Jacques Servin isn’t afraid to get his hands dirty.
And on a warm Saturday afternoon in downtown Tucson, neither are his University of Arizona students as they mix dirt, sand, water and buffelgrass. They’re making adobe bricks that could someday be used in low-income housing projects, while also helping remove an invasive grass that threatens native desert ecosystems and fuels wildfires.
The messy work is part of a School of Art special topics course led by the internationally recognized media artist and activist Servin, a visiting professor who enlisted 10 undergraduate and graduate students to assist local buffelgrass adobe builder David Walker in realizing a decade-old vision.
“Digging deep in the mud pit made me realize how perfectly this applies to the ‘bottom of the barrel’ metaphor — everybody knows that the sweetest apples are at the bottom,” says Beihua Guo, a second-year MFA student in Photography, Imaging and Video. “I’m fascinated by the course. Everyone is pursuing something that’s going to be able to save a human being, no matter what Mother Nature throws at them. ‘Buffel-brick’ is the answer.”
Servin thinks so, too. As co-founder of the Yes Men, who use socially engaged art and satire to confront corporate greed, Servin calls the buffelgrass adobe project “revolutionary” — because Walker’s idea is to eventually pay unhoused people to help build their own housing.
“I thought it was the best idea I’d ever heard, and I wanted to help make it happen,” Servin said. “Another revolutionary thing is that it’s turning the scourge into a resource. So, it becomes a positive thing. The weed gets used and it disappears.”
Public presentation set for May 6
Beyond brickmaking, Servin’s class is producing risograph-letterpress posters, videos and a website to raise awareness about buffelgrass and how it can be used to develop community-driven, affordable housing. Students also are meeting with city officials about building codes and other issues — and will hold a public presentation on May 6 from 5 to 8 p.m. at the School of Art lobby and atrium, 1031 N. Olive Road.
“(Servin’s) absolute sincerity is what impresses me most,” Guo says. “If you look at the premise of using a highly flammable, invasive ecological disaster to build homes, you might think we’re making a really strange satire. And yet, it turns out that these things actually work and could be funded by Tucson and the university to help people.”
During their Wednesday class session in the Art Building, Guo is joined by fellow School of Art students Fiona Doherty, Josiah Lamas, Bella Mayer and Alex Scherotter; History major Clare Jones; College of Architecture, Planning and Landscape Architecture (CAPLA) students Annamaria Pongratz, Abigail Power and Lauren Stock; and MS student and CAPLA lecturer Sheehan Wachter.
They make the bricks on Saturdays, taking turns at different stations at the Barrio Buffelworks Adobe Brickyard, 931 W. Mission Lane, just west of downtown near Mission Garden.
As the students shovel and mix the mud and grass in wheelbarrows and troughs, others pack the mixture into molds — sliding the long, fresh bricks into neat rows under the sun to dry.
Calling the course “an exciting interdisciplinary studio,” School of Art Interim Director Karen Zimmermann is impressed by the students as they “manufacture materials and advocate for change through public demos and policy work.”
“These skills will help students address future issues and provide a model for future community and collaborative work,” she says.
Buffelgrass bricks are resilient
To help give the class a long-term vision, Servin turned to Walker, who has organized community buffelgrass pulls on “A” Mountain and used it to build for over 20 years. Students have promoted the Saturday events to the public, and Walker also invites high school students from the local Nosotros Academy to help out.
“Nice and easy,” Walker tells students as they try to lift a brick from the mold. “Take a deep breath … and pull straight up.”
The beige-colored bricks can dry in one to four weeks, but Walker says during the summer heat it might take just a couple of days.
“I’ve built three casitas with adobe buffelgrass,” Walker says, including one in his backyard 23 years ago for his mother-in-law when his son was born. “It’s my favorite room.”
The casitas are “pretty raw on the outside, with no finish, but they’ve lasted in the weather,” Walker says. “The adobe on the surface might wear out, but then it hits that buffelgrass, and it can’t erode anymore. The grass acts as a stabilizer and an insulator.”
When he moved to Tucson some 30 years ago from southern California, Walker built straw-bale and rammed-earth homes. “I’d been wanting to try (buffelgrass adobe), but I didn’t want to do it on my own. It’s such a good idea because it involves the community in picking the buffelgrass and making the bricks — and we need low-income housing.”
“I’m in love with the idea that this is 4,000 years of history below our feet,” Walker says. “There are pit houses underneath us, and we’re using the same earth. It’s hyper-local.
“Native Americans were making adobe into huts forever, so it’s nothing new. But they didn’t have buffelgrass, and if they did, they probably would have used it because it’s pretty strong material.”
In the 1930s, the U.S. Soil Conservation Service introduced buffelgrass to Southern Arizona for cattle forage and to control erosion. Planting continued until the 1980s, when it became widely recognized as an invasive species dangerous to the desert.
College gives Servin thumbs-up
Given the low-income housing shortage in Tucson and hoping to “dig ourselves out from under a giant corporate system,” Servin pitched the idea for the buffelgrass adobe class to Zimmermann and College of Fine Arts and Arizona Arts Dean Hasan Elahi, whom he met years before.
Both administrators loved the project, even though “I didn’t know how to build anything,” Servin says with a laugh. “But I do know how to organize and process the class. And everyone seems like they are getting along really well.”
Servin is happy to help shape the next generation of creators at the University of Arizona, as he has done previously through teaching appointments at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts and the Parsons School of Design.
The Yes Men produced three feature-length films — including “The Yes Men Fix the World” — and screened them at film festivals, universities and art institutions. In one of their most well-known actions, Servin impersonated a Dow Chemical spokesperson during a live television broadcast, drawing global attention to the company’s ongoing failure to address the catastrophic Bhopal disaster.
Servin, a 1986 University of Arizona graduate in math, gave the Fall Convocation keynote speech to College of Fine Arts graduates in December 2025. Comparing the world’s current problems to a Jenga tower collapsing. He told students “the blocks are there for the artists to play with — and that’s what we do best. I’m really convinced that we’re more likely now than ever before … to effect real change in the world.”
For Servin, his class is also a way to effect change “by literally digging ourselves out from under the big corporate building trade — in Tucson at least — while providing housing, work and community for the most vulnerable members of our society.”
“It’s completely outside the machinery of capitalism,” says Servin, his hands caked with mud. “We actually can house everybody without relying on corporations.”
