A Visit to
Swan House ~
Presidio’s unique adobe
teaching house inspired by the
legacy of Egypt’s greatest
20th century architect
Story and photographs by C.M. Mayo
I
first spied it from a Jeep on Casa Piedra Road: a
huddle of oddly shaped brown buildings baking in
the sun. I’d arrived at its modest gate after a mile and
a bit of crunching over gravel up from the Rio Grande
near Presidio on the U.S.-Mexico border. What interest-
ed me then – I was just starting my book on far West
Texas, focusing on the probable route of Alvar Nuñez
Cabeza de Vaca, the would-be conquistador of Florida
who got lost – was the landscape. Such raw, open vistas
were easy to imagine seeing through that ill-starred
Spaniard’s eyes. From a cloudless dome, the February
sun beat down on the rocks and tangles of mesquite and
clumps of small barrel cactus, prickly pear cactus and
ocotillo that stretched on for what must have been, for
anyone on foot, a merciless number of miles. To the
northwest loomed the bulk of the Chinatis, to the east,
the jagged and lavender Bofecillos and into Mexico, the
Sierra Grande.
“That’s Simone Swan’s house.” My guide, Charlie
Angell, rolled down the window to show me the object
of our detour. He’d been showing me the sights along
the Rio Grande: the Hoodoos, Closed Canyon and the
narrow shallows in the river at Lajitas where Cabeza de
Vaca, then nearly eight years into his odyssey, may have
waded across. Even today, in many places along the river,
you could walk right up to the bank and pitch a stone
that would thunk onto someone’s alfalfa field in Mexico.
Coming up Casa Piedra Road, we’d seen no one – just
a flash of a jackrabbit. Already Charlie was making the
U-turn back to Presidio.
“It’s Egyptian,” he added.
This, in a land of décor inspired by what I had come
to think of as Ye Olde Cowboys and Indians, struck me
like thunder. Well, was it like the inside of a Disneyland
ride? Did she worship Isis? Once home, I Googled.
Simone Swan, it turned out, is an adobe visionary
with a distinguished career in the arts, including many
years with Houston’s Menil Foundation. Her house is
10
not Egyptian, exactly, nor a whim but a work-in-progress
used by her Adobe Alliance, a nonprofit for teaching
earthen design and construction.
And the Egyptian influence? Hassan Fathy. (Not
Fathy as in “Cathy,” as an Egyptian acquaintance was
quick to correct me, but Fot´ hee.)
Another Google search brought up the English trans-
lation of his book, Architecture for the Poor, published by the
University of Chicago Press. When I got my hands on a
copy, I learned that Fathy was Egypt’s greatest 20th cen-
tury architect, renowned for rescuing ancient architectur-
al features and techniques for building with mud brick, a
material he passionately advocated for as abundant and,
when used appropriately, comfortable, ecological, sani-
tary and beautiful. In his cover photo he might have
passed for an elderly Mexican lawyer with his halo of
gray hair, mustache, red turtleneck and poncho-like
burnouse. He squinted from behind his glasses in an
expression at once pained and kind—entirely under-
standable once I learned of his battles with the Egyptian
bureaucracy, then enamored of Soviet-style steel and
concrete housing, and his nonetheless unyielding com-
mitment to building housing for and with the fellaheen,
the peasants who lived in abject poverty.
Born in 1900 into a wealthy family in Alexandria,
Fathy did not set foot on one of his own family’s many
farms until he was in his twenties, and when he did, the
wretchedness of its workers’ houses shocked him. His
solution, in part, was to build with better design and mud
brick. Mud could be dug up easily; bricks could be
formed of the mud, animal dung and a bit of straw and
then left to bake in the sun. The challenge was the cost
of timber for roofing and, for brick vaults, timber for
propping them up during construction. Egypt imported
its timber from Europe. Then World War II broke out.
Ancient Egyptians built vaults, many of which had
survived for hundreds, even thousands of years, without
using wood, but how? Every one of Fathy’s attempts to
Cenizo
First Quarter 2013
Nubian vault under construction, Swan House.
construct a roof without wood collapsed in a heap of
bricks and dust. But then his brother, who was working
on the Aswan dam, mentioned that the Nubians, the
dark-skinned people of Southern Egypt and Northern
Sudan, roofed their houses and mosques without using
wood. In a matter of two visits to Aswan, Hassan Fathy
found the masons, barefoot and in turbans, who showed
him their technique of roofing by means of parabola-
shaped layers of adobe bricks laid at an angle against a
back wall. The bricks had extra straw for lightness, and
a groove made by the scrape of a finger before they’d
dried on one side, so as to give the mortared brick
“grab.” Mortar was a mix of sand, clay, and water.
Using no tools other than an adze and a plank for scaf-
folding, two men threw up a fine mud-brick roof over a
10’ by 13’ room in one and a half days.
Marveled Fathy, “It was so unbelievably simple.”
When Simone Swan was living in New York, a house
with two courtyards came to her in a dream. And it
seemed like a dream to me that, less than a year after I’d
first glimpsed Swan House from the road, I was sitting
with its owner in the Nubian vault that was the living
room, the shell high above us aglow with the orange light
of morning. A graceful eighty-something with a crown
of snow-white hair, Simone Swan was telling me how at
mid-life in the 1970s she had gone to Paris for the Menil
Foundation’s exhibition of the surrealist Max Ernst’s
paintings, and at a dinner party met a filmmaker who
had just wrapped a documentary on the world’s greatest
architect.
Simone laughed. “I said, Hassan Who?”
Intrigued, the next morning she bought his book,
which she read in her native French. It changed her life.
She had been considering going to architecture
school, but inspired by the aesthetic and social vision of
Architecture for the Poor, she wrote to its author. Fathy
answered in his own hand, “I open my country and my
heart to you.”