Message #20121

[Bianca]

Swan's own house is now finished, although her artist's touch and commitment to locally produced materials put it about a year behind her original schedule. She added a freestanding, square guest room with an elegant dome, and a utility shed to house the batteries that power the home, recharged daily by a freestanding photovoltaic array. Recently she has spent more time than expected receiving reporters and photographers: the Houston Chronicle, Texas Architect, Preservation and Texas Co-op Power have all produced features on her work, which has given her a much-needed publicity boost.

"Now I know I ought to dress up and go to some foundations to see if there isn't someone who can extend micro-credit to people, underwrite an efficient office, help organize teams of owner-builders and so on," she says, "but I just haven't had the time. I'm just one person here. I don't have a staff. But now that the house is finished and we have prototypes on both sides, I can really concentrate on the low-income aspect, which of course is the heart of all this."

Swan may be working alone, but she has built up a reliable corps of local supporters, partly because, when she arrived, local interest in adobe was already rising.

"It's booming," says former Presidio High School principal Teddy Purcell, who lent office space to Swan before her house was habitable. He hoped to add an adobe masonry curriculum to his school's vocational offerings. "She's a great resource and nobody else does those vaults," he says of Swan.

"We just have to unite the poor and marginal people—that's me, too, you know—show them the houses, and then maybe we could make some kind of cooperative," muses Karl Downing, who owns one of the town's few tourism-oriented businesses. "I'd love to see lots of adobe here. It would be great for tourism and it would be pretty."

City Manager Michael Kovaks points out that in the construction industry, Swan faces "a skepticism that she's helping move toward acceptance. Some of the brick-and-wood building guys, of course they're skeptical, but then you get them out to see her place and they're sold. But anything new [in low-income housing] takes forever because it's public money and the taxpayers want something that will last. And I know by now that whenever someone says something like that when Simone's around, she'll pull out some picture of [an adobe] building in Egypt and say 'Look! This one lasted 3000 years!' So I think it will work in the long run, but it will take time to be accepted."

Meanwhile, Jimenez and her crew are up on Swan's roof applying the first of two coats of lime-and-sand plaster that will protect the adobe from rain. Although progress is slow, Swan takes some comfort in recalling the official resistance Fathy faced so consistently for a half century.

"If he could be here right now," she says, "I'd ask him first, 'Hassan Bey, do you find this architecture that I have built to be truly harmonious with the culture, with the environment and the climate?' Now, is it?" she asks, pausing to look about with a self-critical eye. "I hope he would agree. I really hope he would."

But as for community-building and her role as a "barefoot architect," Swan says, "I know what he would say about that! He would say, 'Simone, you've already created a community link with your mason, plasterer and helper, with Daniel [Camacho] and many others. It takes time for the rest to come. To be authentic, to have real change, it takes a lot of time.'"

And over on the other side of the river, as he beats earth, water and straw each morning with his feet, Daniel Camacho is learning the same lesson.



Dick Doughty once spent much of a year carrying bricks and mixing mortar for a West Virginia chimney mason. He is now assistant editor of Aramco World.