Not the tech company. There are doubtless many people who want to know about the tech company. I’m not one of them. I’m talking about the adobe BRICKS.
I’ve been fascinated by the concept of adobe construction since I first learned what it was. That must have been early in my life, since I lived in the American Southwest about four years as a small child. Generally, I hated it. I was always sick because the weather was so dry, it was sunny virtually always (hated that, too), and I learned to fear the roads in that period, when my youngest brother was injured. And then there was the fire season…
But I found the concept of brick houses fascinating. As a toddler in the Midwest, I didn’t see many brick houses. There were brick porches (at least the columns were brick). But most houses, even on prairies, were clapboard. Many were probably bought piecemeal from Sears and other catalog stores, which had quite a business in prefab houses in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Apartment houses were sometimes made of brick or stone, but most private houses were wood–after the original sod houses were replaced. Log cabins are a forest makeshift. On prairies the first (semi)-permanent house were usually dugouts faced and roofed with sod.
This preference for wooden houses struck Europeans as impermanent at best and uncivilized at worst. Wood houses were preliminary, by their standards–something you threw up for the first few years, until you had time to lay the lintel-stone, and get the permanent structure built.
In Texas (in an area that’s probably all been built over since), I began to see buildings made of brick. Most of it was bricks of the type that would have been familiar to me from institutional buildings already–rust-red bricks, stamped with the name of the brickyard. But some of it was not. There were odd-colored bricks (yellow, a lot of them). There were houses faced with stucco. And, though it was rare in the suburbs, there were also adobe buildings.
I found adobe intriguing from the start, The idea that buildings would be made starting from mud was confusing–wouldn’t it melt at the first rain? It wasn’t until a little later that I began to learn about firing clay. But adobe wasn’t, as I understood it, kiln-fired. The mud is sun-dried. And though the molded bricks I was familiar with were not made with straw, adobe, it seems, often is.
I can understand the function of the straw intuitively. It not only acts as a binding agent, but it also redirects force. This is important for durability. And I by now understand why there has to be some sand (for water resistance), but not too much.
But there’s still a lot I don’t know. I’d like to see a stop-action sequence showing the construction from the ground up. What kind of framework would you start with? How do you bind the bricks together? I know that adobe is better insulating than other materials–why? And what about windows and doors and stuff?
In this sort of questions, I’ve found that it doesn’t do much good to try to do directed research, until I know a little more about it. So probably what will happen is that I’ll have to wait, and the right source will come to me. That’s the way it usually works, anyway.
Today’s more obscure question is one that’s simple to someone who’s been to the tropics–once the question percolates to the surface. Often we (or at least I) use terms for decades without realizing that they have intrinsic meanings. So I never did wonder–what does the Equator equate?
Once I did ask the question, of course, the answer is obvious. On the Equator, every day is an equinox. Every day is twelve hours long, and so is every night. Oh, there might be some variation, but it’s a matter of minutes, not hours.
You’d think I’d have thought of that earlier, since the thing I found hardest to readjust to when I moved back into ‘temperate’ zones was the bizarre lengthening/shortening of days and nights. So here’s a secondary question–why do areas in the tropics observe Daylight Savings Time? It’s a meaningless observation, since there’s no detectable difference. But then, the whole thing is really meaningless, innit? I mean, when you go by a building and see it fully lighted, does it really matter whether it’s 3am or 4am?
But that’s for another page…
treraia 