“A few people felt that only so much could be said about adobe.” This quote, from an adobe building magazine achieving its one-year anniversary in 1975, forms an epigraph to the introduction to Albert Narath’s new book, Solar Adobe. A reader returning to the quote after finishing the book is almost certain to laugh. Oh, how wrong they were! Subtitled Energy, Ecology, and Earthen Architecture, the book traces a largely forgotten yet freshly relevant period of experimentation with passive-solar design and adobe structures in the American Southwest of the 1970s, spotlighting the rich variety of characters, settings, themes, and narratives that contribute to this storied material’s depth of meaning.
The author’s aim is to explore the ways in which wide-ranging engagements with this particular building material raised critical questions: about how architecture is practiced in a time of environmental crisis, whom it should benefit, and what a building is, or could become, as an object of energy-conscious design. Narath does this across four chapters, each recounting the ’70s adobe scene from a different perspective, with black-and-white illustrations from the period supplementing the text.
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