We are excited to share some finished photos of this completed project. As those of you who have been following along know, we broke ground on this house in June 2021 in the Los Griegos neighborhood of Albuquerque’s North Valley, and wrapped up in early June 2022. There aren’t many real adobe homes being built in Albuquerque proper anymore – within the CABQ building department we were known simply as “the adobe” – so this project stood out from the beginning. It also stood out for some other reasons. We took a full year to build a two bedroom house. We did all the architectural drawings ourselves. We also built all the cabinets for the house. This is about as old-school of a way to build as you can imagine, and here we are making a go at it in 2022. This is one of our goals in building in Albuquerque (and, incidentally, in documenting some of it on Instagram): to keep adobe construction visible, and remind people of its benefits and viability in the 21st century. Adobe construction is an ancient technique, but somehow it has now been lumped into the “alternative construction” category. We would contend that, having been imported into the desert southwest for reasons having nothing to do with our climate, natural resources or architectural tradition, it’s frame construction that is the alternative technique. The house we have built here belongs, in a more authentic way, in this neighborhood dotted with historic adobe structures.

Jun 28, 2022