Photo by Jon Champaigne on Pexels
🇺🇸 USA · Northern New Mexico / Southwest
♨ Temperature
38°C
⛰ Altitude
2100 m
⚗ pH
7
💧 TDS
0 mg/L
🌊 Flow rate
N/A
📅 Established
2000s
✓ Verified on 2026-07-22
CRE Natural Building (Center for Renewable Energy and the Natural Building Arts) is a northern New Mexico-based organization offering workshops, retreats, and immersive training programs in natural building techniques: cob construction, adobe, strawbale, lime plaster, earthen floors, and living roofs. The CRE campus in the high desert of New Mexico includes hand-built structures demonstrating a range of earthen construction methods, surrounded by ponderosa pine, chamisa, and the red and ochre soil characteristic of the Rio Grande drainage. The wellness dimension of the program draws on the inherent therapeutic quality of working with living natural materials — clay, straw, sand, and water — in a community setting. Adobe and cob construction is a deeply embodied, collaborative activity: mixing material, building walls by hand, and seeing a structure emerge from raw earth engages physical, cognitive, and social capacities simultaneously. Participants describe the experience of working with earthen materials as a direct wellness practice, not merely a skill-building one. New Mexico's adobe building tradition is over 1,000 years old — the Puebloan communities of Chaco Canyon, Taos Pueblo, and Acoma built multi-story earthen structures using the same clay-and-straw technology that CRE teaches today.
| No water treatment component | 0 mg/L |
| Earthen material wellness (clay, straw, sand) | 0 mg/L |
Northern New Mexico is the homeland of the Pueblo peoples — Tiwa, Tewa, Towa, and Keresan-speaking communities who built multi-story adobe structures in this landscape over 2,000 years. Taos Pueblo, continuously inhabited for at least 1,000 years and designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site, demonstrates the durability and sophistication of Puebloan adobe construction. The Spanish Colonial adobe tradition of New Mexico (18th–19th centuries) layered its own earthen building culture over the Puebloan foundation, creating the 'adobe vernacular' that defines northern New Mexico's built environment.
The contemporary natural building movement in the American Southwest is explicitly in dialogue with Puebloan adobe tradition — learning from a continuous 2,000-year laboratory of earthen construction in a semi-arid climate. CRE and organizations like it position their workshops at the intersection of environmental building science and cultural reconnection to pre-industrial construction knowledge. New Mexico has a thriving natural building community centred on Taos and Santa Fe.
Adobe and cob construction are among the most ecologically benign building methods available: primary materials are clay soil, sand, straw, and water, all locally sourced; embodied energy is a fraction of concrete or steel; and earthen walls provide excellent thermal mass that reduces heating and cooling loads in desert climates.