Mac Watson

Dirt Rich

Santa Fe, New Mexico · By Charlie Laurel

The story of adobe building is as old as dirt – as old as sun-baked mud bricks, and almost as widespread as human beings themselves. “Eighty to ninety percent of the structures in the world that people live in are earthen structures. It’s only in the Western, developed countries that we’ve forgotten how to use this material,” Mac Watson says.

Mac has spent thirty years restoring old adobe buildings and teaching people traditional adobe building techniques. He wonders how we could, after thousands of years of use, lose the knowledge of this most basic and universally practiced building skill within only two generations – and how, in his hometown of Santa Fe, New Mexico, only the rich can afford homes made from mud bricks, while the poor inhabit the products of industry – mobile homes.

Mac’s own adobe home tells much of the story: “The house was built by local people who led an agrarian lifestyle, so it was a tiny beginning of a farmhouse in 1910 in the upper Santa Fe River canyon – two rooms and a kitchen.” In those days farmers still knew how to make adobes and how to build with them. They built their own homes using simple hand tools. They were subsistence farmers growing and trading diverse crops. Their homes and their livelihoods were products of the earth. “That’s the relationship between culture and agriculture,” says Mac. “If you have a culture that is agriculturally dependent and is performing sustainable agriculture then it’s very likely that they’ll be living in sustainable structures as well.”

For Mac, adobe is the ideal sustainable building material “because it’s there. It’s hard to say that it’s an unlimited resource,” he laughs, “but there’s still plenty of dirt! And there’s not a lot of petrochemicals and steel and the other things we use to build our structures.” Still, adobe is more expensive to build with than stick framing because it is more labor-intensive. Stick framing and other industrial building methods are cheaper because of the availability of cheap fossil fuels. Fossil fuels allow machines to do work instead of people, but they also have severe environmental impacts.

Sustainable building practices are therefore, almost by definition, more labor intensive and more expensive, but environmentally less costly. “People now are not in a position where they can stop working to build their house,” he explains. “The only thing that poor people can get financing for is a mobile home where the interest rates are outrageous and the building is falling apart by the time you pay it off. But you can get into one quick. They make it real easy.” But no one makes it easy to fix up an old adobe house. He explains, “Banks won’t lend you money with an old adobe as collateral. They want something they can repossess. So, unfortunately, we’re seeing more and more adobes disappearing from the landscape because of the economic conditions. When you lose the agricultural base, then you also lose the architectural expression of that agricultural base.”

Against this backdrop, Mac found that he wasn’t interested in building new adobe homes for rich people “who don’t really need a third or fourth home.” He opted instead to work on preserving and restoring historic adobe buildings. He worked for ten years as a volunteer for the nonprofit Cornerstones Community Partnerships and then took a staff position with the organization. The mission of Cornerstones is to help communities restore their historic buildings, mainly historic churches.

“Part of the idea of restoring the churches was to reestablish community values,” Mac explains. “The community would ask me for help in restoring their church and it was obvious that the only way that it could be done was to gather the forces of the community in order to do the work.” He continues, “Community values for me are primarily cooperation and mutual respect and a willingness to work together to accomplish a community goal. Doing restoration work on an adobe structure is a perfect, perfect place to develop or redevelop community values because you get people working together, and they drop their age-old grudges and find out they can get along with each other. Sometimes that spreads to other kinds of community efforts.”
Mac cites as an example his work on a Penitente place of worship in rural northern New Mexico. Penitente brotherhoods came into prominence in New Mexico around the beginning of the nineteenth century, when there were few Catholic priests in the region. They built moradas – windowless adobe structures for men’s religious rituals. Mac assisted with the restoration of a unique Penitente building constructed by pouring adobe mud into wooden slip forms along with cobblestones. The whole community participated in the work, and a renewed interest in Penitente religious practices emerged when the building was done. Some Penitentes from a neighboring community came and gave instruction in the rituals, and many young men of the community took up the old religion.

“It’s one of those cases where architecture had its impact on culture, so we had a revival of traditional architecture techniques and then a revival of community traditions,” Mac says. “Northern New Mexico has some of the highest poverty rates in the country. There are tremendous social problems, huge drug problems, crime problems. Getting the guys involved in the morada distracts them from going out and getting involved with drugs and gang warfare.”

Mac also sees an important role for restoration in ecological sustainability. “Take care of what you have,” he advises. “Save what you have and preserve it, and you’re not eating up all your resources by throwing stuff away. Most historic structures are within an urban landscape. Usually when a historic structure is torn down, what replaces it is a parking lot. It’s almost inevitable. You’re going to have an asphalt parking lot for years and years and years.”

Restoration is a very conservative enterprise, changing as little as possible of the original structure under repair. For Mac, this means saving the original doors and windows whenever possible. “Doors and windows are some of the most significant historic features in a building,” he explains. In his garage workshop Mac illustrates his thinking, showing an old wood-frame window sash. “Windows are the first thing that everyone wants to throw away. They want to replace it with a new ‘energy-efficient’ window. But we’re talking here about long-term economy… the energy-efficient windows will never pay for themselves in savings.”

Mac Watson hopes to renew people’s appreciation of craftsmanship and tradition while restoring old adobe buildings. He believes that old buildings give continuity to our lives, connecting us with generations past. And caring for old buildings, in turn, connects us with generations to come.
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This is one of many stories from the Four Corners region that were printed in A New Plateau: Sustaining the Lands and Peoples of Canyon Country, edited by Peter Friederici and Rose Houk. This book was a project of the Center for Sustainable Environments at Northern Arizona University and Renewing the Countryside, with assistance from the Museum of Northern Arizona. A New Plateau can be purchased at the Renewing the Countryside online bookstore or the Northern Arizona University bookstore, or request it at your local bookstore.