Sharing the work
Maintaining adobe and acequia sewed communities together
TAOS, IN MY CHILDHOOD, was a vividly colorful tricultural laboratory for the study of cultural conflict and confluence. From 1692 until 1847, despite bloody and painful beginnings, Native and Hispanic villages finally developed a functional détente that set aside old resentments in favor of harmony and the practicalities of survival.
There developed a common body of knowledge – consisting of complex, overlapping systems, such as sharing the water in an arrangement that is a worldwide model for ecological water-wisdom – the acequias.
And a beautiful hybrid architecture that incorporates technologies from the same sources, fusing with those of Taos Pueblo and giving birth to an architecture that, like the acequia system, is a template for a sustainable rural, ecologically benign, architecture. Mud’s plasticity is capable of expressing the intimate family relationships and collective spiritual practices of strikingly different cultures and adapting to different climates.
Take the obvious example of Taos Pueblo, and what the architecture reveals at a glance. More than anything – unity and protection. Two huge, fivestoried apartment buildings, surrounded by closely scattered houses, all clustered around an enclosed plaza, turned inward, backs to the cold, enemies and outsiders.
And in the middle – the river, the source of life and ceremonial, sacred space. One thousand years of continuous experience in this architecture produced a people whose leaders relentlessly pursued the return of their beloved Blue Lake, and today unanimously ruled to close their land and protect the tribe from COVID -19.
New Mexico’s people shaped the architecture, literally, with their hands. But the architecture shaped the people. Children learned how to plaster by watching, by being conscripted into teams of women restoring winter damage. The architecture required teamwork, taught cooperation and provided the setting for the oral transmission of a whole building technology. My dollhouse was made from adobes cast in an ice tray on the banks of the acequia.
The lifestyle imposed by traditional Pueblo architecture in general promotes community, cooperation, intergenerational intimacy and collective action. You could say it directs social energy toward community, toward the center.
How? The doors and windows all opened on common space, the plaza. Symbolically, all eyes, speech and nourishment came from and were focused on the central public space. The lower rooftops were simultaneously upstairs patios, from which neighbors were visible, within gossip and child-caring range, and in the summer rooftops served as work areas and cool places to sleep, or ringside seats during feast days and dances.
The hornos (beehive-shaped ovens) were focal points of activity, where women baked together. All this made it easier to share everyday work like hauling water from the river and carrying it, along with firewood, food and children, up the ladders.
Adobe requires maintenance, and so that was added to the seasonal tasks involving all ages and bringing everyone together out of necessity. The architectural environment itself kept everyone in everyone else’s eyes, and for better or worse reduced or even prevented isolation and required unified community action to maintain.
In the 1950s, HUD housing came to Taos Pueblo, and the human relationships shaped by 1,000 years of living just one wall away from each other, all clustered around a single plaza, was transformed overnight into a version of suburbia. Each family was in the middle of their own plot in frame houses. True, with running water and electricity, but the plaza, the center was far away and now every family was enclosed by a different system of human relations from the most intimate, almost invisible and profound level to the mundane, like money for gas instead of family firewood runs, and extended families pared down to the suburban nuclear family floor plan.
The Hispanic villages were also organized around a cooperative lifestyle – also communally built and
maintained with the church in the middle, the houses clustered around a plaza. Seasonal church restorations involved the whole community, and individual house building and maintenance involved extended families.
This seasonal obligation knitted communities together, precisely because adobe is labor intensive and unless it is maintained it melts back into the earth. (A positive ecological feature the near future may appreciate.) And mud is free. And no banks, no mortgages, no permits, fines, red tags, contractors, architects or expensive machinery or tools.
There were experts, the more skilled,
experienced or gifted, and the elders knew the location of proper materials, perpetuated the intergenerational transmission of the technology.
Building also nourished trade. An enjarradora (plasterer) might get a sheep for building a fireplace, a few loads of wood might plaster a room for the newlyweds and thus the architecture moved goods and services through the whole local economy.
Besides, the warmest, most accountable and comforting of safety nets is a united community, and the maintenance of the architecture and the acequies sewed people together.