“Dollens has written beautifully about one of the most passionate, committed, and innovative advocates for traditional earthen construction in our time.”—Ed Crocker. Crocker Ltd., Architectural Conservation
“Swan’s life and work perfectly capture the spirit and romance of the American West. Only at the risk of its own irrelevance will the architecture profession ignore the lessons in Dollens’ book on Swan’s practical yet elegant and modern adobe solutions to housing.”—William Menking, editor of The Architect’s Newspaper
Like an organism sitting and breathing on its site in the Chihuahuan desert, the Swan House is a building of organic beauty and hybrid cultural intelligence. Simone Swan has created an architectural and environmental project that re-examines and promotes traditional adobe building while introducing compatible forms, such as the Nubian vault and dome.
Swan studied with the great Egyptian architect Hassan Fathy in his Cairo studio and after his death in 1989 adopted his mission of helping house the world’s poor.
Simone Swan: Adobe Building is the first book to discuss and illustrate Swan’s architecture while also chronicling one of her annual workshops in Dollens’ first-hand account. Dollens suggests that by biologically analyzing historic adobe we may be able to hybridize its constituents as replacements for current toxic materials, creating new biomimetic, adobe-related building materials suitable for green architecture.
Dennis Dollens is the author of D2A: Digital to Analog; DBA: Digital-Botanic Architecture; Exodesic: Structures, Tumbleweeds, Electronics; and El Proyecto TumbleTruss / The TumbleTruss Project.
