About the Adobe House Atlas
A documented, map-based directory of the historic adobe and pueblo houses of the United States — by state, era, architectural style, and current status.
The Atlas began as a research index. The National Register of Historic Places lists more than a hundred thousand properties; a small fraction of those are adobe. The Historic American Buildings Survey holds tens of thousands of measured drawings and large-format photographs; a still smaller fraction are adobe. Wikipedia, the Library of Congress's Highsmith Archive, and the National Park Service's NPGallery each hold pieces of the record. No one had assembled it in a single navigable form.
This site is that assembly. Every property in the catalog is cross-referenced to public records, photographed (where the public-domain record allows), classified by architectural style and current status, and located on an interactive map. The aim is modest: to make it easy for travellers, homeowners, architecture students, and preservation researchers to find a documented adobe house, learn what is known about it, and follow the cited sources for deeper work.
Method
Entries are scraped from public registries (NRHP, HABS, state historic preservation offices, Wikipedia category pages), normalised against a single schema, deduplicated by slug, and validated before they reach the Atlas. Photographs are migrated to a content delivery network and credited to their archive of origin. Histories are drafted from primary records and reviewed against the cited sources. Where the public record is thin, the catalog says so plainly.
Scope
The Atlas covers historic adobe and pueblo construction in the United States — Spanish Colonial, Territorial, Pueblo Revival, and a small body of contemporary stabilised-adobe work. Spanish Colonial and Mission Revival buildings that are stucco-on-frame rather than load-bearing earth are included only where they appear in the public registries as adobe; the catalog does not pretend they are something they are not.
Project
The Atlas is published by ViewEngine, an independent research studio, and is maintained by hand. Corrections, citations, and additions are welcomed at hello@adobepueblo.com.