Adobe
Aiton's Encyclopedia (1910)
a-do'ba, from a Spanish word meaning to daub or plaster. Adobes are sun-dried bricks made of clay, mixed sometimes with straw to give strength. The bricks made by the children of Israel under Egyptian taskmasters were adobe. The earliest buildings in the valley of the Euphrates were of adobe, made of the sticky clay found in that region. The walls of the Alhambra are built of red adobe. The natives of Arizona and New Mexico construct their dwellings of adobe. When a new house is needed or an additional room, the women folks are set at work carrying water, and the neighbors are invited in. The clay of the front dooryard is mixed with water until it has the consistency of putty; it is then molded into bricks, about 18 x 9 x 4 inches in size. These are piled up in the sun to dry, and when thoroughly hardened, are built into walls. The roof is composed usually of poles and brush, covered with grass and earth, or turf, if it may be had. Adobe dwellings are cool and dry, two essentials in a hot climate. Adobe is suitable for use only in a practically rainless region. Heavy, continued rains would convert an adobe cottage into streaming rivulets of mud. Where the average rainfall is not great, structures built of adobe last indefinitely with reasonable repair; the greatest amount of disintegration being at the base of the walls during seasons of rain, although prolonged sand storms erode the surfaces. For the sake of appearance, as well as to aid in protecting it against weathering, adobe masonry is often plastered, the Indian women using their hands as trowels. The interior walls, and sometimes also the borders of the windows and doors, are whitewashed with gypsum. Adobe soil covers many thousand square miles of the arid west. When watered, it is fertile. It is a limy clay loam of a gray-brown color, fine as flour and free from grit. In places adobe soil, thousands of feet deep, is considered a wind deposit. Extensive areas are covered with fine volcanic dust which shades off into coarse soil like crushed coke. See Brick ; Cliff Dwellers ; Pueblo; Alamo
What Has Changed in the Last Century
Aiton's in 1910 treated adobe as a native expedient — walls raised by "the women folks" out of the clay of the front dooryard — and dated the technique to "the earliest buildings in the valley of the Euphrates." Excavation has since pushed sun-dried brick much further back, to the Pre-Pottery Neolithic mudbrick of Jericho around 9,000 BC, and earthen building is now honoured rather than tolerated: Taos Pueblo, still maintained in the old way, was made a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1992, as was the great mud mosque of Djenn"} — and in Santa Fe and Tucson adobe (often imitated in frame-and-stucco) became the expensive, sought-after style. Two things the entry does not mention now dominate practice: building codes that set standards for adobe and rammed earth, and the seismic danger of unreinforced mud walls, which killed roughly 26,000 people when the earthquake struck Bam, Iran, in December 2003.
Written for this edition, 2026.