Much like traditional foodways, natural building materials are firmly rooted in the places where they’re found or made. Their use represents creativity and skills passed down over decades or centuries, and their popularity often expanded as migration patterns unfolded. Each of the historic materials we’ve chosen to explore below—adobe, tabby, and coral stone—provides a tactile experience that links the built environment to the earth and sea.

Down to Earth: Adobe

Adobe ranks as one of the world’s oldest building materials, dating back thousands of years and used by ancient peoples on multiple continents. Despite its antiquity, adobe is made using “pretty much the same process” today, says David Wessel, a principal at Architectural Resources Group (ARG).

Adobe-making starts by mixing soil and water. Often an organic component, like straw, is added to the mixture to help bind it and prevent it from cracking. The material is packed into wooden molds, and the bricks are cured in the sun.

In the United States, most adobe structures are found in parts of California, Texas, and the Southwest where the soil has a high clay content, resulting in adobe “that will stay together and that will dry without disintegrating,” says Wessel. The dry climate of these regions also keeps the bricks stable. The structures are commonly covered with a layer of protective plaster, and often feature roofs with long eaves to direct rain away from the walls. If the plaster is well maintained, the adobe bricks behind it can last for centuries.

At Cooper-Molera Adobe, a National Trust Historic Site in Monterey, California, the adobe buildings are plastered, while the historic wall that surrounds the property is exposed to the elements. In the 1980s, California State Parks (which leased the site at the time) completed a substantial restoration project that included structurally reinforcing and reconstructing portions of Cooper-Molera’s then-crumbling adobe buildings. Forty years later, the bricks that make up the site’s oldest structures remain in largely good condition. Those include the Cooper Adobe (circa 1827), today a museum; the Diaz Adobe (circa 1842), now Alta Bakery and Cafe; and the Spear Warehouse (circa 1836), now Cella Restaurant & Bar. The National Trust rehabilitated Cooper-Molera, originally the home of sea captain and merchant John R. Cooper, and converted it into a shared-use site in 2018.

The project also included drainage improvements that prevent water from pooling around the base of the adobe structures. Between this and the plaster restoration, Miroglio says, the Cooper and Diaz adobes “should last a very long time.” —Malea Martin

Shell Game: Tabby

Inside the restored Adam Strain Building in the Atlantic coastal town of Darien, Georgia, visitors now get to view something that is rarely exposed on purpose: a wall section of tabby, a traditional building material with roots going back hundreds of years.

Composed of oyster shells as aggregate, which is mixed into water, sand, and lime made from burned oyster shells, uncovered tabby has a deeply textured appearance that looks almost primeval, like a cross-section of some ancient substrate. Primarily found in areas along the Southeast coast, traditional tabby is normally covered in a surface material, such as plaster or stucco, that also contains lime from burned oyster shells. Its marine contents are hidden from view and protected from the elements. When exposed to wind and weather, however, tabby deteriorates quickly.

Thought by many to have origins in Africa and/or Southern Europe, tabby became popular in Georgia in the 18th century. (It also experienced a later revival, but at that point it was made with white cement instead of lime, so it was strong enough to be left exposed.) Traditional tabby is formed when oyster shells are burned to create a lime that acts as a binder. This material is then mixed with water, sand, and more shells and poured into forms to cure. Building with tabby has long been associated with enslaved communities along portions of the Southeast Atlantic coast.

In addition to reusing as much of the original tabby as possible, and employing a clear, stabilizing consolidant on its surface, the Strain building team also incorporated new sections of tabby as needed. To take the pressure off the tabby walls, they installed an internal steel moment frame system that bears the weight of new flooring and mechanical systems. “This building is never going anywhere, because of that steel structure inside,” says Ecker, who led the project with Greg Jacobs, managing partner at Landmark. “It’s a nice mix of the old and new.”

The Savics have since opened Tabby House Brewing Co. and Coastal Darien History Museum in the two buildings, intentionally keeping a couple sections of the shell mixture exposed so visitors can see it for themselves. “We were fortunate to find experts who were willing to work on this material that’s so different from anything else,” Marion Savic says. “When you’re talking about tabby, you need people who know what they’re doing.” —Kim O’Connell

Ancient Origins: Coral Stone

For builders in South Florida in the early 1900s, geology was destiny. A combination of events over the previous 100,000-plus years—from the occurrence of the last Ice Age to related changes in sea levels and tidal patterns—helped create the limestone that underlies the Miami-Dade region and the Florida Keys. All this geological activity yielded two different kinds of stone used for buildings, and today they’re both commonly (and somewhat confusingly) referred to as “coral stone.”

The first type, oolitic limestone, doesn’t generally contain coral. “‘Coral stone’ is a popular misnomer,” says Jose Vazquez, an architecture professor at Miami Dade College. “It sounds nicer, more romantic.” Instead, this typically cream-colored stone is filled with spheres made by calcium carbonate deposits that formed around grains of sand.

Also called Miami limestone or oolite, it’s found throughout much of Miami-Dade County and the southern half of the Keys. The Miami Circle, one of the most important archaeological finds in North America, was carved into an oolite deposit by the Tequesta people about 1,500 to 1,700 years ago. Quarried oolite later became popular during the early development of modern-day Miami. Bahamian laborers who immigrated to the area starting around the 1870s brought quarrying and masonry skills gained from their own oolitic landscape.

RLA and RJHA have each also worked at Vizcaya Museum and Gardens, a spectacular 1916 waterfront estate in Miami. Both types of coral stone appear throughout its gardens and Mediterranean Revival–style buildings, in the form of walls, columns, pavers, staircases, statues, and other details. In certain cases, cast stone replicas have replaced storm-damaged coral stone items, such as some of the oolite statues by sculptor Alexander Stirling Calder on Vizcaya’s historic barge in Biscayne Bay. But much of the site’s coral stone remains in place, adding to its tropical-paradise atmosphere.