As we are taking on the restoration of a 105 year old adobe house. David, Rachel and I have had to learn about adobe as quickly as possible. We started out the summer with attending and International Conference on Earth Architecture in El Rito New Mexico where we met the notorious team from Cornerstone Community Partnership, along with a cast of characters; our favorite being a lime plaster "scientist" named Paul White. Marfa has proven to be a generous community with local trades people dropping by the site to offer assistance. Mr. Joe Urunga (as seen in the following images with David) is one of those locals, who comes from a long line of adobe makers and mud/lime plasterers. As the convention in Marfa is to cover adobe with concrete, which completely undermines the adobes integrity and the thermal function of adobe, we were excited to meet someone enthusiastic about going back to the old traditions. David and I built a form and hand casted 18"x14"x6" blocks reconstituted from old adobe around our project site. The following day, Joe brought out his hydraulic compressive earth block machine and over saw our test block making. One exciting discovery was that crushed glass made a fantastic aggregate (usually gravel is used). As the notorious dance hall and bar, Padres, is next door, we were able to tumble the beer bottles and add them to our adobe mix!
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