The Adobe Alliance Blog/Journal
2012 Events
May 2012. Simone, together with colleagues Quentin Wilson of El Rito Adobe School, and Ronald Rael, author of the seminal volume Earth Architecture, will present their work in earth architecture at the annual congress of the Architecture Institute of America in Washington, D.C. May 17th. Masters in architecture Lauran Unzueta at McGill University initiated and has organized this contribution to the event.
Summer 2012. Dates and schedule forthcoming, collaborations in
- building housing of mud brick and bamboo with victims of the floods in Pakistan guided by architect Yasmeen Lari of Karachi;
- teaching women to build their own housing, invited by Technotierra's Lucia Garzon of Bogota, Colombia. Dates to be confirmed.
October 2012. Workshop at Adobe Alliance's Swan House in Presidio, Texas.
Fall 2012 Adobe Workshop!
Earth plasters + brick making + adobe roof building by hand + mixing mortar + harvesting cactus juice + much more
October 19 to November 2nd, 2012, all former students and new friends involved in design and earth masonry are enthusiastically invited to enroll in learning sessions focussed on slinging mud, mixing the soquete, or mortar, under instruction and watchful eyes and lively collaboration. We will learn to close the Nubian vault begun last year with final courses of small adobebricks , then apply the water-resistant plasters developed by Stevan de la Rosa and Pat Taylor, made of clay and sand, cactus juice harvested in situ, and lime. Adobero elder Santos Chavez, across the river, will teach adobe brick-making in wood moulds.
All this, and more, in the superb Big Bend country on the Rio Grande, facing the sierras of northern Chihuahua state, Mexico.
Tuition fees: A 3-day weekend $300. One week $600. Two weeks $1,050. For tuition grants or internships we need your volunteer fund-raising help well in advance.
Please enroll early: $100 deposit before September 1st sent to Adobe Alliance, Inc, account # 0032628301, attention Linda Smith, V.P., Los Alamos National Bank, 301 Griffin Street, Santa Fe, NM 87501. After September 1st, fees increase each by $100.
Details are on web, and questions go to Simone Swan, swan@adobealliance.org. Welcome.
Simone Swan
2011 Events
March 2011: March 6th through 13th, 2011. Participants were introduced to the craft of building a Nubian vault using small bricks measuring 10"x7"x1.5". Hands-on teaching and theory were offered in English and Spanish by Instructor Stevan de la Rosa of Baja California. Simone Swan taught design, history and gladly discusses, in English and French, experiences in earth architecture based on her apprenticeship in Egypt with architect Hassan Fathy (1900-1989).
Photo Credit: C. Theimer Gardella
April 2011: I returned from Chihuahua city where I presented part of my work on powerpoint, with a translator. However, I'd start various exciting topics in Spanish, then turn to the translator when stumbling on a word or a thought. After this rather comical and informal mix which the students seemed to enjoy and which a professor qualified as "adorable," I shall mobilize expert assistance to coordinate visuals and text.
I had the joy to meet a remarkable architect who presented before me, Mauricio Rocha Iturbide of Mexico DF. When we discovered our shared and profound passion for Louis I. Kahn, we promptly fell in love. Mauricio's rammed earth and adobe work is in Mexico, but he has worked in other materials in Europe. Mauricio is a few months younger than his good friend Rick Joy of Arizona, my favorite of all US architects, who has just turned 50; to my further joy I have just discovered he is the son of the revered photographer Graciela Iturbide!
In Chihuahua I was received, welcomed, sheltered, transported and spoiled by my good friends, both architects, Ana and Roberto Carvajal. For 48 hours basked in an atmosphere of optimism, charm and human warmth -- the very opposite of Santa Fe. Were Chihuahuaenses not living in an atmosphere of fear due to the unpredictable violence of the narco traffickers, I'd move!
There one appreciates the desert, the sunlight and dry air, the hills denuded of trees which blunt one's gaze. The eye rests on the freedom of vast distances.
April 2011: Samar Salma Damluji organised a 4-day conference on MUD, STONE & SHALE in Yemen (PDF). She is the author of two large, exciting books on the architecture of Yemen and on her restorations of palaces and villages in that wondrous area. We met in the late 70s at the house of Hassan Fathy in Cairo. Samar was a student of architecture at the AA in London, I an apprentice of Hassan Fathy's during a leave of absence from the Menil Foundation of Houston. For more information download the PDF above or e-mail Samar Salma Damluji directly at salmasamar@damluji.org.
We went touring the beautiful country of Yemen two weeks prior to joining a conference on its architecture and the materials of stone, mud and shale; while on the island of Soqotra off the coast of Somalia, we learned four days before, that it was canceled. Peaceful demonstrations for a regime change had just begun in February, then lit up in Sanaa like a bonfire after we had left. Download the Yemen PDF for more details.
July 2011. Hassan Fatima, in Memoriam 1993-2011, died at age 18. She was originally discovered at the dog pound in Marfa, Texas. She enriched our lives in Texas, New York, New Mexico.
My Louisiana Catahoula Leopard Hound
She finishes all the bacon treats
innocent and willful to the last,
I waiting for the vet to appear
with Fatima's injection.
A sphinx on the floor,
too big for my lap, she's poised
paws forward, her dear black nose
on one front leg, huge eyes shut
while I expect them to open.
Her sudden peace, her serenity, dim
the memory of weeks of mournful gazes
of incontinence and quivering legs.
The vision of her great beauty,
as she rests splendidly
brings a flash of joy from times past.
I see her breathing
since for eighteen years
i've never not known
her ribs to rise and fall
as if to assert I'm all yours.
But her heart has stopped.
She folds her exotic being
like a night flower at dawn.
She remains a classical beauty.
Simone Swan
Photo Yasmina Rossi, Swan House, Presidio, Texas.
September 2011. Simone was invited by Habitat for Humanity Southeast Asia in Bangkok to present her work on adobe design and the building by hand of vaulted and domed woodless roofs . The invitation was prompted by Fernando Morales, Mexican architect at H for H, who is actively promoting earth architecture in the desert regions of southeast Asia -- Australia, India -- and beyond, in central Asia.
"This large gathering, in contrast to most conferences, was spirited, optimistic, enthusiastic," Simone reports, "An energy among professionals from Thailand, Cambodia, the Philippines, Malaysia indicates to me a future of sensible and sensitive solutions in the field of housing built of non-industrial materials." As a result the Adobe Alliance will work this spring 2012 near Darjeeling with the Abari Group (see link on this website) to build in West Bengal an elementary school for local children and for refugees from Nepal. Materials are mud, either in bricks or rammed, and bamboo for structural elements and protection from rains. Nripal Adhikary, alumnus from a 2005 workshop with Adobe Alliance, is the architect in charge.
October 2011. Adobe Alliance presented at the Earth USA conference in Albuquerque, New Mexico, together with colleagues from around the world. The subject was social organizing of cooperative low-cost adobe housing with the theme that the roof is no longer a problem.
2010 Events
October 2010: Today we are thrilled to tell you that we are singled out in the exhibition catalogue of SMALL SCALE BIG CHANGE published by the Museum of Modern Art of NY. WE ARE IN IT HERE on page 14, after an introduction of the work of our mentor Hassan Fathy, begins a paragraph with "Activist Simone Swan..." Go see. Remarkable in our experience is that every word, every thought is exact. Mind you, the writer Andres Lepik is a scholar. Plus he is charming: We met him at his architecture department office last April 2010.
November 2010: We began Tuesday, November 16th to learn how to make a Nubian vault to roof an adobe house. The weather was perfect, the views were sublime, the silence was enhanced by the murmur of bees, the half moon echoes the form of the dome. As we built the Nubian vault with our small adobe bricks we gazed upon the 8,000 ft peaks, the Sierra Rica, across in Mexico with several lower ranges in the foreground, including a beautiful dormant volcano. To the west, toward the Chinati range, visibility was at least 40 miles.
Now in Santa Fe, from 87 degrees to 27. The adobe "fiesta" here on the border has ended, accomplishing little but we all had a good time. Our faithful Efren got sick from the dust storm; they bothered our sinuses and we cough a bit. Some did not appear out of general fear of Mexico. Too bad: the mainstream press does not know about our tranquil Big Bend area, far from Juarez or Chihuahua City. We crossed the border just about every day for fine meals at Los Comales, to see friends there in Ojinaga, Chih., to shop, and some to have their teeth cleaned at board member Dr. Rebeca Olivares's dental clinic.
Desert Acacia - Photo credit: Dave Pobst