Architects of Adobe

Architects Virginia San Fratello and Ronald Rael met as students in Design Studio at Columbia University in 1998.

“It was fate,” San Fratello said. “They were assigned seats, right next to each other.”

The couple sat down with me this week in a house they designed in Marfa, Texas. The home is owned by Terry Mowers and Suzanne Tick of New York.

The white ceilings are twelve foot high, and the walls are adobe, twenty inches thick, with a rich red-brown color known as colorado in Mexico. Fine bits of straw can be seen in the plaster. The cement floors are smooth but imperfect and give off a laquer like sheen. There’s a feel inside the 1300 square foot, two room, minimally furnished house that soothes the senses - a clean rare quiet lingers.

I look through a big glass window. A giant cement sill encases its metal framing while Haystack Mountain shimmers in the distance. There is ample light inside, yet only four windows. Solar tubes illuminate the hallways. A thirteen foot stainless steel kitchen counter runs along the wall, between the two hallways, dividing living room and kitchen from bedroom and bath.

“The house has an inner and outer box. The inner box provides the technology; kitchen, bathroom, heater. It’s separate from the outer box which is mostly earth,” Rael leaned against his chair. “Over fifty per cent of the world’s population lives, works or worships in earth structures,” he said.

“I grew up in the San Luis Valley of southern Colorado. Most of the homes there are made of mud, but there was always this tension between traditional and modern building techniques. It’s the collision of these two forces that excites me,” Rael said. “And then there is steel and concrete and glass.” He stretched out his arms. “This house is a blend of those four materials and those two forces.”

After getting married the two professors taught two years at Clemson University with special assignments at the Southern California Institute for Architecture in Los Angeles.
Now, they are just back from Genoa, Italy where they served a year and a half as co-directors of the Charles E. Daniel Center for Building Renewal and Urban Studies.

“Every meal we had in Italy was great,” San Fratello said.

The two are on there way to Tuscon where they are teaching at the University of Arizona for one semester. Then off to San Francisco where Rael has accepted a position as a professor at University of California – Berkeley. San Fratello will continue to lead their architectural practice.
“Hopefully it’s the last stop for awhile,” she said.

The two have recently visited earth structures in Africa and the Middle East including Mali, Morocco and an 175 foot tall adobe brick structure at Tarim, Yemen.

“Building codes in the USA have not been kind to adobe. Many code writers purport to be safety specialists and do not understand earthen construction,” Rael said. “But things are changing and increasingly codes are supporting adobe. But they have along way to go.”

“The enemy of adobe is capitalism. You can’t sell dirt. You can’t comodify it. You can’t make it homogenous. Dirt is different everywhere you go. You can’t guarantee the same recipe. And thus it’s hard to make a profit on it.”

“Poor people have abandoned the mud house culture because the industrial world has convinced them that they aren’t advancing,” Rael said. “Unfortunately they end up in trailers or worse.”

“Adobe has a low R-value. But its beauty is thermal mass,” San Fratello said. “It absorbs the energy of the sun during the day and radiates it at night.”

I asked them about mixing cement in adobe bricks.

“It makes it more water resistant but becomes a different material and requires interface with big industry,” Rael said. “The largest adobe manufacturer in the world at Alcande, New Mexico mixes cement with the mud only to protect the commodity from rain while its stockpiled at the factory. It’s like a food preservative.”

Rael and San Fratello helped artists Elmgreen & Dragset realize Prada Marfa.

“It challenges the idea of capitalism,” Rael said. He looked out the window. “The primary material used to construct Prada Marfa is dirt.”

The two architects looked at each other, as if a prompt was needed to see who would finish the story. Rael turns and folds his hands together on the table.

“There’s a weird prestige to build from dirt today, but it’s a dying art. Knock-offs of Prada products are everywhere and so are faux-dobes – the preferred style of manufactured southwestern homes,” Rael said.

San Fratello is currently developing an advanced thermal mass technology using water. Called the Hydro-Wall, her design won the 2006 Next Generation Design Competition. Because the wall mimes the patterns of the liquid it is designed to hold, curvilinear surfaces are needed. A shipbuilding firm in Genoa with the technology and history of working with curves produced the first proto-type last year.

“We’re hoping this will lead to an inexpensive final product that is easy to assemble and install,” San Fratello said.

Meantime the duo is working on a book titled Earth Architecture: A new look at the oldest building material on the planet. Princeton Architecture Press intends to release it on October 2008.

The two have recently bought an old adobe home in Marfa and plan to rebuild it.

“It’s a big project. We don’t have a lot of money but it’ll be worth it. We love it out here,” Rael said.