Adobe at Bioneers in Santa Fe
Quentin Wilson and I were at the Bioneers conference in Santa Fe this past weekend to build a demo adobe dome, promote adobe and round up some new students for the program at NNMC. It was a very successful weekend full of hard work.
The adobe demo dome we did at Bioneers is completely mobile. We bring all the materials to the site in one truck, unload, put the dome together and then pull it back apart when we are done. It certainly turns heads. The base is made of papercrete blocks which a guest instructor made for the department some years ago. They get our base up quickly. We “brownwash” the papercrete blocks to make them look like adobes. Still, we answered more questions about papercrete than we would have preferred. Next, we lay a pre-made wooden bond beam on the papercrete base. Finally, we mix mud mortar on site and build the dome out of thin 7X10 inch mud bricks with mud mortar. We had a load of sand on the truck and just scooped up soil from the conference grounds in Santa Fe for our mortar. It worked perfectly.
No electric needed, only basic hand tools.
The adobe road show - coming soon to a town near you…
