Rina Swentzell remembers standing at the washbasin one day in the house where she grew up, her great-grandmother’s house at Santa Clara Pueblo, and hearing an odd sound. She looked up and saw a wide crack appear in the adobe wall in front of her. The crack grew quickly before her eyes. Rina was only nine or ten at the time, but instinctively she knew what was happening. She ran to her great-grandmother at the stove, grabbed her hand, and pulled her outside. As the two stood watching, the thick wall wavered a moment and then collapsed into itself, taking the roof with it. The old woman spoke quietly to her great-granddaughter while the dust rose before them, telling her to be thankful, that it had been a good house.

“She was very reverent. There was a sense of respect for the house,” Rina recounts. “Then after a while everybody came over, gathered up all the dirt, remixed it into mud, made new adobes, and rebuilt the house, and then we were living back in the same place.”

Now 67, Rina tells the story as a way of offering a glimpse into traditional Pueblo concepts of house and home that have been a central part of her life from an early age. Since that time she’s earned a master’s degree in architecture and designed and built—with her husband, Ralph, and their children—the house in Santa Fe where she’s lived for 30-some years. She’s helped three of her sisters renovate their homes, offered architectural and building advice to numerous friends, and served as a cultural, architectural, and educational consultant for institutions such as the Museum of New Mexico and the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian. Through it all she has retained a strong sense of how a home’s design and construction can reflect a deep connection with place, with community, with tradition, and with the surrounding landscape. Now the next generation is carrying on her family’s legacy of bringing beauty into the world—via clay.

 

 

 

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