Message #20118

[Bianca]

Camacho heats water to make instant coffee. Mud is embedded in the deep creases of his hands, and here in the desert the sweat dries before it can shimmer on his lithe neck and chest. He has spent the day spreading shovelfuls of dry earth and mixing it with water and straw. The mixture will sit until morning, when he'll add more water to it and, from that mud, form bricks. Since finishing his own house, Camacho has become one of several adobe-brick makers in Ojinaga. He employs two other men—when he has orders—and though they can each mold up to 200 bricks in a day, they sell only about 4000 to 5000 in an average month. He makes two sizes of brick, a large one for walls and a smaller one for roofs. The difference, he explains, is that lighter bricks are needed to form the vaults and domes. The proportions of the bricks he makes are similar to those used in ancient Egypt and in much of the Middle East, the same proportions introduced to the New World by the Spanish, who had learned to work with adobe during the centuries of Arab rule in al-Andalus.

Outside, he pours water onto the piles of earth and beats straw into the viscous mixture with his bare feet—about three bales per 1000 bricks, he says. The straw will reinforce the adobe internally, much as steel bars do when set within concrete. Tomorrow, one of his workers will help him mold the mixture by hand. He'll use one of two wooden forms, either the one that forms three wall bricks at a time, or the one that forms six roof bricks. They'll pour the mixture from a wheelbarrow into the mold and smooth it by hand; then they'll lift the mold away and rinse it for the next set of bricks. After two days the bricks will be propped up on one side to dry more evenly, and after four they will be stacked to await a buyer. A good adobe maker, Camacho points out, is one whose bricks consistently carry the optimum proportion of mud and straw.

As Camacho treads straw and mud, he can look north across the Rio Bravo—called the Rio Grande in the US—to what from his distance appears as no more than a smudge on a scrubby hill. This is the region's second Fathy-style home. Camacho supplied 18,000 bricks for it, and the mason who taught him, Maria Jesusita Jimenez, is working there now. The home's owner and resident is Simone Swan, whose presentation to Camacho's neighborhood group was an early program of the Swan Group, dedicated to introducing both Fathy's philosophy and—as applicable—his techniques to the Rio Grande/Rio Bravo valley. A self-taught architect and lifelong student of the arts, Swan spent three years in Cairo as an assistant and student of Fathy's.