Mud and bricks make artistic, durable architecture

RED bricks form the major building blocks of this building that houses the World War II Holocaust Memorial in Washington D.C. Similar red bricks are being used in other old cities in the US.

Mud and bricks make artistic, durable

architecture in old U.S. cities

Text and photos by

Manuel T. Cayon

SANTA FE, New Mexico—An average American would feel almost like being in another country when one enters this oldest town of the United States. The mud houses that were typical of the old pueblos of the Spanish era dot, the sprawling desert plains of Santa Fe, where water is at once the key issue as what confronted the then Spanish conquistadores, to whom many of the old Spanish-speaking families would trace their roots. Far from the ornate city hall building in Philadelphia designed in the elaborate fashion of Victorian architecture in Europe, besides other traces of English and French architecture elsewhere in the old cities of the US, that of Santa Fe is low-key but embedded with as much folklore and the rich cultural tradition from the old Spanish conquest of the New World. Mud clay houses of up to two floors high dot the avenues of this city of more than half-a-million residents of mixed national and ancestral origins, whose ancestors carved a rich trading post between southern US with Mexico and other northern countries of South America. The houses of what once were the pueblos of old settlements have largely remained intact in terms of the materials used and, in many instances, of designs and structure. Mud clay is abundant in the place and construction companies have provided the raw materials in brick form. From afar, the coffee-brown colored houses appear to blend well with the vast grayish brown panorama of desert plains, and authorities said that the mud houses have their ecological uses: heating the homes during autumn and winter, and cooling the inside during spring and summer. With mud abundant around, the pressure on the environment is also less than the requirements of the construction industry in the other US cities. The nation’s capital, Washington D.C., has also adapted the old practice of using the red bricks for its building materials, both for traditional and environmental considerations: to preserve the architectural tradition, to utilize locally sourced materials, and to serve as thermal-regulator. In both cases of either mud or brick materials, the urban planners have adapted them both for aesthetics and durability, attested by the tenacity of the houses and buildings to withstand weathering, war and calamity.