Simone Swan: Adobe Building

motto: Adobe is Political.

Over the last five years I have known and talked with Swan during summers when she resides in Santa Fe. In 2002 I first visited her at the house she built in Presidio and where she has based Adobe Alliance. But it was only in July of 2003 that I began to question her with the idea of writing this essay. Swan is a gifted cook and we met many times over her Thai curries and talked.

Often general but equally often focused, our conversations illuminated some points important to cover here. I was curious how someone coming from Swan’s background of directing a cultural foundation, someone based in New York and then Houston, decided to go to Cairo and study with the master Egyptian architect, Hassan Fathy, and then, further, how she decided to transfer that learning to the geographically and culturally isolated Big Bend area of West Texas.

Swan’s elegant and urbane conversation not only weaves her own story, it also entwines parallel cultural and social history, embracing the listener, welcoming questions, asides, and diversions. For this essay I’ll bypass most biographical information (she is working on her own book) but some basic chronology is useful. Here is how Swan described meeting Fathy in an article she wrote for Aramco World.

It was during a dinner party in 1972 that I heard my host announce the completion of a film on “the greatest architect of the century, Hassan Fathy” . . .

All I could think was “Hassan who?” Yet I 18 • Simone Swan: Adobe Building