Category: North America

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AREA: Design + Build in Marfa, Texas

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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 detail, 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 60 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 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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Paquime Ruins

paquime.jpgFrom Above: Mexico

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.