The Taos Tribal Council supported the National Park Service’s nomination of the historic Taos Pueblo to the 2010 World Monuments Watch because of the need to conserve the adobe buildings and develop a heritage management plan to protect the status of the pueblo, one of only eight cultural UNESCO World Heritage Sites in the United States. The nomination was successful, and members of the council came to New York for the 2010 Watch announcement.
Photo by Rick Romancito, The Taos News
WMF and the Tribal Council developed a training program in traditional construction methods at the pueblo focusing on Sub-House 2, an 11-family dwelling in an advanced state of deterioration. The central portion of Sub-House 2 had suffered a fire and was in danger of collapse. Many portions of the buiding were not longer usable.
The first task was to document the historic pueblo buildings, including Sub-House 2, with laser technology, an extremely accurate form of documentation especially useful in recording irregular structures like adobe buildings. With funding from WMF and the National Park Service, CyArk was engaged to undertake the documentation and train a group of pueblo residents in documentation methodology and data retrieval techniques. ©CyArk/WMF
Field work started in December 2010. A group of 10 trainees was assembled. Since the cold weather prevented outside work, the trainees began by building wooden elements, such as metal-lined canales (roof drains), doors, windows, skylights, and ladders in the newly built preservation project workshop, located on tribal lands not far from the historic pueblo.
Logs were harvested on tribal lands to provide replacement vigas (large structural roof beams) and latillas (smaller logs placed on top of the vigas) needed to support heavy new earthen roofs (see slide 8). These were trimmed, peeled and stored outside the workshop.
In early spring 2011, removal of damaged portions of Sub-House 2 began, which included disassembly of unstable walls on both the first and second floors of the building.The return of warm weather enabled the trainees to start mixing adobe mud and casting it into bricks, which were then sun-dried and stacked up for use.
Reconstruction of the building began with new foundations of cobblestone and mud. New walls started going up by late spring and the work progressed quickly through the summer.
As the first floor walls were completed, they were topped with bond beams on which the new vigas and latillas were placed. Above those, in a concession to practicality, a layer of plywood and a waterproofing membrane were placed to help prevent water and dirt from penetrating into the living spaces. None of the modern materials are visible from inside or outside the building.
By late fall, most of the second story of Sub-House 2 had been rebuilt.
With the arrival of snow in the winter, traditional cyclical maintenance was reinstated at Sub-House 2. Earthen roofs have to be shoveled or the melting snow will find its way into the building, even with a new waterproof membrane in place.
By late spring, the remaining work consisted of finishing the porches, plastering, and installing additional doors, windows, skylights, and canales, as well as constructing two missing first-story units that had been destroyed over the years. This image shows the remnants of the walls of one of these units on the western side of the building.
Work on Sub-House 2 was completed in July 2012.
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