Adobe

Adobe walls

Description

1) A handmade, sun-dried brick typically made from wet mud and straw. Adobe may also contain sand, clay, dung, grass, chaff, and/or blood. It is porous, wettable and susceptible to wet-dry cycle degradation. Adobe was used as early as 7000 BCE for houses, buildings and pyramids. It is commonly found as a construction material in arid climates, such as Mesopotamia, Persia, Palestine, India, China and in pre-Columbian Americas. Adobe walls are typically built using mud mortar between the brick layers followed with a mud stucco finish layer. Adobe provides good heat insulation.

2) A silt or soil containing a high proportion of clay.

Deteriorated adobe walls

Synonyms and Related Terms

mudbrick; unfired brick; unburnt brick, sun-dried brick; sun-baked brick; Adobe (Deut.); adobe (Esp., Fr., Port.);

Additional Information

° N.Agnew, J.Druzik, T.Caperton, M.Taylor, "Adobe: The Earliest Composite Material" ICOM Preprints, Sydney 1987, p.439-446.° J.Clifton, "Adobe Building Materials: Properties, Problems & Preservation" Technology & Conservation, 1/77, p.30-34.

Additional Images

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  Adobe bricks

Sources Checked for Data in Record

• G.S.Brady, Materials Handbook, McGraw-Hill Book Co., New York, 1971 Comment: p. 118

• Dictionary of Building Preservation, Ward Bucher, ed., John Wiley & Sons, Inc., New York City, 1996

• Robert Fournier, Illustrated Dictionary of Practical Pottery, Chilton Book Company, Radnor, PA, 1992

• The Dictionary of Art, Grove's Dictionaries Inc., New York, 1996 Comment: "Bricks"

• Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, at http://www.wikipedia.com Comment: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe (Accessed Mar. 1, 2006)

• Random House, Webster's Encyclopedic Unabridged Dictionary of the English Language, Grammercy Book, New York, 1997

• The American Heritage Dictionary or Encarta, via Microsoft Bookshelf 98, Microsoft Corp., 1998

• Art and Architecture Thesaurus Online, http://www.getty.edu/research/tools/vocabulary/aat/, J. Paul Getty Trust, Los Angeles, 2000