Cover of Hassan Fathy’s book.
Soon Swan found herself in the shadow of Cairo’s
Citadel, ensconced in the guest-room of his Mamluk-
Ottoman house. She worked on his archive (later taken over
by the Aga Kahn Foundation). “When I would pull a book
out from the shelves, a cloud of dust would fall on me!
Frankly, I thought I was mainly going to write about him. I
had no idea that I would become a designer-builder.”
Swan House, named in honor of her mother and built
in 1997, has the form of an H, the great hall “an exalting
space, like in Italy,” as Simone described it, with its 16-foot-
high flat truss roof connecting four wings: kitchen and liv-
ing room, master bedroom and guest bedroom, each a
Nubian vault. So there were, as she’d seen in the dream,
two courtyards, one open to the sunset, the other to the
sunrise, in turn providing relief from the harshness of
the northern Chihuahuan Desert’s sun and wind.
As part of her workshop, Simone had given us stu-
dents a tour that also included the domed guest house,
two sheds, and then, from the western courtyard, a clam-
ber up the outside stairs to the flat roof with its latticed
parapet above the great hall.
Always, everywhere, from the narrow doors and tiny
windows, and especially here, from the flat roof: that
jaw-dropping view. To the east, a hawk disappeared into
the maw of the arroyo. South, on the Mexican side of
the river, rose the igneous monolith of the Sierra del
Diablo where, as the Indians recalled decades later,
Cabeza de Vaca had planted a crucifix.
“How could I resist when I saw this?” Simone said. “I
was seduced!”
She’d come to the Big Bend as a guest of her friend
from New York, the artist Donald Judd. While driving in
from Houston, she visited Presidio’s adobe Fort Leaton,
then undergoing renovation. Welcomed as a volunteer
upon her return from New York, she rented a room in
Presidio, put on overalls, and set to making mud bricks,
giving talks, and building a Nubian vault. Here on the
U.S.-Mexico border, in a climate similar to Egypt’s and
where she perceived an acute need for more affordable,
ecological and attractive housing, she determined to stay,
committed to adobe, to “show people what they could
do themselves.”
In the three days of the workshop, we shoveled clay
and sand through a sieve and mixed mortar in a wheel-
barrow. We met Jesusita Jiménez, an expert mason who
had worked on almost every aspect of the house. We
talked about Dennis Dollen’s monograph, Simone Swan:
Adobe Building and of course, Hassan Fathy.
On a brisk walk across the desert, Simone told me
about her childhood on a coffee plantation in the
Belgian Congo where “elephants would appear in the
jungle.” Over coffee in the kitchen, she recounted the
successes and travails with Swan House and the local
communities on both sides of the border. From the east
patio, we watched a full moon rise as thin as a water-
mark, then a wafer, then, floating in a sea of stars, a
marble. Midmorning, doves came to drink from a pan.
On a windy afternoon, cold enough to want gloves, bal-
ancing on the top of a ladder, I lay bricks in the para-
bolic arch of another Nubian vault—this one for an
office. I hacked up a bisnaga, a type of barrel cactus, to
macerate in a bucket of water for the plaster. A carload
of us skipped over the border to make abode bricks in a
maestro’s dirt yard surrounded, ironically, by cin-
derblocks. And each time we returned to Swan House,
indeed with each hour, it seemed to emanate like a liv-
ing thing (charming Sphinx) a subtly different quality
of feeling. The walls changed colors, sometimes rosy,
sometimes a honey-gray; bright straw-speckled brown;
slate. And inside, as one of the participants, architect
Paul Dehenny put it, “It is as if the small openings allow
only the most beautiful light inside — always pleasing;
always just right.”
>)(=$)",;$,")/&$"./
?)(,9!)-&$ ($/+)-, ()+-&$
"./$@!+/-&$A
>)(=$="*&$"./$*(& $,")/&
($'#$-)&$"./$="@"%+.-&$A
D!)$,")-'!#$,!& (=-)$&-)"+,-
"./$F-?4?"&-/$&-=+.")&$
#+##$9-#*$$(!$,)-" -$".$
(! & "./+.@$*!?#+," +(.<
!"##$!&$'()
*)+,-&$"./$/- "+#&
123456747687$
&9#-+;+<,(=
!"#$%&''()$*#))$+#!,-')
!"#$%&'&()**+#,-#.*#/(#,01*####2"#3-#40++*(#5-6)6####7"#8'**#,*9:#;%<<-')#&(+#,'&0(0(=
Cenizo
First Quarter 2013
11