June 13, 2009

Adobe Brick Wall

As part of the architectual look of the studio, I wanted to create the effect of a newer earthen building built on top of an old adobe 'ruin'. Therefore I'm constructing two partial adobe brick walls on each side of a doorway in the studio

I had about 110 of these adobe bricks left over from another project and decided to integrate them into the building design. The adobe bricks are made with 40% clay and 60% sand (unstabilized). You may be able to tell from the picture (click on photo to enlarge), that I applied a clay coating over the bricks to help protect them from the expected summer rains.

You can see this wall in context to the whole structure in other posts to this blog.

2 comments:

Derek said...

What is the mixture for the mortar

Blogs of Bart Santello said...

The mortar between the adobe bricks was a wet clay/straw mix. The adobe brick itself is a 40% clay, 60% sand mix. The brick is vulnerable to rain, so I coated the brick with a light clay slip on the outside to better stand-up to any rain. Once the roof is on, I can remove the clay coating with a large 'file'-like tool I devised, to expose the 'grain' of the clay/sand adobe brick. This will provide the contrast I'm looking for between the adobe brick and cob wall textures. Bart