Your housing in your hands.
CASA teaches skills that allow you to repair, restore and maintain the unique adobe architecture of Northern New Mexico, respect the historical and cultural context from which it emerged , and help preserve and proliferate a building technology that combats both the housing crisis and climate change.
Strengthen
Youth, Family
& Community
We provide training that engages
multiple generations and reinforces cooperative building systems. We educate workshop attendees so that they understand the culture and historical context that created these techniques, breaking down cultural barriers.
Support
Housing for Everyone
The skills we teach help ensure historic families are able to maintain their ancestral homes and all adobe homeowners are better equipped to preserve and protect our historic local architecture. And we teach self-help skills to marginalized communities in need of housing assistance.
Protect the Environment
Adobe construction dramatically reduces the construction related carbon footprint of housing which includes the manufacture, transport, disposal and decay of often toxic materials. Adobe is non-polluting and is readily available anywhere on earth. It is earth. It literally has a supply chain of zero.
Value the
Tradition
Anita Rodriguez traveled the villages of Northern New Mexico and learned these techniques from the elder Enjarradoras, all members of the gobal sisterhood of female mud finishers. At CASA we support women in the construction industry.
Teaching teachers
CASA is working to build a network of adobe ambassadors who will take these building techniques and make them accessible to as wide and diverse an audience as possible. These workshops will also teach a viable trade, improve the existing skills of professional builders, provide authentic educational experiences for culture seeking visitors, and will teach self-help skills to marginalized communities in need of affordable housing options.
Images courtesy Daniel Sonis and CASA
Meet The Team
Anita Rodriguez - Founder and Creative Director
Anita Rodriguez, born in Taos in 1941, has a lifetime of experience in the preservation, development and teaching of adobe. Her generation lived in an adobe architectural environment, as children the absorbed by osmosis the social and cultural infrastructure that produced it - the pueblos, churches and villages of New Mexico - the oldest buildings on the North American continent. Anita’s doll house was made from tiny adobes cast in an ice tray. Today she lives in an adobe house she built and made into a showplace for earth building techniques.
Anita became the first licensed woman contractor in her area. From the 70’s to early 90’s she worked alongside her crew for private clients, contractors, architects, owner-builders, and volunteered her time and expertise for religious buildings of all denominations. She also served as contractor or consultant for several important historical restorations: Our Lady of Talpa at the CO Springs Art Center in 1979; The Martinez Hacienda and the Morada of Santa Cruz in 1980 in Taos; Hassan Fathy’s house interior, Gourna Egypt in 1981; Consultant for Bent’s Fort, In La Junta, CO in 1986; San Jose de Gracia in 1986; San Lorenzo, Picuris Pueblo NM in 11987; and Las Milpas, Santa Fe NM 1992.
She practiced, taught, lectured and wrote about the art of adobe finishing across the southwest, Colorado, Arizona, and was invited to Egypt in 1980 by Hassan Fathy, winner of the Aga Kahn prize for earth building. She toured Egypt with a team of Fathy’s disciples to the border of Ethiopia, tracing and documenting the techniques the Spanish brought to New Mexico to their original roots and original form.
She has brought sustainable earth building into public credibility. She has written or been featured in articles in Continental Airlines (12/85), Audubon Magazine (3/84) Christian Science Monitor, New York Times, Los Angeles Times, (11/83), MS Magazine ((5/81), Readers Digest “Working Worlds” translated into 32 languages, (1980). Her research and work is the original source for most of the existing information on the Internet about adobe finishing. She appeared on TODAY’S SHOW and GOOD MORNING AMERICA, and was awarded the Warner Brother’s Wonder Woman award and the Charles Strong Lifetime Achievement Award in 2018.
Angela Francis - Workshop Director
Angela Francis is a plaster artisan and earth builder, originally from Philadelphia, where she was introduced to the beauties of vernacular architecture and artisan craftsmanship. In 2004 she bought an abandoned shell of a Victorian house and learned how to fix it by doing worktrades with skilled tradespeople and fell in love with plaster systems and plaster repair in old buildings.
In 2011 she went to Oregon for some permaculture training and ended up being pulled into the natural building community once she was introduced to clay plaster.
She spent the next 7 years as a travelling journeywoman, learning from various mentors and gaining experience with a range of earthen materials: cob, strawbale, adobe, light straw clay, earthen floors, clay and lime plasters. In 2016 she spent 6 months in Japan with a Sakan (Japanese traditional plasterer), working and training with his crew. She has been in New Mexico since 2017, involved in the restoration and plastering of many of the old adobe churches, doing preservation on adobe structures within the national park system all over the Southwest US and teaching and sharing what she has learned about how to problem solve the interaction of our hands with these materials, from her experiences in many different climates, regions and traditions.
The throughline that drives this passion for mud is healthy, beautiful, regenerative and affordable housing for all, the acknowledgement of this kind of architecture's relationship to land, place and community, and a humble approach. She is currently working with Samas Design, doing earth and lime finishes in the greater Santa Fe area. She loves to plaster and she is thrilled to be working with Anita and Shemai and the whole CASA team to help share the knowledge and experience of the Enjarradoras of Northern New Mexico.
Anita Rodriguez says, "Angela has a passionate dedication to and love of quality work. She has mastered all the traditional specialties of the enjarradora, refined and polished them, and to that body of knowledge she has added Japanese techniques, enriching and expanding her repertoire. Furthermore she's a born teacher, she can eloquently express her reverence for tools and almost psychic connection with materials, and has the authentic, hands-on, job-site experience to back it up."
Mark Goldman - Engagement Manager
"Mark Goldman, architect, coordinator for the UNM-Taos Construction Technology program and champion of affordable and sustainable housing, was named a 2023 Unsung Hero on Oct. 4 at the 23rd-annual Unsung Heroes event, hosted by the Taos News at El Monte Sagrado in Taos. Goldman was one of nine Taos County residents recognized by a panel of previous honorees. This selection committee chose this year's Unsung Heroes based on their remarkable contributions to the community through exceptional business leadership and volunteer efforts." UNM Newsroom
"Mark has been a licensed commercial and residential general contractor in Taos, NM since 1989, was a Professor of Green Building Technology at UNM Taos, teaching Carpentry, Computer Architectural Graphics & Sustainable Building Systems Lab. He has a Bachelor’s Degree from the University of California at Santa Barbara in Studio Art and a B. ARCH Degree from the Boston Architectural College where he was the Cascieri Scholar, AIA Foundation Scholar & was awarded the 2004 Distinguished Alumni for Architectural Practice". Onyx Construction
Donald Wood - Funding Manager
Donald is a purpose-led, systems-oriented, justice-driven organizational leadership executive and consultant with 19 years of success in enterprise-wide culture-change management and collective liberation facilitation for clients spanning Fortune 500 companies, health care systems, international aid groups, government agencies, and nonprofits.
His approach to servant leadership is as a pragmatic idealist focused on amplifying the voices of the unheard, disrupting the unjust status quo, and acting as an ally in supporting individual and group capacity to lead equitably and inclusively. Recognized for innovating and launching award-winning programs and first-of-their-kind equity and inclusion building experiences, Donald excels at navigating social complexity through centering on truth, healing and cultural responsiveness. Donald is the Founder/Senior Consultant of One Eight Create Consulting (OEC)—a diverse collective of systems-change facilitators. Donald has a masters degree in communications--with a focus on civic engagement--from the University of Arkansas., also serving during that time as an AmeriCorps Fellow. He is also passionate about using his experience, power and privilege to serve in his community and on the national level. He has recently served in volunteer leadership roles for the Racial Equity & Hunger National Learning Network, the Arkansas Peace & Justice Memorial Movement, the Arkansas Minority Film & Arts Association, and AR Kids Read. Other notable community service includes as a community advisor for the University of AR-Medical Sciences & AR Minority Health Commission, member of the AR Department of Health’s HIV Elimination Task Force Member and member of the Little Rock (AR) Mayor’s Equity & Inclusion Committee. Donald has also been recognized for his service including in 2010 as international outstanding chapter advisor for one of North America’s largest collegiate leadership development organizations, and more recently, with the Outstanding Young Alumni Achievement Award at his undergrad alma mater. Donald has called northern New Mexico home for the past three years where lives with his amazing partner Jennifer and two adorable pups. And he is the overwhelmingly proud dad of a daughter who recently graduated from college in Chicago and now is gainfully employed!
Shemai Rodriguez - Project Coordinator
Just as generations of daughters before her, Shemai was trained as an Enjarradora by her mother, the renowned adobe expert Anita Rodriguez. She has decades of professional adobe building experience and has worked on such iconic historic structures as Taos Pueblo, The Ranchos Church and the Martinez Hacienda. She also has spent a lifetime housed within adobe walls. She has been active in community service most of her life, including as a former Red Cross volunteer and board member. She spent five years as a United Way Campaign Communications Manager. She has been a non-profit employee since she returned home to Taos in 2010. Shemai is values driven, passionate about and committed to ensuring that traditional adobe building techniques are preserved and made available to coming generations.
Daniel Sonis - Photographer and Videographer
Daniel Sonis is a Filmmaker, Musician, and Music Producer. His filmmaking has been focused on social justice documentary through which he strives to create positive change. Other filmmaking interest include cinematic short form pieces and music video. He has created dozens of short films for the Albuquerque nonprofit and educational communities. He collaborated with former New Mexico Poet Laureate Levi Romero on “Going Home Homeless”, which won the Local’s Choice Award at the Taos Shortz Film Festival. Another collaboration with Taos poet Olivia Romeo, “Bendicìon del Agua” was featured at the National Cowboy Poetry Gathering. As a music composer he composed a theatrical score for a production that won the LA Weekly’s Production of the Year Award, has written an orchestral composition that was performed at the LA County Museum of Art’s “Sundays at Four” concert series, and co-composed a theme for a PBS series. Daniel continues to be active in social justice filmmaking in New Mexico, having recently been the Cinematographer and Editor on a short film about local issues related to development presented at “The Paseo” in Taos.