Adobe building construction types, history, identification & repair guide.

Photos of antique and modern adobe-constructed buildings in North America. We also provide links to articles on adobe construction, adobe repair, the preservation of historic adobe structures, and the history of adobe construction in the United States and Mexico.

Photo above: Laura Waterman outside a traditional adobe building in Tucson, Arizona. This adobe house was named for Maria Navarette Cordova whose family acquired the home in 1896. - source: Tucson-Pima County Historical Commission & the Arizona Historical Society.

This article series provides a photo guide to determining the age of a residential or light commercial building by examination of the architectural style of construction or the building materials and components that were used in the structure.

Adobe construction in North America

Definition of Adobe

Adobe, from the Spanish adobe or mud brick, is a building material, typically in large earthen-brick form, made frrom a mixture of water, about 15% earth or clay, about 10-30% silt,and about 55-75% sand.

Adobe bricks typicaly include also materials for structural strength such as straw, pebbles, shells, manure, and other organics. The asobe bricks are dried in the sun to a hardened form.

In construction of walls, adobe bricks are set using a bedding mortar of the same type of mud as was used to form the adobe bricks themselves.

Photo: adobe bricks drying in the sun at Los Olivos, above the city of Guanajuato, Mexico. These adobe bricks vary in size, even in the same production run, as shown in our photo, and adobe will vary as well as in constituents - also shown in the photo.

In Mexico adobe bricks may weigh 25 pounds or considerably more, with large adobe bricks weighing as much as 100 pounds.

In size adobe bricks vary from about 4x8x12" (small adobe bricks) to much larger sizes. Some adobe builders use wider rectangular adobe such as New Zealand's Solid Earth builders providing square 280x280x130mm building adob e bricks along with larger 430x280x130mm corner adobe bricks.

Shaped and compacted earth was used as early as 8300 B.C. as a construction material for the ancient city of Jericho. (Bowen 2017)

Adobe construction has been used world wide since pre-historic times to build structural walls and floors, arches, towers, and for Arizona's Anasazi, grain storage facilites mid-way up the walls of the Grand Canyon (200 BC - 1500AD). Adobe structures that are protected from the weather can survive for more than 100 years.

Below: an Anasazi corn storage crib using stone and adobe in the Grand Canyon, photographed by the author in July, 1991.

Composition of Adobe

The most desirable soil texture for producing the mud of adobe is 15% clay, 10–30% silt, and 55–75% fine sand.

Another source quotes 15–25% clay and the remainder sand and coarser particles up to cobbles 50 to 250 mm (2 to 10 in), with no deleterious effect.

Modern adobe is stabilized with either emulsified asphalt or Portland cement up to 10% by weight.

No more than half the clay content should be expansive clays, with the remainder non-expansive illite or kaolinite.

Too much expansive clay results in uneven drying through the brick, resulting in cracking, while too much kaolinite will make a weak brick.

Typically the soils of the Southwest United States, where such construction has been widely used, are an adequate composition. ] - Wikipedia, retrieved 2018/06/18, original source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe

Types of Damage to Adobe Structures

Above: remains of a 19th century adobe structure remaining outside of Mineral de Pozos, nee Mineral de San Pedro de los Pozos, a silver mining center in Guanajuato, Mexico.

At its peak, Pozos was populated by silver, copper, zinc, and mercury mine workers and was home to about 80,000 people. 13,000 Pozos miners died in a tragic flood during the Mexican revolution.

Pozos was more-recently a ghost town and currently a small but growing tourist destination. When Europeans arrived at Pozos (wells) in 1576 the area had been settled for centuries by Chichimecas and Huachichiles and their ancestors.

Stucco Failures on Adobe Walls

dobe structures, roofed and stuccoed, can be very durable, lasting 100 years or longer, and offering considerable advantages including use of inexpensive local materials and the temperature-regulating comfort of thermal mass.

But the adobe durability story changes when there is a roof or wall leak, or where surface runoff or rain splash-up wear the bottom of an adobe wall.

Adobe structures are usually coated on the exterior and interior with a stucco mixture of cement, plaster or similar substances.

Stucco on adobe suffers different problems from stucco systems on framed walls. On adobe, the most common stucco coating failure I see is adhesion loss, usually when rain water penetrates the stucco wall coating.

That may explain the loss of the stucco coating on the adobe wall of the adobe and stone structure in Jalpan, Queretaro, Mexico, shown in our preceding photo.

Below: A traditional adobe structure in Tucson, Arizona in 1990, photo by the author.

La Casa Cordova includes remaining portions of one of the oldest still-standing structures in Tucson, believed to have been built before the Gadsen Purchase in 1854.

Photo below: an antique adobe structural wall with cement stucco coating in Oxaca, Mexico. I first visited this building in Oxaca 1960. I visited it again, finding it in its present condition in 2016.

This is the most common failure I see is stucco-coating adhesion loss, usually when rain water penetrates the stucco wall coating.

The adobe building shown below, located in San Miguel de Allende, Guanajuato,Mexico, is ready for repair and re-painting.

Unlike the stucco on steel or wood-framed buildings in colder climates, none of the stucco-coated traditional adobe structures I've inspected in several countries has used flashings around windows or doors. Cement stucco is applied directly in one or two coatings to the exterior of the adobe walls.

The paint wear or failure including painting and stucco-coating loss are discussed

at PAINT on STUCCO, FAILURE.

Below: an adobe and concrete-hybrid home constructed in the same city in 1960. This home is described also

at THERMAL MASS in BUILDINGS.

Structural Damage & Collapsing Adobe Walls

Below are photographs of antique adobe structures at Jalpan in Queretaro, Mexico.

Usually on an adobe structure that is not maintained, the roof collapses and disappears first.

Then, as you see in our detailed photo above, the adobe wall structure, exposed to the weather, begins to collapse.

Below: you can see the remains of roof beam pockets in the top of this adobe wall at el Charco del Ingenio, San Miguel de Allende, Guanajuato, Mexico. The protective stucco coating has long fallen away.

Less often we find severe stuctural damage to an adobe wall, usually where the wall base has been undermined by surface runoff.

Our photo below shows temporary bracing supporting a cracked, leaning adobe structural wall in Pozos, Mexico, an antique silver mining center.

Our next photo, below, shows the remains of an 19th century hacienda wall built of adobe at el Charco del Ingenio, San Miguel de Allende, Guanajuato, Mexico.

Adobe Structure Build, Repair & Preservation Resources

Illustrations: Traditional Adobe Construction, Russell Lee, Farm Security Administratin, Library of Congress, excerpted from the NPS Preservation brief cited just below.

• "Adobe, Past and Present." Reprinted from El Palacio. Vol. 77, no. 4 (1971).
• Austin, George. ADOBE as a BUILDING MATERIAL [PDF] New Mexico Geology, November 1984. New Mexico Bureau of Mines and Mineral Resources. p. 70. Archived from the original (PDF) on 2 December 2013. Retrieved 27 February 2013.
  Introduction:
  
  Adobes are dried mud or unburned bricks that have been used for thousands of years in the construction of dwellings and bther structures.
  
  Even today the majority of the people in the world use mud-brick construction.
  
  The term adobe generally is used to describe various building materials made of earth and the techniques for using these materials. Most often it refers to sun-dried brick, currently the most widely used in the United States,
  
  but puddled earth material, mudplastered logs or branches, cut soil horizons, and even rammed-earth construction also can be identified as adobe.
  
  Generally, any strucfure that has been made with soil or mud as a primary building material is considered to be adobe.
• Barnes, Mark R. "Adobe Bibliography." The Association for Preservation Technology Bulletin. Vol. 7, no. 1 (1975).
• Boundreau. E. H. Making the Adobe Brick. Berkeley, Calif.: Fifth Street Press, 1971
• Bowen, Thomas, A BEST PRACTICES MANUAL FOR USING COMPRESSED EARTH BLOCKS IN SUSTAINABLE HOME CONSTRUCTION IN INDIAN COUNTRY [PDF], (2017) U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, HUD, Thomas Bowen, University of Colorado, Boulder, retrieved 2018/06/18, original source: https://www.huduser.gov/portal/sites/default/files/pdf/Compressed-Earth-Blocks.pdf
  
  Excerpt:
  Compressed earth blocks (CEBs) are a natural infusion of modern technology with one of the earliest elements of manmade structures: the mud brick or adobe block.
  
  CEBs are essentially molded adobe blocks produced using mechanical compaction. Shaped and compacted earth was used as early as 8300 B.C. as a construction material for the ancient city of Jericho, near what is now Jordan.
  
  Taos Pueblo in northern New Mexico is the largest surviving multistoried adobe structure and the oldest continuously inhabited adobe site in the United States.
• Carpenter, Jennifer Lynn, DIRT CHEAP: THE GARDENDALE EXPERIMENT AND RAMMED EARTH HOME CONSTRUCTION IN THE UNITED STATES [PDF], Masters Final Project submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School of the University of Maryland, College Park, in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master in Historic Preservation 2010, retrieved 2018/06/18, original source: https://drum.lib.umd.edu/bitstream/handle/1903/10740/Carpenter_DRUM.pdf;sequence=1
• Clifton, James R. Preservation of Historic Adobe Structures: A Status Report. Washington, D.C.: National Bureau of Standards Technical Note 934, US Government Printing Office, Stock No. 003-00301740-0, Feb. 1977.
• Grimmer, Anne E., The PRESERVATION & REPAIR of HISTORIC STUCCO [PDF], National Park Service Preservation Brief No. 22., retrieved 2018/06/18, original source: https://www.nps.gov/tps/how-to-preserve/briefs/22-stucco.htm
• Eyre, T. A. "The Physical Properties of Adobe Used as a Building Material." The University of New Mexico Bulletin. Engineering Series. Vol. 1, no. 3 (1935).
• Garrison, James, ADOBE, the MATERIAL, ITS DETERIORATION, ITS COATINGS, [PDF] (powerpoint type presentation slildes), retrieved 2018/06/18, original source: http://missions.arizona.edu/sites/default/files/1%20Garrison-Adobe%20Characteristics.pdf
• George, Eugene. "Adobe Bibliography." The Association for Preservation Technology Bulletin. Vol. 5, no. 4 (1974).
• Haapala, K. V. "Stabilizing and Restoring Old Adobe Structures in California." Newsletter of the National Association of Restoration Specialists. Murphy, Calif., June 1972.
• Hubbell, E., Earth Brick Construction: U.S. Office of Indian Affairs, Home Improvement Pamphlet 1943, 1, 110 pp
• McHenry, Paul Graham, Jr. Adobe—Build It Yourself. Tucson, Ariz.:University of Arizona Press, 1973
• Schroder, Lisa, and Vince Ogletree. Adobe homes for all climates: simple, affordable, and earthquake-resistant natural building techniques. Chelsea Green Publishing, 2010.
• Smith, E. W., Adobe bricks in New Mexico: New Mexico Bureau of Mines and Mineral Resources, 1982, Circular 188, 89 pp.
• Solid Earth, Main Road, Wakapuaka, RD1 Nelsonn, New Zealand phone: (03) 545 0240 mobile: 021-036 3938 e-mail: contact@SolidEarth.co.nz Website: http://www.solidearth.co.nz/
  Provides Solid Earth Adobe Buildings, Earthbuilding Construction and Adobe Brick Manufacture
• US NPS, PRESERVATION OF HISTORIC ADOBE BUILDINGS [PDF] (1978) Preservation Briefs No. 5, U.S. National Park Service, Technical Preservation Services, retrieved 2022/10/02 original source: https://www.nps.gov/tps/how-to-preserve/briefs/5-adobe-buildings.htm
  
  Excerpts:
  The adobe, or sun-dried brick, is one of the oldest and most common building materials known to man.
  
  Traditionally, adobe bricks were never kiln fired. Unbaked adobe bricks consisted of sand, sometimes gravel, clay, water, and often straw or grass mixed together by hand, formed in wooden molds, and dried by the sun.
  
  Today some commercially available adobe-like bricks are fired. These are similar in size to unbaked bricks, but have a different texture, color, and strength.
  
  Similarly some adobe bricks have been stabilized, containing cement, asphalt. and/or bituminous materials, but these also differ from traditional adobe in their appearance and strength.
  
  Traditional adobe construction techniques in North America have not varied widely for over 3-1/2 centuries. Adobe building methods employed in the Southwest in the 16th century are still used today.
• US NPS, PRESERVATION OF HISTORIC ADOBE BUILDINGS - ORIGINAL [PDF] (1978) Preservation Briefs No. 5, U.S. National Park Service, Technical Preservation Services, retrieved 2018
• Vargas, J., J. Bariola, M. Blondet "Seismic Strength of Adobe Masonry". Materials and Structures. 9 (4): 253–256. (1986).
  Abstract:
  
  The most important soil characteristies [sic] from the viewpoint of the strength of adobe masonry are first studied.
  
  Subsequently, based on the acquired knowledge, the effect of some natural additives to the soil is investigated.
  
  Simple field tests, devised to identify the most adequate materials for adobe construction and to be easily transmitted to the potential adobe builder are finally proposed.
• Wilson, Quentin, ""Mass and insulation with adobe". Green Home Building.
  

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