Soft Modern
In New Mexico, the adobe architecture is impossible to avoid: it greets you already at the Santa Fe airport terminal, built in adobe style. In traditional pueblos they tell you about the techniques of the original adobe construction. An adobe brick is made of clay-like earth mixed with water and an organic material such as straw. The bricks, pressed into molds and air-dried, are assembled into walls with adobe mortar and then coated with more adobe layers. It is hard to imagine a more inexpensive, environmental, renewable, non-polluting material, which also has significant thermal properties. As such, it is remarkably attuned to the preoccupations of many of today’s architects.
Aside from these notable features, adobe buildings have a unique appearance. When the structure is coated with layers of adobe plaster, it acquires a characteristically rounded, “soft” look. The colors are also specific: a palette of beige, earth-pink, and warm grey in many subtle variations. In spite of their millennial history, the adobe buildings have a strangely modern feel. Curiously, they have never served as inspiration for the architects in the early days of Modernism. Le Corbusier admired and referenced the grain silos and other industrial buildings, which were rectilinear, like most of the technology of his time.
The industrial design of today, in its attempts to be user-friendly, routinely features rounded corners and softer materials (smartphones, speakers, cars, furniture). In this context, one could imagine the adobe as a stimulus for new architecture, both from environmental and aesthetic points of view. Timber construction has been adapted into contemporary structures, including even skyscrapers. Could the adobe be next?
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