The Design+Research+Build program at the University of Arizona has constructed several projects in rammed earth. Visit the programs website.
The Construction of a Hybrid Home
Building With Awareness: The Construction of a Hybrid Home
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.
Rammed earth constructions: Trans-cultural research in the Sonoran Desert
A case study illustrating a series of university/community collaborations leading from research idea, to full-scale improvisation in a Design/Build Studio at the University of Arizona (UA) School of Architecture (SoA), to a significant application in the Gila River Pima community of southern Arizona.
American Adobes
American Adobes by Beverly Spears documents the rich and distictly Northern New Mexican vernacular house.
Mii amo Spa
This 34,000 square-foot spa facility in Sedona, Arizona by Gluckman Mayner Architects is comprised of a main treatment building and six freestsanding residential buildings. The main building’s five adobe brick clad towers contain treatment rooms and anchor the complex in the landscape. See more of this commercial project at www.gluckmanmayner.com
Land Art/Earth Architecture
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.
Paquime Ruins
The Paquime ruins, located near Nuevo Casas Grandes in the state of Chihuahua, Mexico, is a archeological, sculptural and architectural wonder. Paquime emerged from shadowy origins early in the thirteenth century. It became the largest and most culturally complex settlement in northern Mexico and the southwestern United States. Much like the Hohokam to the north and west, the Paquime people began building rectangular walled surface structures next to their pithouse lodges late in the first millennium.
Univision Television Studio and Headquarters
The Univision Television Studio and Headquarters in Phoenix, Arizona by Swaback Partners
Adobe Walls Rise in Tijeras, New Mexico
For the first time in hundreds of years, real adobe walls began rising at Tijeras Pueblo. The walls will eventually enclose the Tijeras Pueblo Education Center, an authentic adobe building that will house a museum, labs, educational displays and other information and activities.