Adobe is usually associated with Spanish and Mexican California, but after Americans moved in, adobe remained a practical material where the climate was hot and lumber scarce. Many if not most surviving adobes from the 1830s through the 1860s—including the so-called Monterey Style—also embody Greek Revival architecture. American adobes were sometimes built with redwood siding, sometimes had it added later, sometimes had it removed later, and single-wall load-bearing additions of vertical redwood planks are also common.

Once Mission and Pueblo Revival architecture were invented in the 1890s, the search for authenticity (and inexpensive materials) produced the Adobe Revival, which gained new impetus in the 1930s from the manufacture of water-resistant Bitudobe (a portmanteau of bitumen and adobe, “a quart of oil in every brick”). Bitudobe buildings were constructed throughout the West, but their post–World War II history is particularly rich in San Diego. (Age 0–5 I lived next door to Bitudobe’s most important architect in San Diego [and one of America’s earliest Expressionist artists], New Mexican Bill Lumpkins, but only realized who he was decades later. I still have a masterful watercolor he gave my parents that hung in their dining room for the rest of their lives.)