A Master Adobe Builder

By Jessica Rath

Maria and Quentin’s clay pottery collection, some of which was done by Felipe Ortega, and most of it by their family members who took classes from Felipe. Image credit: Jessica Rath.

For our interview, Quentin Wilson invited me to the house that he shares with his wife Maria: a beautiful, spacious adobe structure. Sunlight streamed through the large windows and provided ample light for an indoor arboretum with tropical flowers: bougainvillea and poinsettia were in full bloom. They moved here in 1970, shortly after their first son was born. The Mesa Vista High School is within walking distance, and both Quentin and Maria worked as teachers there. Quentin taught math and science there for two years, and after that he started teaching trade-related mathematics in El Rito at Northern New Mexico College, which was a technical vocational school at the time.

​After that, Quentin got into building. He procured a contractor’s license and started building houses, demonstrating the different ways one can build with adobe:  the glass needs to be on the south side, so that the building will be mostly warmed by the sun.

Window reflections. Image credit: Jessica Rath.

“So you're sitting in the middle of my system,” Quentin explained. “The glass lets the sunlight in. It migrates across the room, and it's stored in these walls. And that's what adobe does better than any other common material on the planet, because it has the ability to store heat.”

​Quentin continued: “Compared to rock, stone, concrete, or brick,  adobe does one thing that's different: it's very slow to warm up, and it's slow to return the heat to us. So when the sun goes down and it gets cooler in here, the heat starts coming out of the walls. During the daytime the heat is being driven into the walls, and then at night, it starts coming back. If this were concrete, the heat moves too fast, and it would just go in quickly, and in a couple of hours it would be gone. But with adobe, we get about a ten-hour time frame, it'll be next morning before the building starts getting cold. So that's the basics of passive solar adobe, and the two go together so well it’s just one word: ‘solaradobe’,  first coined by Mark Chalom.”

The lower part of the wall is called pintar de la zanefa, Quentin explained. The lower color is micaceous clay, and the upper part is also micaceous clay, but it comes out brilliant white. Image credit: Jessica Rath.

From 1995 until 2010, Quentin was teaching the  Adobe Program in El Rito at Northern New Mexico College. “The program that we came up with was a year long. It taught people how to build a house from foundation to roof, and if they had another year, we covered working with the government, working with insurance, contracting, licensing, dealing with inspectors, and all of the other things that go on around getting a house built.”

The Abiquiú Dome, built by Quentin and Northern students. From left to right: Becca, Connie, Maria, Quentin, Lori, and Richard. October 2022. Image credit: Becca Fisher

The students who stayed for two years got an Associates in Science degree in construction, with a major in Adobe. If they were there just for one year, they got a certificate in Adobe Construction. During this time, among other constructions, he and his students built eight little domes, such as the domes at Abiquiú. In 2010 Quentin retired.

I wanted to learn more about adobe bricks, what they’re made of.

​“The perfect adobe is just sand and clay,” Quentin pointed out.  “The secret formula is 30% clay and 70% sand, and that makes a perfect adobe. The sand actually gives the brick its strength, and the clay holds it together. And on a piece of property, you find you've got clay on top and organic things such as grass, and that's what you want to get away from, you move it to the side and get down to where you've got clay and sand.”

“I built and made a lot of the adobes for this room. It's interesting living in a round room, but if you have little things on the back side of a drawer and you drop things, you have to go underneath to retrieve them. There are people who make furniture that will conform to the round shape.” Image credit: Jessica Rath.

Adobe buildings can be found almost anywhere in the world, I learned. Because I had mentioned that I grew up in Germany, Quentin asked me to guess how many adobe homes might be found in Germany? I was certain there were none, that I had never seen any. Well. I soon found out that I was dead wrong.

“One day I was at a conference in former East Berlin,” Quentin told me. “This was around 2000, not too long after the wall had come down, at a big conference with stadium seating and about 400 people. And there's a young man  up on the podium, and he says, ‘We have discovered that there are about 50,000 earthen homes in Germany.’ Next, this stately gentleman stands up with a blue suit and rimless glasses and thinning white hair, and he said, ‘Pardon me, there are 2 million earthen homes in central Germany alone.’ What do you say?” Well, to say I was surprised is putting it mildly… Frankly, I couldn’t believe it. I had never seen anything resembling an adobe building in Germany.

​Quentin resumed: “In Thuringia, one of the  German states, there are many adobe houses now.  Sometimes the actual structure of the house is half timbers, where they put up a frame of timbers, and the adobe bricks are only the infill. They tend to use adobe more often than they use stone for the infill.”

Half-timber house in Bernkastel, Germany. Public Domain.

Of course, now I recognized them!  In German they're called Fachwerk houses. One can find them all over Germany, in smaller towns and rural areas. I had no idea they were built with adobe!

​“In the US, we call this half timber construction,” Quentin confirmed.  “If it's true half timber, they build the house with a timber frame, and many of the elements will be vertical, but sometimes you have one that's at an angle, so it'll form a triangle and then the adobe goes in between. Sometimes they put small stones in between, but they're put together not with cement mortar, but with a clay based mud mortar. Lehm is the word for clay. So Lehm Bau, I believe, is a clay house.”

Absolutely,  Lehm is the German word for clay.

And not only Germany, but England, France, Norway, and many other European countries built houses with adobe. I grew up there, and didn’t know!

My ignorance was so profound that I asked Quentin whether he makes the adobe bricks which he needs when he builds a house? But he was patient with me and explained how it works.

Abiquiú Dome and sunflowers. Image credit: Becca Fisher.

“I made a few of the adobes for this house. Four of the rooms were already there, and then we added a utility room at the back and a bedroom over here. I had a tractor, and I pulled a trailer with a big steel drum on it, and my son and I would fill it with dirt and water, and mix it up. And then either that evening or the next day, while he would drive the tractor forward, I'd open a little gate on the back, and it would spill out the mud and fill the forms that I had. I could make 90 bricks at a time. We'd let them sit for most of the day, and then lift the forms off, and there were our bricks, and then they just had to sit there till they were ready to use. So that's what's nice about adobe: you can make your own building materials but it takes time and is hard work!”

Clearly, if one wanted to build houses, one would have to find somebody who made and sold adobe bricks. Sure enough, at the intersection of highway 554 and 84 Quentin saw a little sign that said ‘Adobes for Sale’. It was a father-and-son enterprise– Andy Trujillo was the son. They made adobe bricks, and could deliver 500 a day. That was exactly the number of bricks that Quentin and his two co-workers could use in a day to build a house.

“That house we built in 1978 was passive solar, and we got an award for it. We got the Presidential Residential Passive Solar award. The award was $6,000 just for the design, and you got a second award of another $6,000 if you built the house. Robert Nicolais from El Rito and Los Angeles was the designer.”

​Quentin continued: “At about this time, some people started producing adobe at a factory scale. There was one man, Dennis Duran, who was making adobes at what's now Ohkay Owingeh. We got the adobe bricks for several houses from him. A little later, Mel Medina in Alcalde started making adobes at a large scale, with a vast investment in equipment and land. When you put the adobes on the ground, they have to lie there for at least a week before they're ready to be picked up. You have to let them dry out. And he could produce 25,000 adobes a day.  He called his business the Adobe Factory.”

Abiquiú Dome and Gallery Shop. Image credit: Becca Fisher.

Next, we looked at some issues of Adobe Today, a magazine published by Joe Tibbetts. Quentin showed me the photograph of La Capilla De Todos Los Santos, the Chapel of All the Saints, in San Luis/Colorado. It looks Mexican or Peruvian and has many domes, built with adobe.

​“What's interesting here are the domes, where the big one comes down, there's a half dome here and a half dome there, and there are two more on the other side. Have you ever been to Istanbul?” Quentin asked.

Hagia Sophia, Constantinople, Turkey, ca. 1897. Public Domain.

Yes,  I have, but it’s a long time ago…

“It’s similar, the dome comes down, but then it lands on other domes which land on more domes. This dome is huge, but it makes the space inside even bigger by these cascading smaller domes, and it gives you a very big space inside. How did people ever figure this out? It was built 1400 years ago. Quite often we don't give enough credit to the cultures of other times. When they started the building, they had to be clear over here and clear over there, and how they ever got all these other little domes on it and then get up to the big final dome. They had to do all kinds of calculations on the sizes of those domes and the curvature, and then the big dome goes on top. That's pretty amazing.”

I remembered that I had heard that the way to build with mud actually came from the Middle East, and that the word adobe is actually an Arab word.

Quentin confirmed this. “It’s dub, or sometimes it's tub, and every country in north-Africa has a slightly different word for it. And when you get to the Arabs, it starts sounding close to adobe. And once you get into Spain, it finally becomes adobe.”

“The magazine came out for a good number of years,” Quentin went on. “It also talks about Hassan Fathy, who designed the mosque at Dar al-Islam.”

Then we looked at a photo of the Great Mosque of Djenné in Mali, the largest adobe brick building in the world.

“Let me show you on my computer where adobe's going now.” Quentin took me to another room. “Remember that I said that Mel Medina could lay down 25,000 adobe bricks a day on a sustained basis? One day my phone rang, and this young lady with a  British accent said ‘we need 150 million adobe bricks.’ I said, ‘That's unprecedented’, and she wanted to know either how they could buy them, or how they could make them, or how they could have them made. 150 million bricks. It would take Mel Medina, who had declared to be the world's largest adobe making facility, 180 years to produce enough.“

​“I had a feeling where this was coming from – it's Saudi Arabia, because they've got the money, and they've got the land, but they don’t have the water. Every adobe brick you make on the ground, in this simple way, takes about a gallon of water. So they're going to need 150 million gallons of water. So then the answer has come from India. They have come up with these machines that can put down in one day many times more than what Mel Medina does in a year, and I'm going to show this to you on the computer.”

Abiquiú Dome Ceiling. Image credit: Becca Fisher.

We looked at a website of an Indian company, SnPC, which sells brick-making machines that can produce 24,000 to 25,000 adobe bricks AN HOUR! Click on the link and take a look, it’s truly mind-boggling. But be warned, the website is poorly designed.

The 150 million adobe bricks which somebody had asked Quentin about were indeed to be used in Saudi Arabia, for a huge tourism project in Diriyah.  “The original capital was bombed by the Turks in World War One. Now they're going to rebuild the city, and it will offer luxury residences and hotels,  Diriyah Gate.”

​The companies involved in this huge project invited Quentin twice, as a consultant and expert in adobe building. That was about ten years ago. He had a funny story about his visit: “There was a pile of dirt, and all of these people in their suits were standing around and wondering what to do. I got down on my knees and put it together to see if it would hold together, and  I said, ‘Look, it'll make a brick.’ And everybody remembered that I was the guy that got down on his knees while everybody else was just standing there, looking around.”

That’s so impressive; Quentin’s masterfulness in everything related to adobe building was in demand all over the world. I appreciate all that I’ve learned in the company of Quentin and Maria. Thank you for a delightful afternoon.

​The Dome at Los Silvestres. Video produced by Lori Faye Bock.