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Simone Withers Swan, who introduced Nubian vaulted adobe construction to the Chihuahuan desert of Texas and Mexico at the turn of the 21st century, died in Tucson, Arizona, on January 16, 2025. She was 96 years old. Simone Swan was a legendary personality: mercurial, seductive, cultivated, curious, determined, imperious. She was by turns an architectural patron, architectural muse, construction foreman, and construction teacher. Based in New York City, where she started a public relations firm, Swan was recruited by Houston art and architecture patron John de Menil in 1964 to publicize art events associated with Menil and his wife, Dominique Schlumberger de Menil. From 1973 until 1977, Swan was the first executive vice-president of the Menil Foundation. Photographed with Andy Warhol, profiled in newspaper articles alongside Gloria Vanderbilt, Mica Ertegun, and Charlotte Ford, Swan was even the subject of a hit song by Carly Simon (Cow Town, from 1976s Another Passenger).From left: John de Menil, Andy Warhol, Simone Swan, Fred Hughes, Dominique de Menil, and Howard Barnstone in Buckminster Fullers geodesic dome for Expo 67, Montreal, 1967. (Courtesy Menil Archives, The Menil Collection, Houston)In Houston, she was the client for (but never lived in) one of the two original Tin Houses that architect Eugene Aubry designed for her and for gallery owner Fredericka Hunter. Louis I. Kahn was designing a weekend home for her in Southold, New York, the time of his death in 1974. She later commissioned Swan House, which Charles Moore designed for her in 1976 on the same Long Island site. It was a simple but poignant wood house that embodied what was most endearing in Moores architecture. She occupied the home for 25 years; later, she spent summers there and winters in West Texas. During the 1970s, architecture editor Peter Blake prevailed on her to write for his magazine, Architecture Plus, about contemporary architecture in Africa. Swans extensive friendship network included architects Howard Barnstone, Natalie de Blois, Carlos Jimnez, Christopher Genik, and Rick Joy.In 1975, Swan made the acquaintance of the Cairo architect Hassan Fathy. Between 1975 and 1980, she traveled to Cairo numerous times to help Fathy put his papers in order and to learn the basics of Nubian adobe construction. This was a traditional practice that Fathy became aware of in the 1940s, and which he subsequently promoted as a sustainable, socially responsible technology that enabled low-income people in arid climates to construct their own dwellings. What is singular about Nubian adobe construction is that it employs adobe domes and catenary adobe vaults to enclose buildings. No other materials are required, not even wood formwork. When, in 1991, Swan first visited the Trans-Pecos region of Texas, the far western tip of the state where El Paso and Marfa are located, she recognized parallels between its arid climate and desert landscape and those of Egypt. Adobe was already the most venerable building technology in the Trans-Pecos (and in the neighboring state of New Mexico and, across the Ro Grande, in the Mexican state of Chihuahua). In 1995, Swan acquired property outside the border town of Presidio, Texas, where she determined to build vaulted adobe structures. She found allies across the border in Ojinaga, Chihuahua: the adobe brickmaker Daniel Rodrguez Camacho, master adobera Mara Jess Jimnez, and adoberos Efrn Rodrguez and Roberto Hernndez.In 1998 Swan began construction of Casa Swan, a 1,600-square-foot, off-grid, desert house with adobe vaults and domes. With the aid of her colleagues from Ojinaga, she started an adobe construction workshop, teaching all phases of the manufacturing and construction process. Swan attracted an international array of students (including architect Ronald Rael) for what became the annual November workshop of the Adobe Alliance, the nonprofit she had started in 1993. Swan did not attract the support of officials in Presidio or Presidio County, for whom she remained an exotic outsider. Nor did she persuade people in Presidio or Ojinaga to build their own adobe houses, let alone launch a movement for self-built, affordable adobe housing. To document Swans work and that of the Adobe Alliance, Dennis Dollens wrote Simone Swan: Adobe Building, published by SITES in 2005. In 2016, she received an Honorary Lifetime Membership from The Earthbuilders Guild.View this post on InstagramA post shared by The Earthbuilders Guild (@theearthbuildersguild)Swans friend, Houston artist and patron Surpik Angelini, wrote of her: Simone was a soul whisperer to celebrated and upcoming artists, architects, anthropologists, philosophers, writers, filmmakers, musical composers, ecologists, freedom fighters, activists, and humble adobe builders, all geniuses in their own fields who changed our world for good. On a personal level, Simone was an unadulterated child, marveling at everything that brought new knowledge, and an old sage with an unerring wisdom rooted in many past lives in magnificent ancestral cultures.In a remembrance for The Earthbuilders Guild, Ronald Rael shared: We spoke often about the politics of adobe. I shared my belief that building with adobe is a political acta stance against capitalism and, in some cases, restrictive building regulations. It was a way to reaffirm ones connection to heritage, land-based practices, and sustainability, standing in opposition to a disposable, plastic society. Simone was equally passionate, and from those conversations emerged Adobe is Political, a mantra that became Simones tagline. Together, we envisioned architecture as more than constructionit was an ethical and moral statement, a social act with the power to transform. Simone Juliette Withers Swan was born in Antwerp, Belgium, on November 30, 1928, the only child of a Dutch-Belgian mother, Simone van den Berch van Heemstede, and an expatriate American father, Noble Withers. Swan spent much of her youth in what is now the Democratic Republic of the Congo. In 1949, she married Alfred Hjalmar Swan, Jr., in Los Angeles. They had two children, Eric H. Swan and Victoria Swan Takahashi, before divorcing. During the 2000s, Swan split her time between Presidio and Santa Fe, New Mexico, before moving to Tucson, where she lived with her daughter. After advancing age compelled her to sell Casa Swan in 2022, the Adobe Alliance suspended operations.By force of her personality and style, Simone Swan cut a swathe across the Chihuahuan Desert. She pursued the cause of adobe construction with dedication and diligence in the conviction that, as she asserted, adobe is political. Not only a material, adobe also became a method; a means of social reproduction; and an ethical imperative for building, repairing, and living responsibly in a damaged world.Stephen Fox is an architectural historian and a fellow of the Anchorage Foundation of Texas. He is a lecturer in architecture at Rice University and the University of Houston.
