The Barrio's Adobe: A Building Tradition of the Desert

What survives of Barrio Viejo in the blocks south of the Convention Center is a notable surviving concentration of Sonoran adobe architecture. Walk these streets and you are looking at a building tradition that was not imported. It was invented here, in the desert, over centuries, by people who understood the Sonoran climate in ways that took Anglo architects generations to learn.

The Sonoran adobe house solves a specific set of problems. Heat is the first problem, and the solution is mass. Thick adobe walls absorb the day's heat slowly, not releasing it into the interior until the evening, when the desert air has already begun to cool. The thermal lag built into the material is a natural air-conditioning system. The second problem is the street: the Sonoran style placed the house directly at the property line, flush with the sidewalk, with no setback. Life happened inside, in the courtyard hidden behind thick walls.

The rooflines are flat, the parapets high. The surviving houses of Barrio Viejo today are painted in a spectrum that would surprise any visitor expecting adobe-beige monochromes. Burnt orange. Turquoise. Deep red. The colors are not traditional in the nineteenth-century sense; they are a living tradition that has evolved as the neighborhood has survived.

The majority of what was built here between the eighteen sixties and nineteen twenties was demolished in the urban renewal campaigns of the late nineteen sixties and early seventies. What remains is a fraction of what existed. Walking through Barrio Viejo now is walking through the remnant of a city that was here before the United States, built from the desert itself, in the shade of walls that remember a different Tucson.