it’s so special. What a beautiful project. Our group hopes to one day see the project in person.

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N. Dash

N. Dash was born in Miami Beach, Florida, in 1980. She earned a BA from New York University in 2003 and an MFA from Columbia University, New York, in 2010. Now, Dash lives and works in New York and Taos County, New Mexico.

Dash’s work in sculpture, painting, and photography is the product of a unique, multipart creative practice that seeks to register lived experience and bodily intelligence through material. Her works, primarily made of natural items such as linen and adobe, give physical form to the intangible and the imagined.

During 2010 to 2020, N. Dash’s work started to be included in group exhibitions in many different museums. Dash also has presented solo exhibitions at White Flag Projects, Saint Louis (2013) and Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2014–15).

In 2022, N. Dash has one solo exhibition in Europe at Stedelijk Museum voor Actuele Kunst (S.M.A.K.), named “earth”. In this exhibition, she still uses what could be considered common materials, such as jute, mud, and string. But the earth referenced in the exhibition title is a constant, often used as a ground, which is a capstone in earth art.

Dash composes her works—which are usually Untitled—using discrete units, never disturbing the integrity of a given unit. Her works always used nature material and create without meaning which explains that “Art can be no meaning.” By looking her works in two different viewing positions, people can get very different feeling.  For example, this work named Unititled, looks like a light-blue panel is placed high up on the wall, and it is only when we move in closer that we perceive the skeins of string that are suspended from the panel. This kind of formal play has charged undertones in our time. The subjection of the natural world to the present economy of images transposes materials into essentially aesthetic contexts.

 

Citation

 

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Christine Howard Sandoval

Who is Christine Howard Sandoval?

Sandoval is an interdisciplinary artist working across media including sculpture, installation, performance, and public art. Her versatile practice allows her to express her conceptual interests through a variety of artistic forms.

Sandoval is currently an Assistant Professor of Interdisciplinary Praxis in the Audain Faculty of Art at Emily Carr University (Vancouver, BC). Howard Sandoval is an enrolled member of the Chalon Nation in Bakersfield, CA. As an artist and writer engaging with timely ecological and social justice issues, Sandoval’s practice is situated within important contemporary conversations around environmentalism, indigeneity, and cultural representation.

https://www.brokenboxespodcast.com/podcast/christine-toward-sandoval

Cultural Identity and Influences:

As someone of Mexican and European American descent, Sandoval’s multifaceted cultural heritage is a core influence on her artistic vision and the themes she explores.

Her work often engages with questions of land, place, and indigenous environmental knowledge, reflecting her connection to the American Southwest region where she is based.

This cultural hybridity and commitment to representing marginalized perspectives is a key aspect of Sandoval’s artistic identity.

Education and Career:

Sandoval has formal training in the arts, holding a BFA from the University of New Mexico and an MFA from UC Davis.

Her educational background has provided her with a strong technical foundation to realize her conceptual ideas across different mediums.

Over the course of her career, Sandoval has exhibited her work internationally and received prestigious awards and grants, indicating her recognition within the contemporary art world. Howard Sandoval has been awarded numerous residencies including: UBC Okanagan, Indigenous Art Intensive program (Kelowna, BC), ICA San Diego (Encinitas, CA), Santa Fe Art Institute (Santa Fe, NM), Triangle Arts Association (New York, NY).

Examples of her work:

-Coming Home, August 21 – October 31, 2021

“In Coming Home Christine Howard Sandoval explores the history of California Indigeneity and its relationship to the archive, a place in which collective memory is stored. In California, the documentation constructed by settlers embodies a narrative of erasure but is also embedded with the seeds of Indigenous knowledge paramount to the reconstruction of Indigenous language, cultural practices, and relationships to the land. Howard Sandoval works with the archive to trace the migration of her Chalon Ohlone ancestors, telling the story of her community, her family, and her coming home to California.”

Document Mounds- Application for Enrollment with the Indians of the State of California Under The Act of May 28, 1928 (6 pages), 2021, inkjet print on vinyl, tape, adobe mud, and steel, 24H X 16W X 7D inches each.


Surveillance Mound, 2021, adobe mud, tape, steel, wood, wire, paint, 89.5H X 19W X 19D inches.

Sending Signals Into The Ground To Form Images Of What Is There To See, 2020, adobe mud on paper, 60 X 96 inches.

-The green shoot that cracks the rock, May 27 – July 16, 2022

“Howard Sandoval’s embodied work confronts the complex history and innate interconnection of land and body. As she traces a path to her ancestral home, the artist scrutinizes the narrative of erasure in early North American settler’s records and reassigns power through documentation of embedded Indigenous cultural practices. Her poetic oeuvre seeks to weave a collective awareness back to nature by means of a more cyclical and deepened relationship with land and place.

The land, as an ever-evolving being, plays a central role in Howard Sandoval’s visual language. Taking adobe as her main medium, the artist explores its inherent properties of historical, familial and ecological histories. Adobe mud requires a bodily process to mix soil (sand, silt and clay), water and often straw to form a workable, malleable and ultimately structural material. In this ongoing investigation, she emphasizes the intentionally omitted history of forced labor, land theft, and the violent genocidal actions Indigenous people experienced.”

Installation view, the green shoot that cracks the rock, parrasch heijnen gallery, LA, 2022.

Niniwas- to belong here, 2022, single channel video with audio, TRT 12:23, Sound design in collaboration with Luz Fleming.

Installation for the green shoot that cracks the rock, parrasch heijnen gallery, LA, 2022

Stretcher- For The Transportation of Water, 2021 adobe mud, tape, steel, wood, wire 54 x 56 x 27-1/4 inches.

More  of her work: 

Mound- Angle of Integration, 2020, adobe mud and graphite on paper, 60 X 96 inches.

 Pillars- An Act of Decompression, 2020, adobe mud and graphite on paper, 60 X 96 inches. 

Arch- A Passage Formed By A Curve (detail), 2020. Photo by Scott Massey.

360 VIRTUAL TOUR:

Creative Output:

In addition to her visual art practice, Sandoval is also a published poet and essay writer.

Her literary work, like her art, delves into themes of land, place, and environmental stewardship from an indigenous-influenced perspective.

This dual commitment to both visual and written expression demonstrates Sandoval’s versatility as a creative practitioner.

References:

–https://www.chsandoval.com/home

–https://www.parraschheijnen.com/artists/christine-howard-sandoval

 

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Rafa Esparza

Rafa Esparza is a Los Angeles-based multidisciplinary artist, known for exploring the intersections of history, identity, and place through his work. Born and raised in East L.A., Esparza draws inspiration from his Mexican-American culture. His installations, performances, and sculptures delve into themes of colonization, queer identity, and environmental concerns, critiquing ideologies, power structures and binaries. Esparza frequently collaborates with other artists and his community, including his family members.

At the Edge of the Sun (2024), Jeffrey Deitch, Los Angeles

His most prominent works consists of building adobe structures in unconventional spaces, such as the Los Angeles River and art galleries. This in reference to both his familial roots and indigenous building traditions they also emphasize the labor and traditional skills involved.

Corpo RanfLA: Terra Cruiser 4everz (2023), SFMOMA

“I just knew that adobe had a special place in his own personal history, and I thought it could be a good way to start  having conversations about some guidance that I needed at the time as a young person coming into adulthood. What it did, in fact, was allow us to share space without being at each other’s necks, while he passed down this way of working with land”

Rafa Esparza, on mending his relationship with his father through earth

Cowboy (2023), Museum of Contemporary Art, Denver

Esparza challenges institutional frameworks and addresses socio-political issues (e.g. immigration, race, and marginalization). His work, at its core, is about storytelling and resistance, using art as a platform to engage with broader discussions on identity and systemic injustice.

In Whitney’s 2017 Biennial, in New York City, Rafa Esparza’s Figure/Ground: Beyond the White Field, created an immersive microclimate.  What was once, a white cubed gallery is covered in what Esparza calls “brown matter,” adobes; a mixture of hay, clay, horse dung, and water from the LA River, baked under California sun, and transported across U.S. coast’s. By invitation fellow queer artists to become adoberos, and helped to collectively created nearly five thousand adobes for the installation.

Whitney Biennial (2017), Whitney Museum of American Art, New York

“Brown matter” or adobe is used not only in reference to skin color, but also a broad range of conversations on race, nationality, ethnicity, and gender and the intersections therein. Most especially, concerns surrounding the 2016 U.S. Presidential election of Trump.

To complete the installation, five other artists were invited to exhibit their mixed-media artwork within the adobe rotunda. The adobe rotunda plays is both an artwork itself and a space for exhibiting the work of others (figure and ground).

building: a simulacrum of power (2014), Bowtie Project, Los Angeles

References

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David Adjaye, Asaase

Location: Gagosian Gallery, New York City

Completion: 2021

Architect:  David Adjaye

‘Asaase’ takes the form of a labyrinthine,  walls made from stacked blocks increasing in height toward a “conical vertex” in the center. The British architect’s first large sculpture was one piece to Social Works, a group exhibition of a dozen Black artists, curated by Antwaun Sargent, to engage with social space “as a community-building tool.”

João Fazenda

“It’s this idea of construction that works across many modes of sensory perceptions….it’s designed to create moments where the audience is just in – between earth. This is something people have forgotten how to do.”

 

 

 

Constructing the rammed earth blocks began with a combination of crushed limestone and schist from New York, with the tops of the shorter walls at the perimeter revealing some of the loose aggregate from the process.

Tiébélé Royal Complex, Burkina Faso

The ‘Asaase’ project incorporates a sense of collective memory and aims to evoke a deeper connection with the land, specifically traditional black architecture and historical identities. References to historic works of West African architecture such as the Tiébélé royal complex in Burkina Faso and the walled city of Agadez in Niger, can be seen in the sculpture’s maze form.

The project reflects on the unique essence of a place, drawing connections between the present and the past by examining Black communal spaces across the African continent. It delves into how these spaces served as central hubs for families and communities to gather.

The curved walls invite visitors to explore the spaces between the gallery walls and the piece before entering the spaces inside. These overlapping walls mean there are numerous ways to encounter  and move through the installation.

‘Asaase’ contemplates the idea of fragments—both in terms of physical spaces and the buildings constructed from the earth—that provided the backdrop to everyday life for Black individuals, symbolizing a connection to heritage and history. What Adjaye describes as “fragments of chambers,” can be demonstrated the most by the niche at the center of the maze.

References