Solar Adobe

In the 1970s, with a global energy crisis as the backdrop, a widespread movement took up raw earth as a building material. Solar Adobe examines this wave of architectural experimentation in the United States and shows how an ancient practice became a meeting point for environmentalism, architecture, technology and Indigenous resistance. The Pueblo people of the American Southwest and Spanish colonialists had built with adobe for centuries. In the 1970s, various groups wrestling with the troubled legacies of modern architecture, and with a growing need for sustainable design, turned to it again. The design networks involved included architects, historians, counterculture communities, government weapons labs and Indigenous activists, all of whom saw adobe as a way to respond to pressing environmental and political problems. Albert Narath follows adobe construction through a wide range of settings and repeatedly complicates any neat split between traditional and modern technologies, or between high design and vernacular building. By drawing parallels among architecture, environmentalism and movements for Indigenous sovereignty, the book makes the case that the history of the built environment should be considered alongside architecture's wider effects on the natural world.