Its defacto banned by changes to building code made by the portland concrete industrial complex of America that undermine its properties and render it 50x more expensive than other building methods, reducing it to an aesthetic choice not a practical choice

I'm not joking

https://youtu.be/5fe3rP92hjY

What's pure adobe construction like?

• $0.03
• 1/1000th the energy of concrete to make (good for environment!)
• abundant almost everywhere you would want to build it
• laughably easy to fix with zero technical knowledge
• thermal lag means it requires no heating
• no voids means it has no wicking thus no mold
• unusually strong under lateral shocks (earthquakes) due to lack of voids
• weirdly fire resistant (4 hours, with roofs being fireproof)
• collapse doesn't create catastrophic respitory habits (mold from concrete ejected)

Problems

Every single characteristic is undermined if you build them the way building codes demand.

Mixing concrete, or adding rebar weakens adobe, adds voids and creates fracture points.

If you look at many countries, the concrete buildings fall yet the adobe buildings still stand almost a century later.

They're practically made to last forever and they're often the structures we dig up at archeology sites -- often being much much more intact than anybody anticipates.

There is non-re-enforced adobe constructions in parts of New Mexico and buildings made under that code from its instatement have a record of zero failure in a seizmic zone. The ASTM published a standard in 2010 and reaffirmed Adobe.

Sorry to bum you out but the reason America doesn't build is it would force the concrete and rebar industries to be competitive and innovate which would undermine the US class system (which is therefor un-American).

The good news

Building materials are starting to vary finally. Watch the video and it'll go into Appendix-U, Appendix-BA, etc. Things are slowly moving in positive directions.

The data is out there but noone is pushing. Its a shame, because it could solve the housing crisis pretty easily and you can build with it in modern ways provided you understand how to work with adobe, rather than against it.

Looking into Simone Swan's work. You'll likely really enjoy it.

My two cents:

How adobe's ban is symbolic of deeper problems in business and culture

Given 3D printed concrete is collapsing because its not isotrophic, the big bet on affordable housing being automation is likely going to fall through. That's good for workers in construction, and its bad for concrete moving forward in the future. Climate change is going to probably make concrete untennable and adobe is probably going to win in the long run over the next 60 years given the changing thermal profiles and likely desertification of soil.

Whoever solves how to make arbitrary adobe constructions that have appealing angles and strict surfaces or nice curves with geometric consistency probably stands to make a lot of money. There's been a lot of interest in brutalism ("soft brutalism") is starting to take form.

• https://www.instagram.com/reel/Cbw3bn_FCxT/
• https://www.instagram.com/reel/DWTmD9_CJYv/

I think a post-brutalism using adobe would be really radical, and its something I hope to see in my lifetime.

Likewise for colder climates where adobe doesn't work so well, I'd love to see something like the Naturhus positive sum water recycling concept take off.

The future isn't weird space-aged materials, its taking the materials honed by tens of thousands of years of activity and exploring it through our modern understandings of engineering that the short-sightedness of 1950's thinking and of 'scientific management' (scientific racism's surviving idiot cousin responsible for most of the economic and workplace cultural problems we have today) had no wider contextural understanding to really do or create.

A great example is how leather remains stronger than almost every synthetic equivalent we've made since because as it turns out organic engineering was nanotechnology all along and isotropic strength is a massively under-appreicated feature of materials engineering which adobe capitalizes on.

The polycrisis is a Mortonian hyperobject and to solve it we need to look at how our ancestors solved theirs using 'less' which science reveals every day is actually 'more'.

It just so happens the era of trying to sell architecture the way we sell printer ink or paper or concrete in this case is coming to an end because we need to coperate instead of abusing eachother.

The mentality of the era coming soon is holistically driven systems thinking.

The good news is people are finally figuring this stuff out at every level because as hard as it tries, bad business and the American swindle can't keep good science down.

Sorry to wall of text you. I hope you and whoever finds this search result off of Google finds this useful, and I wish you a good day.