We Are Knox...

Jim Hallock ’69 has a good sales pitch. The types of homes he builds don’t
burn or attract bugs. They stay cool in the summer and warm in the winter.
And they’ll last. Just ask Paul Revere.

Hallock is founder and president of Earth Block, Inc., a company that builds modern-style homes out of adobe, or machine-made compressed blocks of dirt. And Hallock, who majored in history, can cite statistics to prove his pitch about earthen construction. Such as the fact that Paul Revere’s house, made from adobe, has been around since 1630. Or the fact that the adobe Palace of the Governors in Santa Fe, New Mexico, is the oldest continually occupied public building in the United States. Or that the pueblos in Taos have lasted more than 1,000 years.

 "I've been reading voraciously about all this stuff for the last 13 years, since becoming a 'blockhead,'" he says. "Adobes have been around for millennia, and I’m trying to reintroduce the concept to the modern world."

Hallock moved to San Francisco directly after graduating from Knox and became a carpenter and construction worker. Eventually, he developed a steady business of buying "fixer uppers" and restoring them to high-quality pieces of property. In 1993, he learned about a machine that produces blocks of adobe. He had been searching for an alternative construction method for the home he wanted to build for himself and his wife Nora, who suffered from sensitivity to chemicals. Hallock wanted to build with as natural materials as possible, and the idea of earth blocks caught his attention. He built his own home in Durango, Colorado, using the machine, and then went into business building earthen homes.

Hallock is passionate about this ancient method of home-building and believes it is the best one for the future. "It's more cost-effective and environmentally friendly than using concrete and lumber," he says. "Those require oil to process and ship, and they deplete natural resources. By the time a two-by-six [board] gets to your yard, we as a society have burned an inordinate amount of petroleum. The manufacture of concrete alone produces eight percent of the carbon dioxide that goes into the atmosphere, destroying the ozone. I really do believe earthen construction is the solution to world housing."

Despite the benefits of building with the energy efficient earth blocks, Hallock is one of only 10 to 20 professional earth-block builders in the country, the majority of which are in southwestern states where adobe-like structures -- or "faux-dobies," as Hallock likes to call them -- are already common. While traditional adobes are baked in the sun, which means they can only be made in desert regions where the sun shines for months with no rain, the earth-block machine is set up directly at the building site, allowing for earthen homes to be built in any region. Hallock hopes the idea of building modern-day adobe homes will become more mainstream across the country now that the price of oil -- needed to ship lumber and other building materials -- has gone up drastically. "It will be one of the silver linings that will come from [the price of oil being] $10 at the pump," he says. "But it's a cultural thing and an economic reality that we [Americans] build out of wood."

Hallock's work with earthen construction has not been confined solely to the Southwest. In 2000, he served as a consultant to the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) in Honduras after Hurricane Mitch, assisting in the reconstruction effort by teaching how to build earthen homes. Currently, Hallock is working as a consultant to the Loreto Bay Company of Baja California Sur, Mexico, in the creation of a community of 6,000 homes built of earth blocks -- the largest such community in the world.

Read more about Hallock's work at www.earthblockinc.com.