Colorado vernacular - adobe

barn

A number of months ago a wrote a series of posts about Colorado's vernacular architecture.  I attempted to categorize the vernacular buildings by the dominant material - log, stone or frame.  Sadly missing from that collection was the base building material used by the Spanish colonial settlers in southern Colorado - adobe.

As most folks know, adobe is a sun-dried, hand-formed brick made of local sand, clay, water and some binding fiber like straw.  Adobe construction has been used in many cultures and over thousands of years and is particularly well-suited to hot, dry climates because of its dense thermal mass.

house 01

store

In southern Colorado, along the east and west sides of the San Luis Valley, there are numerous examples of very old adobe structures, many of which have been slowly replaced with more conventional concrete block construction.  In fact, when white-washed, it is very difficult to tell at a glance if the underlying structure is adobe or concrete unit masonry.  The adobe construction is generally limited to single story rectangular buildings that could be simply spanned by vigas or lumber framed roofs.

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When left unadorned, the adobe bricks weather, their edges flaking off, creating a soft, pillowing profile that adds to their impression of mass and weight.  As a testament to their enduring nature, you can find many structures long devoid of their wood roofs and doors, with the adobe still standing.  The precious little dressed lumber that was used is placed to make uniform and contained window and door frames, further accentuating the adobe's soft forms.

window detail

I don't know where the line is struck in southern Colorado, but some place slightly north of Alamosa I would guess the use of adobe was found too incompatible with the increased snow and rain fall.  These adobe structures are certainly part of the Colorado vernacular environment and like the simple log and stone structures of the mountains, they are equally geographically limited.

house 02

Construction progress - up the canyon

One of my ongoing projects is the construction of a new house up Sunshine Canyon just west of Boulder, Colorado.  My clients, long-time residents, lost their house in the Fourmile Fire last Fall and we are trying to replace the spirit and energy of that house while making a new design that is better suited to aging in place concepts.

With most of the home's spaces located on the main level, the spaces flow into each other and connect the interior and exterior in a seamless panorama.

I will be posting construction photos as we progress over the next year and add some thoughts about the design process and the techniques involved in building in such a fire-prone area.

Architecture:  M. Gerwing Architects, Mark Gerwing project architect

Construction: Cottonwood Custom Builders, Marc Anderson project manager

Structural Engineering:  Gebau, Inc.

San Isadore

San Isadore is a church in Mesitas, Colorado, on the west side of the San Luis Valley.

It lost its roof and much of everything else that would burn in a fire in the 1970's.

It is still used for services, under the bright, aluminum sky of southern Colorado.

The fire reduced the building to just its basic walls, the fundamental enclosure of architecture.  For all the excitement of Modern architecture blurring the line between inside and outside, it is startling and humbling to see simple walls defining a space.  Inside and outside; here, not here.

I spent quite a bit of time there making drawings and photographs.  I shot it with three four different cameras as a bit of an experiment on how each of the different technologies record our impressions.

First and fourth images with a Lumix digital camera. Second and third images with black and white film in a 1970's Yashicamat.

Fifth image with a 1980's Nikon FM

Sixth image with the same Yashicamat with color slide film.

Last image with a Holga, black and white film.

the shining castle

I went down to the San Luis Valley to photograph some of the small village chapels that dot that flat, dusty landscape.  So as I was driving around, I was keeping a keen eye out for any structures, like a steeple, that might pop up out of the surrounding buildings or clusters of wind-ravaged trees. As I approached Antonito, one of the larger towns on the west side of the Valley, a shining, luminous vision sparkled in the morning sunlight above the two-story town.  Upon closer inspection I found what I later learned was Cano's Castle.

Built over decades by Donald "Cano" Espinoza, Native American Vietnam war vet,  it is his temple of thanks for surviving the war.  The photos really do it no justice.  It is made up of thousands of objects, mostly metal, from beer cans to hub caps to ...

Outsider art is fascinating, but outsider architecture - not just building, but really audacious architecture, is heavenly.

silos, grain elevators: the architect's muse

Ever since LeCorbusier identified them in Toward An Architecture in 1928, grain elevators and silos have been of endless fascination for architects.  Their simple geometric austerity and utilitarian "dumbness" is fascinating, their forms clearly derived from the function of storage and the volumetric efficiencies of a circle extruded.

It is not a coincidence that the chapter in which these photos appear also contains the most famous quote from the tome:

"Architecture is the masterful, correct, and magnificent play of volumes brought together in light."

In the century that followed and the many fractured debates over Modernism, functionalism and formality, the simple structures were either forgotten or too simply parodied in the making of buildings.  Their stark beauty, which so impressed LeCorbusier, was dramatically re-envisioned by Bernd and Hilla Becher in their striking black and white images that exhibited across the United States in the early 1990's.

The Becher's images helped revitalize a dormant humanistic Modernism that had been buried by the sophistries of Deconstruction and French philology that came to dominate the architectural academia.  If nothing else their photos reminded us that after all, architecture is made of buildings, solid and constructed.

Having grown up in Kentucky I certainly saw my share of silos.  And true, they only really became apparent to me after reading LeCorbusier and allowing a new kind of appreciation slowly surface in my awareness of them.

Now it seems I sort of search them out.  They are striking and beautiful - if not in their actual construction then in their mass and verticality and how that contrasts so distinctly from the surrounding fields.

And of course, the geometry is sublime - a magnificent play of light.

San Luis Valley

I recently returned from a windy and dust-caked trip to the San Luis Valley.  Inspired by a book by writer and photographer Robert Adams, The Architecture and Art of Early Hispanic Colorado, written in 1974, I drove through the small towns and even smaller hamlets in the southern San Luis Valley taking pictures, quaking in the sand-filled winds and feeling a rush for architecture and place that I have been sorely missing.

I have lots of photos, mainly of the variety and typologies of small chapels, including the remarkable roofless chapel in Las Mesitas.  Over the next couple of weeks I hope to do a little more research and post some of the images and some thoughts about this oldest of vernacular architecture in Colorado.

By the way, if you don't know how flat and relentless the central valley can be:

(I don't recommend this photo technique as you drive as you can't see at all where you're going.  Mind you, not a lot of traffic out there.)