Message #20119

[Bianca]

She recalls it was in 1990, during the memorial celebration for Fathy that she organized in New York, that she "came to a conclusion of significance." She thought of the awards Fathy had received and the countless articles, books and seminars his life's work had spawned. "But who, I wondered, was carrying out his most vital wish, the very task of helping the poor of this world to be housed decently? No one was doing the work! I resolved then, quite simply, to continue it myself. I was aching to do hands-on building, and to realize materially the learning I had acquired."

But where to carry out such a mission? For Swan, raised in the US and central Africa, educated in Europe, a former director of the Menil Foundation in Houston and a long-time resident of New York, it could have been anywhere—and that was part of her dilemma. The next fall she took a vacation to Big Bend National Park in Texas. En route through Presidio, Swan caught sight of the historic adobe Fort Leaton being restored on the outskirts of town. "I was just dying to get my hands on adobe," she says, and the next spring, she found herself volunteering on the project.

"Of course, once I was there I talked about Hassan Fathy this and Hassan Fathy that, and pretty soon they asked me to do a demonstration of the vaulting I kept talking about. We invited several local masons, and one was a woman who kept very quiet but I could see that she was just watching, very intelligently, less skeptically than the others." She was Maria Jesus Jimenez, a soft-spoken mother of three who says she finds "great contentment" in masonry. Later, while Swan taught her all she could, Jimenez helped introduce Swan to the community. Together they formed the Swan Group to serve the broad, binational valley, where the parched rattlesnake mountains and the hardscrabble population both bear a remarkable resemblance to those of Upper Egypt.

On an early summer afternoon, with the thermometer pushing 41 degrees centigrade (106°F.), Swan's kitchen is pleasantly warm. Above, a vaulted ceiling traces the catenary arch that peaks at 4.4 meters (14½'), giving the three- by eight-meter (10' x 25') room the feel of an old Middle Eastern market. But this ceiling is disconcerting to an eye accustomed to the plumb verticality of Roman and Gothic vaults: The parallel courses of bricks, which Swan has left unplastered to reveal the technique in use, list off plumb like a less-than-full shelf of books leaned casually against a bookend. The effect imparts a sense of motion that belies its own physics, as if the thrust and weight of the vault is not straight down into the walls—as it truly is—but rather along the length of the room toward the rear wall, like a string of dominoes frozen in mid-fall. On the other side of the H-shaped house, the vaults over her bedroom and the guest room are much the same. Yet all of them, like their countless millennium-old archetypes in Nubia, will likely long outlive the masons who raised them.