Here in the fourth largest city in the country, there seemed to be an inordinate emphasis on “small” projects.  Nine awards were given for new buildings recently completed.  Five of those were given to single family homes, two were for interiors and one was for a very clever carport and parking lot.  Only one award was given for a building of over 50,000 square feet.  Although there were dozens of substantial sized schools, office buildings, medical facilities, government and university buildings etc. submitted, only one was selected for an award.  Whereas one in six of the houses submitted might have won an award, more like one in sixty of the larger buildings won an award.  Having kept up with dozens of such awards programs over the years, it strikes me that the AIA Houston program is not so unusual.  Why are so few larger buildings chosen as models for the best of architectural design in programs like this?  (I should note that this is certainly not sour grapes on my part since the one large building selected, the General Services Administration Field Office, is the only one submitted in which I had any involvement.)

Maybe one could argue that the really good designers are mostly doing smaller houses and interiors and the designers working on larger buildings are just less skilled and therefore less appropriate to be recipients of awards.  That argument seems seriously flawed given the fact that some of the same designers who win awards for “boutique” projects have much less luck when they submit their larger projects.  It also seems very unlikely that all the best talent in the field has somehow gravitated to these little projects and eschewed participation in projects that might have a broader cultural role.  I think this very common pattern of awards recognition is symptomatic of an obsession with the small in our field that is very problematic.

Don’t get me wrong.  I love doing single family houses and other small projects, and have almost always had one going on at pretty much any point in my career.  They are far less complicated than larger buildings, and there is much more opportunity for control on the part of the architect.  Clients and users are less complex and hydra-headed.  Both fees and construction budgets are generally more flexible and much higher per square foot.  Their smaller size inherently makes it simpler to get your arms around the problem and understand every detail.  Frankly, they are just easier.  I think that is why so many projects in architecture schools are small.  They are manageable, and satisfying results can be achieved by a single student working alone for the limited time-frame of a semester.  Maybe we are trained in school to think this is the premier vehicle for good design–a project that can be boiled down to a simple concept, conceived in a napkin sketch or two, worked through in one head over a few months and presented in a handful of snappy drawings.

Unfortunately, the kinds of buildings our culture needs from us as architects are not that simple.  Children in our cities need schools that will stimulate them and facilitate their education, and these will not be tiny little schoolhouses anymore.  The workforce of our society needs office buildings, production facilities and other work places that will be nurturing, efficient and beautiful places to spend 8+ hours a day–often more hours than we spend in our homes.  Our cities need multi-family housing environments that create sustainable patterns of living while also making well-scaled, neighborly places for everyday life.  We need healthcare environments where both medical staff and patients feel supported and where design contributes to medical advances and individual patient healing.  All of these needs require large, complex buildings with a diverse range of users, complicated processes of design and construction and a wide array of architectural skills.

Shouldn’t we be recognizing, awarding and learning from the best of the kinds of buildings our society desperately needs us to design well?  Shouldn’t well designed large buildings–like schools, office buildings, laboratories, retail centers, airports, convention centers, university buildings, public buildings etc.–be purposefully represented in our awards programs?  In the 25+ design awards juries I have served on I have made it a point to be an advocate for the practice of architecture that serves large numbers of everyday people in their daily lives.  I am certainly proud to recognize the exquisite small project that is full of control and finesse.  But these projects should stand, in design awards programs, alongside a good complement of projects that make a substantial contribution to solving the larger architectural problems of our society.

Given the precipitous economic decline that followed, it is actually quite phenomenal that so many of these projects have survived to either reach completion or at least to keep enough momentum that their outlook is still optimistic. On the civic scene, the new Community Events Center on Auditorium Shores is up and thriving. The expansion of the Austin Convention Center has more than doubled that facility’s capacity while also giving it a powerful new “front door” presence and a much more integral position in the fabric of the Sixth Street Entertainment District. The new City Hall is emerging from its mammoth construction excavation-slowed down, but still on track.

Dreams of a badly needed new generation of cultural facilities have been more vulnerable to the economic downturn. But while a number of particularly well-conceived plans for new Austin museums and performance places have stalled or died, the University of Texas has picked up some of the slack by garnering substantial private resources and expanding its longstanding role in enriching the Austin cultural scene. The staid old HRC Building on a prominent corner of Guadalupe and 21st Street has been transformed into the remarkable Ransom Center Galleries. Sophisticated and original both in the nature of its exhibits and its fresh new architectural character, this treasure-trove for the humanities is just the kind of jewel that can give Austin its own unique cultural distinction. The new Blanton Museum of Art has broken ground on its landmark site where north Congress Avenue terminates at the UT campus and promises to be a commodious home for an extraordinary collection which the University has been unable to display.

Significant strides have also been made to plug some of the “snaggle-toothed” gaps in the fabric of downtown Austin. Even when the infill involves an isolated or unremarkable hotel or office building replacing an open parking lot, the new energy and activity generated contributes to a livelier downtown. When there is a well-coordinated effort to raise the bar in terms of both architectural and urban design, as in the mixed-use CSC/AMLl/City Hall district centered on Second Street, the effect can be more synergistic. It is new and refreshing to see urban residential buildings balancing the overall chemistry of uses downtown in a significant way. Large, sophisticated projects like the Nokonah and Austin City Lofts predict a new way of living in the city and a new citizenry with a substantial stakehold in downtown.

Exciting recent developments, unforeseen in 2001, also promise to enrich our urban and architectural landscape in the foreseeable future. Whole Foods has, once again, proven itself a model of creative Austin entrepreneurship by investing in an expanded headquarters downtown. Most exciting of all, is the decision to replace one of downtown’s most notorious eyesores-the unfinished INTEL “mainframe” on Republic Square-with a new Federal Courthouse to be developed through the Federal Government’s prestigious Design Excellence Program.

But while all of these projects bode well for Austin’s commitment to be a proud, progressive city which can protect its uniqueness while moving forward into the future, there are signs of great danger as well. Start-from-scratch developments on large parcels of land at the city’s periphery have not provided the same positive outlook as downtown. Even when enlightened developers have entered the arena with the best of intentions, their efforts and those of their architects seem to be stymied.

Why is it that even in tough economic times the cancer of cacophonous, confusing suburban sprawl proliferates unabated? Banal subdivisions continue to ravage Hill Country landscapes, while strip malls and “big box power centers” spring up along roadways and clog intersections. The national/international market of retail chains seems to have invaded Austin particularly mercilessly over recent years, leaving their standardized boxes surrounded by seas of asphalt-often abandoned in a few years for bigger boxes with bigger parking lots at the next “hot” new retail corner.

The battle cry of “Keep Austin Weird” is, for me, a call to all of us to help keep Austin unique-a reflection of the remarkable assets we have inherited in terms of the physical environment and a bellwether for creative and dynamic development focusing on a rich quality of life for the future. We do that by voting with our dollars to support the institutions and businesses that build in a way that makes our community more particular and independent and by avoiding generic, faceless development like a plague.

Barnes’ landmark Walker Art Center of 1971 in Minneapolis established him as a creative innovator willing to take a fresh look at what an art museum might be – both as a home for art and as a focus for a city’s cultural life in the late 20th century. His Sarah Scaife Gallery of 1974 for the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh demonstrated his ability to insert an important new building seamlessly into a strong existing context and his willingness to sublimate his individual work in order to create a larger fabric. By the time he received the commission for the Dallas Museum of Art in the late 1970s, Barnes was well equipped to take on what would be his largest museum project and to hone ideas he had developed earlier into a rich, mature work of architecture.

Barnes had very strong and consistent notions about architecture in general and about art museums in particular. Educated at the Harvard Graduate School of Design under Walter Gropius and Marcel Breuer, he has been lauded for his unfaltering fidelity to modernist principles of “purity, simplicity, quiet elegance, and integrity.”[1] In his museums, and strikingly in the Dallas Museum of Art, four strong design parameters predominate.

CONTEXT
From the earliest projects that established his reputation, such as the Haystack School in Maine of 1962, Barnes drew significant design inspiration from the site and regularly created buildings inextricably linked either to natural topography, as in the case of the Haystack School, or to urban fabric, as in the case of the Dallas Museum of Art. Considered a “practitioner of contextualism even before it became an architectural buzzword,”[2] Barnes was deeply involved in the urban plan of the sixty-acre Dallas Arts District from its inception. Harry Parker, Director of the Dallas Museum of Fine Arts during that period, has noted that while others contributed to the overall district plan, “the basic concept of the Flora Street spine of what was later to be called the Arts District, and the position of the Museum as an anchor within the Arts District, came directly from Ed Barnes.”[3]

The most fundamental concept of the building, in fact, became the creation of cityscape rather than of building. The plan became a kind of neighborhood of volumes and open spaces oriented to both internal and external passageways. The primary orientation device of the Museum became a long ramped spine with various functions – permanent galleries, theater, bookstore, temporary exhibition space – able to open or close on their own schedules “like buildings on a street,”[4] as Barnes described it.

Not only the plan arrangement but also the exterior character of the building was shaped by considerations of context. Barnes justified the severity of the building’s massive limestone facades on the grounds that a low, flat building in a downtown environment must be “rugged, even brazen”[5] to hold its own in a high-rise world. Shapes of building faces, locations of entries and windows, and, most notably, the creation of the emblematic vault as the heart of the Museum and as the termination of Flora Street all responded to Barnes’ impressive interest in making the building a natural outgrowth from its urban context.

MOVEMENT
In museum design, Barnes noted, “Flow is more important than form.”[6] He believed that patterns of movement through a museum should often be the “genesis of the design” and that passage through the rooms should always be “effortless and logical.”[7] Beginning with his extraordinary helical organization of galleries stepping up continuously around a core at the Walker Art Center, Barnes consistently used movement as a memorable design feature, drawing museum visitors gradually and intuitively through what were often large, complex series of spaces.

In the Dallas Museum, “flow” is accommodated significantly by the striking ramped spine, which links the site’s lower north elevation (with its primary auto access point) and the higher south elevation (with primary pedestrian orientation to downtown). But close attention to movement is also powerfully evident in the parallel axis of circulation through the south Sculpture Garden, across the axis of the vault, and through the terraced volumes of the permanent collection. As in the Walker Art Center, visitors are gradually transitioned up partial levels, in this case drawn by light from courtyards carefully aligned with stairs. Movement up, around, and through the collections, with changing vistas constantly enriching the viewing experience, provides a powerfully orchestrated museum experience. It also allows a large building with multiple floors to be continuously linked, providing greater curatorial flexibility.

FOCUS ON ART
Barnes believed that “within the museum the architect must not upstage the art.”[8] Directors who have worked in his buildings describe his galleries as “serene, seemingly anonymous backgrounds for art” (in the case of the Walker) or as “clean, unadorned, and well proportioned … a friendly environment for works of art from the whole range of the history of civilization” (in the case of the Scaife Gallery). In the Dallas Museum of Art, as Harry Parker noted early in the building’s life, “one is first conscious of the objects on display, not the … building itself.”[9]

Barnes’ original environments of long clean white walls, diffuse light, and minimal detail in the Dallas Museum suited a broad range of art from classical works, to Mondrians, Monets, and Rothkos, to the ancient American and African collections that are the Museum’s strongest points. Though substantially altered today, the Barnes approach exemplified in these spaces became a standard for art museums, especially in Europe, where architectural reticence became a watchword for gallery design. Even today, the work of architects as diverse as Herzog and de Meuron and Yoshio Taniguchi strongly support Barnes’ attitude toward the relationship of art and architecture in the museum environment.

REFINEMENT
The aesthetic strength of the Dallas Museum of Art lies most substantially in its subtlety, elegance, and refinement. At the time of the building’s opening, nationally renowned reviewers such as John Morris Dixon and Peter Papademetriou applauded its “minimalist aesthetic,” its “primitivism … recalling vernacular structures,” its “understatement,” “sobriety,” “decorum,” and “ascetic sensibility.” The Indiana limestone skin, laid up in two-foot six-inch courses (the basic module of level changes) and crisply chamfered at every third course to create strong horizontal shadow lines, was immaculately detailed. Windows and other openings were incised with bladelike precision. Inside, stair rails, exhibit cases, light tracks, and air diffusers received lavish attention in both placement and detailing. Natural light provided by courtyards and perimeter skylights (which Barnes had been refining for several decades) was bounced, softened, diffused, and made adjustable in order to render it appropriate for diverse applications.

Barnes’ refinement, both inside and out, was elegant and sophisticated but also extremely vulnerable to the ravages of weathering, wear and tear, and changes in curatorial attitude. The design precision and exactness so evident on opening day is less clear now, though still discernible on close inspection.

The original 1983 Dallas Museum of Art building, along with the Hamon Building added to it a decade later, demonstrates Edward Larrabee Barnes’ strengths as a late-modern designer as well as his contributions to defining the contemporary genre of art museums. The project also took a major step in defining a whole district of Dallas and laid claim to a large segment of downtown that is only now reaching full fruition as an arts district. Without the confident strength of the Dallas Museum of Art building quietly staking out the western edge of the district and without its towering vault giving presence and climax to Flora Street, it is hard to imagine that the resolve to build an arts district would have continued over the past twenty years. As the eastern end of the Dallas Arts District finally matures, it is time to appreciate once again the importance of that first bold step to make the Arts District a focus of architectural excellence – Edward Larrabee Barnes’ Dallas Museum of Art.

[2] John Morris Dixon, “Art Oasis: Dallas Museum of Art,” Progressive Architecture (April 1984), 127.

[3] Edward Larrabee Barnes Museum Designs (Katonah, New York: The Katonah Gallery, 1987), 31.

[4] Dixon, “Art Oasis,” 128.

[5] David Dillon, Dallas Architecture 1936-1986 (Austin, Texas: Texas Monthly Press, 1985), 173.

[6] Edward Larrabee Barnes Museum Designs, 6.

[7] lbid.

[8] lbid.

[9] Ibid., 31.

The Jimenez addition houses a 9,OOO-volume library that reflects the Whatleys’ diverse areas of interest. Ted is a former headmaster of a private boys school and an outspoken voice for educational reform; Melba is a successful businesswoman, community activist, and an architectural patron and client for a museum and a landmark home in Dallas, both designed by Edward Larabee Barnes. The book collection they have amassed together spans fields ranging from literature and politics to education and architecture.

The programmatic challenge was not only to build a serene, contemplative place for books, conversation, and thought, but in so doing, to be considerate of an already impressive architectural context. The Whatleys’ existing house, designed in 1983 by Hal Box (then dean of the School of Architecture at the University of Texas at Austin) is organized by a biaxial, Kahnian plan. Originally, a car court separated the building from a less formal pool and guest quarters. The compound, with buildings rendered in stone, was burrowed into a Texas hilI-country thicket, invisible from the street and neighbors’ houses. The site was compositionally complete just as it was.

Respectfully distancing himself from Box’s original house, Jimenez floated the 2,400-square-foot library/guesthouse above the old car court, creating a direct link between the main house and its outbuildings. The open space beneath the library became an almost incidental carport, flanked by small stone-clad rooms (one a guest room and exercise space, the other gardener’s shed) that serve as piers to support the library’s span. Very little new ground space was claimed by the addition, as the car court continued to play its original role. The sense of privacy and seclusion within the thicket was also retained, despite the presence of a strong and sizable new element.

In his treatment of materials, Jimenez took cues from the existing house, but also melded these with fresh, new directions. The stone piers roughly match the split-face local limestone used in the original house, but their surfaces are slightly crisper in execution, with deeply raked joints and meticulous coursing that reflect the tight precision in detail of the bridge above them. Standing-seam metal, a prominent feature in the pyramidal caps of the original house, is employed not only for the shallow monopitch roof of the library but also for its entire east facade. The angled top plane seems to fold down over the back face, creating a subtle interlocking of roof and wall. The other three exterior facades are tautly skinned in flat, lightly stained cypress siding. A composite wood and galvanized steel frame is exposed on the west-facing porch, executed with clean, careful detail. Stainless-steel acorn bolts, decking and handrails made of ipe (a rich South and Central American wood), and elegant proportions project a sense of care and refinement on the otherwise simple front.

But the project’s real tour de force is the great open space of the library itself. Quiet and gracious, the room embodies timeless architectural values that transcend style or affectation. Proportions are studied and harmonious. Materials (knotty maple floor, clear maple shelves, white painted wallboard) are clean and simple. The light is generous and ethereal, drawn from clerestory windows incised into the taller eastern side of the roof pitch and projected from the lower western side. Inside, the staggered openings of the eastern and western windows arch toward one another across the gently curved ceiling, dropping a softened, diffused light into the room. There is a dignity and presence here that contrasts strikingly with many overwrought contemporary designer homes and the faux period mansions of the current conspicuous-consumption boom.

Jimenez and his clients have created an exemplary residential lesson in how to achieve quality without pretension. In the world of high-end residential building, this project is quietly rebellious in its modesty.

Along with the bathwater went a handful of very talented designers for whom postmodernism was a broad world of right-headed ideology and not just a grab bag of visual gimmicks. In the early 1980s, the heyday of postmodern style, Taft Architects John Casbarian, Danny Samuels, and Robert Timme – was a fresh, dynamic triumvirate with top-grade pedigrees and adventuresome spirits. Their early projects were full of verve and energy, though limited by miniscule budgets and a constructional naiveté inevitable in young architects. At just about the time these young Turks began to win promising commissions and their maturity as builders began to catch up with their daring as designers, the gods of architectural style changed direction. Burdened by restrictive labels and associations, Taft’s developing direction got less notice than it deserved. And now, two decades after their initial fame, the firm has built up a very distinguished body of work rooted in legitimate postmodern notions like diversity, inclusivity, and particularity. Notably absent are the trappings of postmodern style.

The Williams House in Houston, the second house Taft has designed for clients Casey and Joanna Williams, is a good example. Reinforcing a postmodern respect for diversity, it could hardly be more different from the first, which was built in Austin in the mid-1980s. Though they loved this grander, more formal home, the couple, who are both artists, preferred their new one to be more spare and austere, to feel like a “beach house” with lots of light and openness.

Longtime friends of both Samuels and Casbarian, the clients wanted to give the architects as much freedom as possible in terms of design vocabulary. They knew they would get options: Postmodern processes revel in alternatives and choice. For the Austin house Taft had presented seven initial schemes, and for the Houston house they did three. Casbarian notes that design for Taft is about “inclusivity-being about more than one thing.” He and his partners generate options in order to be able to experiment and free their minds of dogmatic constraints.

Inclusivity, in the case of the Williams House, embraces inspirations as diverse as Tuscan, Texan, and French farmhouses; the early work of Le Corbusier; and industrial materials such as metal siding, concrete block, and chain-link fencing. But there is also a real particularity to the Williams House that makes it more than just a collection of favorite elements. “The look of a house,” notes Casbarian, “always evolves out of a program and its relation to the site.” The need for north light in a live-work home for two artists and the desirability of private courtyard views on a tight urban site strongly shaped the building’s diagram. It has a U-shaped plan clustering all of the rooms around a south-facing living space with monitors grabbing a softer, balancing light from the opposite side. The tight budget and informal lifestyle of the clients provoked the use of inexpensive materials and simple detailing.

The Wiliams House rejects the singularity, certitude, and universality of a bygone era in favor of an accepting ambiguity and synthesis of diverse elements appropriate to our time. It is a rich, broad-minded little house, full of responsiveness and invention. Speaking a language that is both fresh and familiar, the Williams House represents an appropriate cultural manifestation of the contemporary postmodern condition.

Plagued by an acceleration of excess and bombast, architecture periodically needs a course correction, a return to what is fundamental and authentic. Just as Marc-Antoine Laugier’s primitive hut contrasted with the excess of its rococo context, so a modest, elegant ranch shelter near Garden City, in West Texas, provides an antidote to the intemperance of contemporary architecture. Designed by Rhotenberry Wellen Architects, it stands as a basic response to the circumstances that bred it.

The client, Becky Reynolds Cotton, grew up nearby, part of a prominent West Texas landowning family. She purchased the 14,000-acre Flying B Ranch in the mid 1990s to consolidate her holdings in the area. Cotton asked architect Mark Wellen, whom she had known for 20 years, to design a shelter for the property where she could stay while doing business in the district. Wellen’s first scheme occupied the most luscious site on the ranch – hard beside a spring-fed creek and a spectacular pecan tree. Complications of the flood plain and extremely high foundation costs moved both client and architect to reject the scheme. The original dramatic, but troublesome site was replaced by an amenable clearing 100 yards away, adjacent to a compound of existing ranch buildings and a fine cluster of pecan trees.

The simpler site evoked a more modest design response. Wellen decided against using a San Antonio or Midland contractor in favor of a local builder who had never worked with an architect. He based his design on a standard 16-by-24-foot steel bay system commonly used for barns and sheds, repeated five times. The two bays to the north and one to the south are open; Wellen enclosed the other two with sliding corrugated-metal panels and screens. A sleeping loft perches above the kitchen and bathroom, which line the north wall; a fieldstone fireplace occupies the southeast corner.

Wellen produced a sketchy set of drawings and initiated a process of good-natured wrestling with the contractor over details, coaxing quality design from the project through on-site decisions and hard-nosed bargaining. Wellen salvaged wood for the interior partitions from a little one-room building on the ranch where Cotton grew up. He left weathered red paint on the antique pine, and assembled the boards in the most straightforward way possible. Recycled stone came from an old smokehouse and was laid, with coaching from the architect, by the contractor’s regular mason. The corrugated galvanized-metal skin is a staple on Texas ranches; it will dull over time to a matte gray and rust in 20 to 30 years, which is what the architect intends.

The building occupies its site and the larger landscape with ease and confidence. In summer, pecan trees to the west block the hot afternoon sun, and prevailing southeast breezes cool the house when the large sliding walls are open. The generous south-facing porch looks across a meadow to a creek beyond, catching the sun in the cold West Texas winter and protecting its occupants from bitter north winds. Clearly a working ranch building, the shelter is comfortably compatible with the preexisting structures around it.

The poetic authenticity of this little “hut” nestled in a powerful landscape has a heritage its architect quickly acknowledges. Wellen’s mentor, Frank Welch, was a pioneer of fine modern design in West Texas a generation ago. His exquisite Birthday House (1964), now sadly altered beyond recognition, inspired this project, which Wellen calls Becky’s Birthday as an homage. Welch and Wellen share a tough, real tradition of modernism that is less about modern forms than about modern life. It embraces industrialization, prefabrication, and straightforward building methods. It makes magic out of practical considerations of sun, wind, and climatic orientation. It revels in an appreciation of everyday things akin to Le Corbusier’s reverence for the common wine bottle.

Laugier’s hut is often singled out as the beginning of a modern sensibility, which in the mid 20th century became a style. To its credit, this West Texas hut recalls the sensibility more than the style, and reminds us how rich and responsive modernism can be.

Slowly, tentatively, several Texas cities are creeping back toward a genuine urbanism in their downtowns. Fort Worth and San Antonio have led the way. Sundance Square, revived retail, new residential options, and the Bass Performance Hall in Fort Worth add up to a lively downtown scene that stands in stark contrast to the tired, dull Cowtown Downtown of just two decades ago. San Antonio’s River Walk has long been viewed as a great suction machine that pulled what urban life might have existed in downtown San Antonio below street level, creating an outstanding, single-use entertainment district but not a vital, multifaceted urban core. Over the last decade, that seems to be turning around. New civic and recreational venues, expanded housing, a new public library, and a large retail center, as well as a comprehensive street and sidewalks improvements program in the 1800s have given downtown San Antonio a shot in the arm. It, like downtown Fort Worth, is beginning to feel like a real city- diverse, lively, authentic, and full of character. Downtown in these two cities has become a destination again-a place to plug into the life and identity of the city and a source of great civic pride.

The kind of transformation Fort Worth and San Antonio have initiated makes good fiscal sense. In an increasingly mobile society where individuals and corporations have many choices about where they will call home, identity and quality of life become important economic factors in a city’s future. Generic metropolitan sprawls with no heart and limited lifestyle possibilities are losing out to savvy cities which tend their identities better. The urban virtues long evident in Boston and San Francisco have become economic calling cards for Seattle, Portland, San Diego, and dozens of other American cities (including Fort Worth and San Antonio), which have noted that revived downtowns are an essential feature for the desirable city of the 21st century.

Austin, Houston, and Dallas are taking steps in the right direction. Austin’s now got an upscale, well-stocked grocery store downtown, and a big multi-cinema complex is in final planning stages. Houston will build its new baseball stadium downtown, and a very broad range of housing – from SROs to lavish apartments – are springing up in heretofore unthinkable places. On a Thursday afternoon a few weeks ago, I sat in a 10th-floor office in downtown Houston and watched construction on the Rice Hotel across the street, which is being converted to residences. The next day I sat in a 10th-floor office in downtown Dallas and looked across the street at lofts in the old Titche-Goettinger department store building. This is mixed use. This is new for Houston and Dallas.

It was recently reported that-whereas five years ago only 250 brave residents lived in downtown Dallas nearly 10,000 new units have sprung up since then or are about to materialize within a 1-mile radius of Main and Akard streets. Dallas now boasts three lively entertainment concentrations within roughly that same radius-Deep Ellum , West End, and McKinney Avenue. DART’s light rail is a rousing hit making downtown more easily accessible from other parts of the city.

So where does the new arena fit into this picture? It is certainly one more in this series of good moves in Texas cities that will benefit downtown life. The chosen site is terrific – a wasted industrial tract at a critical juncture in the urban fabric. Even in the worst case scenario (imagine the kind of isolation and suburban single- use mentality which Reunion Arena embodies so perfectly), it would still bring frequent, citywide activities downtown where they belong. Whether you’re a sports fan or not, it is impossible to escape the importance of athletic events in consolidating the identity and spirit of a city. Just look at the massive explosions of energy and solidarity that come to cities locked in a championship playoff. That kind of spirit is most appropriately focused downtown.

But it is important that the new arena not just be located downtown. It should become a contributing building block of downtown. To do that will require a serious commitment to urban design quality in the critical planning stages currently underway. It will be in the design of the new arena, its parking, its support facilities, and its surrounding district that this important civic project will succeed or stall as an engine for downtown renewal.

The precedents for both success and stalling abound. Ancient Rome was, after all, nestled between three great sports facilities-the Coliseum to the west, the Circus Maximus to the south, and Domitian ’s stadium to the east. (Today’s popular Piazza Navona is a sort of radical adaptive reuse of Domitian ’s stadium, retaining the shape of its long, oval track.) One can still stand by the Arch of Constantine in front of the Coliseum and imagine the crowds pouring out after an event onto the adjacent Caesar ’s Forum, Augustan Forum, and Trajan ’s Forum. These three great civic spaces would have been teeming with urban life-from markets to political rallies-all much enhanced by the activity of the coliseum. Many important Roman cities, from Verona in the Veneto to Merida in Spain, were built around great multipurpose arenas which were a vital part of the formula that made Roman culture justifiably famous for its savvy city building.

Probably the most successful American city in integrating sports events into urban life is Boston-famous for both Boston Garden (basketball and hockey) and Fenway Park (baseball). The “warm-up” of Kenmore Square adjacent to Fenway Park is palpable in the hours before a game as crowds gather and mingle and eat before they filter toward the ballpark. After a game, the bars are full of fans rehashing highs and lows as they let the traffic subside before heading home. People still talk about the defining urban party of the century in Kenmore Square when the Red Sox were in the World Series in 1967. Fenway Park is a tremendous urban asset and activity generator, beautifully integrated into its dense, near-downtown context.

Cleveland is a germane case-in-point to look at just now as well, having recently completed both an arena and a ballpark at the edge of their well-planned downtown. Though both facilities probably deserve some credit for the Cinderella reawakening of downtown Cleveland over the last few years, neither Gund Arena nor Jacobs Field seems fully satisfying in terms of its integration with the surrounding city. The arena, which is just a block or two from Euclid Avenue and the city’s main square, is a hulking behemoth separated from the rest of the city by a ring of parking lots and garages which surround it. Sky bridges take fans directly into the arena from garages so, for many, there is no real contact with downtown to be experienced. Though one can observe some trickling street life generated by arena patrons and though one can find a few bars and cafes with names like “Coach’s” in the adjacent neighborhood, there does seem to be an opportunity lost in this drive-in/drive-out arena. Dallas should do better.

The new arena site indeed has “opportunity” written all over it. So much could be accomplished for downtown through this one important project. The TU Electric plant site lies at a critical hinge between the West End and Uptown. These two thriving retail/entertainment districts are surprisingly close to each other but seem miles apart because of the chasm created by Woodall Rogers Freeway and the industrial wasteland of which TU Electric was a part.

Already, there have been tentative steps to build a bridge across that chasm. The classy new Centex building pushes the Crescent/McKinney Avenue action southwest, a bit closer to the West End. A bar or two has jumped the freeway north, extending the West End toward Uptown. (Woodall Rogers is, fortunately, elevated in this stretch.) Magnolia Station and Magnolia Hill townhouses have been followed by a whole string of new residential developments filling in the eastern side of the gap bit by bit. It is the TV Electric plant site, however, that could transform these tentative steps into a solid, vital link which might begin to knit downtown Dallas into more than a series of isolated events and start to make it a viable whole. What would it take to make that happen?

Three guiding urban design principals must lead the conceptualization of the new arena site and its surrounding area if this project is to live up to its potential as a boon for downtown Dallas.

Connection. Piecemeal real estate development has been the bane of most American downtowns in the late 20^th century. There is an almost irresistible tendency to look at what makes good sense for this or that site internally rather than looking at any given project as a cog in a larger urban system. Because the old TU Electric site is so deliciously definable (all those streets and railroad tracks outline its boundaries so clearly), it will be tempting for architects, planners, and developers to make a tidy package of it.

Great cities don’t work that way. The Grand Boulevards in Paris were a brilliant 19th-century device to tie all the former medieval villages of the city together and make it easy to wander seamlessly from one district to another. The ubiquitous American grid has been a handy mechanism for accomplishing the same purpose in cities from New York to San Francisco. Bold steps need to be taken to connect the neglected TU Electric site back into downtown to make the arena district an extension of the West End and a natural outgrowth from Uptown.

Mix. Ralph Waldo Emerson said, “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.” He must have had modernist planners in mind. The inclination to segregate uses (housing on these three blocks, restaurants on this street, parking all clumped together at this end of the site) is so ingrained in us by now that it is hard to even discuss planning issues without falling into the trap of consistency. When you are working with a district that will inevitably have one powerful use-a 500-pound gorilla like an arena-it is particularly important to counter consistency with variety. This site needs a rich, well-orchestrated mix of activities and land uses.

Scale. Many of the components of this project and this part of town are inevitably big – big freeways, big arena, big parking structures. If care is not taken this could become a part of town where we all feel like Gulliver in the land of Brobdingnag. Big things, however, need not be gross or overpowering. If scaled properly they can be big and comfortably human-size at the same time. The great train stations, exhibition halls, and cathedrals of European cities accomplish this beautifully. Fair Park, closer to home, does a fine job of making buildings with many acres of square feet feel pedestrian friendly. The architecture of the arena and the buildings around it must make human scale a primary concern in shaping both spaces and building forms. With proper connections, an appropriate mix of activities, and a user-friendly urban scale, the new arena project could constitute a big victory for downtown Dallas. Bringing thousands of people who are in the mood to have a good time into the city core several times a week for most of the year can hardly be a bad thing for a district that strives to be a destination. The arena will inevitably make a big score in this regard.

But the bonus points, the ones that will likely make the difference between winning and losing for Dallas’ underdog downtown, will be hard fought. They can only be won through careful, strategic urban design.

In 1966, on the 25th anniversary of the first list, the Architectural League produced an updated version, which was edited by Robert A.M. Stern and supervised by Philip Johnson. New Yorkers accounted for just under half the total; more than 20 architects from the rest of the country were included. California was again well represented, as were Chicago and Philadel­phia, and, for the first time, Boston. Again, no one from Texas was on the list.

Why mention it? Because the 1966 list was uncannily prophetic. It predicted many of the leading architectural lights of today, including Peter Eisenman, Michael Graves, Charles Gwathmey, Hugh Hardy, William Pederson, Hugh Jacobson, Richard Meier, Charles Moore, William Turnbull, Donlyn Lyndon, James Pol-shek, Jaquelin Robertson, Der Scutt, Robert Stern, Stanley Tigerman, and Robert Venturi.

TEXAS ON THE VERGE OF LEADERSHIP

In 1986, the Architectural League was at it again. The group discarded the Forty Under Forty moniker—possibly because they had included more than 40 names on each of the previous lists and because the ages of those cho­sen had often crept a bit past 40. The new pub­lication, Emerging Voices: A New Generation of American Architects documents a lecture series hosted by the League over the last five years. It includes a great many New Yorkers. California and Chicago are still well rep­resented. This time, however, of the 46 archi­tects or firms selected, five are from Texas—as many as have appeared from any single state, aside from New York, on either of the previous lists.*

Nor is the League’s list the only indication. Over the past decade and a half more attention has been paid than ever before to architecture in Texas. The Houston firm Caudill Rowlett and Scott was named AIA Architectural Firm of the Year for 1972. New York Times critic Ada Louise Huxtable in 1976 called Houston “the American city of the second half of the 20th century.” Shortly thereafter, Lon­don’s Architectural Review devoted an entire issue to Texas, co-edited by David Woodcock of Texas A&M. Louis Kahn’s Kimbell Museum in Fort Worth (1972) and Philip Johnson’s Pennzoil Place in Houston (1975) gained recog­nition as world-class landmarks. Touring groups of Japanese architects “fujichromed” the Kimbell’s serene vaults for Eastern posterity, while international books on high-rise design and late-modern style copped Pennzoil’s sleek lines for cover images. For the first time, buildings that were influential in the world of architecture were being built in Texas.

As the state entered the 1980s, both Texas firms and Texas buildings began to assert a greater presence in national design competi­tions. Taft Architects in Houston won AIA design Honor Awards in three out of four years between 1982 and 1985 (they were ineligible in 1984 because they were on the jury)—an impres­sive record, particularly for such a young firm. In the 1986 Honor Awards competition, two of the nine buildings selected were from Texas (a house in Dallas by Edward Larrabee Barnes and Herring Hall at Rice University by Cesar Pelli), matching two each from New York and Califor­nia in the same competition.

Is this new attention a flash in the pan or can Texas architecture be moving into a new era? Can we imagine a strong national leadership role for Texas architecture in the future? Can this place become a consistently fertile context in which influential forms and ideas in architec­ture are regularly germinated?

I think so. There are many instances in the 20th century where a particular locale has become the focus for architectural thought and activity, influencing design nation wide. Some­times only a few architects, sometimes only one, have been seminal in such instances, but in each case the collective energy and architec­tural discourse of the place of each of these designers contributed fundamentally.

The development of architecture in California in the 1930s and 1940s may provide a useful precedent. Not much attention was paid to Cali­fornia before 1940, but since then California has consistently remained in the national forefront.

California’s rise to national prominence came when sufficient talent and maturity coalesced in the state to create the needed leadership. Archi­tects such as William Wurster, Richard Neutra, Rudolf Schindler, John Funk, Joseph Esherick, John Dinwiddie, Harwell Hamilton Harris, Gre­gory Ain, and Ralph Soriano became important nationally as well as locally. As appreciation for their work increased, so did the stature of California architecture in general.

American architecture as a whole was the main beneficiary. The greater diversity of per­spectives offered by California architects broadened a discipline formerly dominated by models from Chicago and the East Coast. The impact on American building, including build­ing in Texas, was significant.

Perhaps the same kind of contribution could be made by Texas architecture in the future. Life in Houston, Dallas, San Antonio, or Kerrville is significantly different from life in New York, Boston, or Ithaca, as it is different from life in San Francisco, Los Angeles, or Santa Cruz. A physical expression of that differ­ence would enrich the vocabulary of American building. Our national culture needs a broad palette of expression in order to reflect the real range of history, landscape, climate, lifestyle, and attitudes found across the country. When distinguished innovation emanates from a par­ticular part of the country, it enriches the palette for all of us.

Such an influential role for Texas architecture seems, at this point, potential but not assured. Great advances have been made in the last dec­ade and a half, but true leadership takes time to develop. The bright spots in the profession in Texas are still scattered. Attitudes of depen­dency and inferiority are still prevalent.

HOW TO MAKE IT HAPPEN

What can be done in the next decade and half to nurture the development of architecture in Texas—to help Texas practitioners achieve their potential as we move into the next century? Drawing on the experience of California and other places, six points emerge as areas to focus on.

•              We need to develop greater cooperation among architects in the state. California’s experience demonstrates the power of multiple talents working synergistically. Neutra and Schindler pushed each other, and together they stimulated (as well as learned from) Harris, Ain, and Soriano. In the era of Case-Study houses, many architects worked together to create a sig­nificant design leap. The individual talents involved were notable, but their combination gave the movement its impact. This is also reminiscent of Chicago’s emergence as an archi­tectural center in the late 19th century, when Daniel Burnham, William Le Baron Jenny, Dankmar Adler, Elihu Root, Louis Sullivan, and Frank Lloyd Wright, all important figures, often worked together.

It is important to get the strongest talents in Texas communicating with each other about architecture. I was impressed on a recent visit to Minneapolis to hear of a group of weekend cottages designed and built by the principals of four of the leading firms for their own use. The architects involved are strong competitors dur­ing the week, but on weekends they fish together and talk about architecture, looking beyond their individual offices. To truly advance the discip­line, architects must be concerned about archi­tecture beyond their own work.

•              We must continue to welcome talent from outside the state. Bostonian H.H. Richardson, with such landmarks as the Marshall Field warehouse and the Glessner House, helped spark Chicago’s architectural emergence. It took Richardson’s gimlet-eyed, outsider’s percep­tions to crystallize the essentials of the Chicago environment. Likewise, it was New Yorker Ber­tram Grosvenor Goodhue, in the Panama-Pacific Exposition in San Diego of 1915, who awoke Southern California to the potential of its own Mediterranean roots.

In Texas we have already benefited from per­ceptive works by several such talented outsiders. It is notable that these have often come not from designers who jet in and out, leaving a signature “jewel” behind, but from architects who have invested significant energy in Texas. Philip Johnson’s best buildings in Houston came after he had gained a long-standing sense of the city and its vitality. For the future, we especially need the kind of imported talent that is interested in laying down roots here. Sometimes outsiders, with their fresh perspectives and broader view­points, can see the special potential of a place most clearly.

• We need to increase our activity in the national and international community of architecture, exporting as well as importing capabilities. It is notable that in the very same era when Neutra, Schindler, and Harris were developing a cogent sense of architecture for southern California, they were also very active members of the European-based CIAM, enter­ing CIAM competitions and regularly exchang­ing proposals with colleagues abroad. William Wurster left California at the peak of his career to become Dean of the School of Architecture and Planning at MIT, extending Californian influence nationally.

Texas architects must become more visible and assertive outside the state. Although advances have been made in this regard, more Texas projects deserve attention in national and international publications. Texas architects should feel confident about discussing and writ­ing on architectural issues that reach beyond our borders. They should enter competitions and be on juries outside the state. They should aggres­sively seek commissions elsewhere.

Many architects have found the recent eco­nomic downtown to be the mother of invention in this regard, and the result has been positive. For too long Texas architects had been comfort­able focusing solely within the state. We needed a kick in the pants to move us into potentially larger spheres of influence.

•              We need a concerted reappraisal and reappreciation of the history of Texas architecture. Significant architectural developments do not emerge from a vacuum. California’s architec­tural awakening at mid-century followed the profession’s discovery that there was a distin­guished resource for inspiration right under its nose.

Texas has a stronger architectural history than we have acknowledged. The appreciation of central Texas immigrant vernacular that David Williams and O’Neil Ford voiced in the 1930s only scratched the surface. The exuberant fan­tasies of James Wahrenburger and Nicholas Clayton—which Williams and Ford would have hated—are equally evocative. When I have shown knowledgeable architects from out of state the central Texas work of James Riely Gor­don and Alfred Giles, they have been dismayed by the fact that it is so little known and so inadequately studied and published. The Texas work of Ralph Adams Cram, Cass Gilbert, and Paul Cret is little understood within the context of their larger, very distinguished careers. Much remains to be learned from Atlee Ayres, Charles Dilbeck, David Williams, George Dahl, How­ard Meyer, and O’Neil Ford. These valuable resources need to be tapped.

•              Related to that effort, both the quantity and quality of writing, analysis, and criticism of architecture in Texas must be increased. We need to nurture the cadre of writers interested in architecture in the state. California, overtime, built an impressive collection of analysts, from John Entenza, Esther McCoy, Sally Wood-bridge, David Gebhard, Norma Evanson, and John Woodbridge in the early days, to Barbara Goldstein, Reyner Banham, and John Pastier more recently.

In many ways, the California writers have been advocates—even promoters—of the state’s architecture, in a way that Texas writers have not. They have been activists, pointing and reinforcing directions rather than simply appraising with a cool, critical detachment. McCoy, for example, maintained close relation­ships with Neutra and Schindler. She believed in what they were doing and was instrumental in the eventual influence of their work.

Texas writers must also seek a larger audi­ence, in non-professional as well as professional publications, to generate further interest among a broader public.

• We must bolster the strength of our archi­tectural institutions. Knowing that, in order to develop architecturally. California needed a first-class school of architecture, Maybcck helped establish what later became the College of Environmental Design at the University of California at Berkeley. That institution and others that followed focused leadership in the profession in California. Berkeley alone has housed or developed the likes of Wurster, Esherick, Moore, Gerald McCuc, Daniel Sol­omon, Donlyn Lyndon, Christopher Alexander, Norma Evanson, and Spiro Kostof.

We need strong schools of architecture in Texas, not only to educate young professionals, but to maintain libraries and drawings collections, to organize lectures, symposia, and exhib­itions, and to participate in rinsing the consciousness of both profession and public. One can’t imagine the development of the Texas Medical Center in Houston without the contributions of the University of Texas and Baylor medical schools. The growth of Silicon Valley and the high-tech belt around Boston has everything to do with conncetions to Stanford, MIT, and Harvard.

DOWNTURN AS OPPORTUNITY

One of the great attractions of Texas for me has always been its boisterous can-do attitude. The tough, hardscrabble character of the place has seemed to attract a populace with ambition and resolve. How strong is our ambition and resolve in the profession today? Do we aspire to greater responsibility, or are we content to demur?

When I proffered these questions on a recent panel in Dallas, I heard two objections from colleagues that surprised me.

The first objection raised was this; Texas architecture is too young to take a leadership role. New York, Boston, and Philadelphia, it was said, have simply been building longer and therefore naturally assume a leadership position. This point of view, however, fails to acknowledge the leadership of our cohort-in-time, California. Chicago, founded in 1833, was already beginning to vie with New York for architectural preeminence after a scant 50 years of existence. Dallas, Austin, and Houston are roughly as old as Chicago; San Antonio is more than a century older. The time argument doesn’t seem to me to hold up.

The other argument against Texas’ potential for leadership was based on the current eco­nomic downtown, which, it was said, would take Texans out of the running nationally. Wouldn’t leadership gravitate where the work is? Again, examples dispel the strength of such an argument. The Weimar Republic of Germany after World War I was one of the most produc­tive incubators of architectural leadership of the century, even though the Weimar Republic has become an exemplar of economic desperation.

The Californians of the early part of the century were never beneficiaries of great building booms. In fact, their workloads were often spotty. The message for us is that idea booms are often countercyclical with business booms, and that quantity of building is not a prerequisite for quality of building. We have benefited from an unprecedented building boom in the past dec­ade, but its subsidence need not reverse our course. Continuing toward greater leadership could significantly contribute to creating a broader base for architectural practice in the state and thereby act to ameliorate radical fluc­tuations in the future. Architects in New York, Boston, Chicago, and California are less depen­dent on local economic conditions than firms in Texas, because they tap a broader base.

The advances of architecture in Texas over the past 15 years are impressive, but they have raised the ante for practice of architecture in the state. Clearly, fine and influential buildings can spring from this soil. If they fail to, our commit­ment and resolve must be brought into question.

* Editorial note: The five Texas firms included in Emerging Voices are: James Coote, Archi­tect, Austin; Peter Papademetriou, Lonnecker & Papademetriou, Houston; Lawrence W. Speck Associates, Austin; Taft Architects, Hous­ton; and Peter Waldman, Houston.

Much of the credit for that effort by TSA must go to Larry Paul Fuller, who helped conceive the whole notion, organized and directed the process of building selection, and commissioned both the photography and the original catalog text. Additional credit is due Jerry L. Clement, then president of TSA, and Larry Good, chairman of the task force charged with overseeing the effort, as well as to Ray Bailey, Reagan George, Stan Haas, Tom McKittrick, Patsy Swank, Des Taylor, and Jack Tisdale, who were members of the task force.

Any selection process to determine twenty outstanding examples of architecture anywhere is bound to be fraught with controversy. Although advice for the selection was sought in a polling of practicing architects across Texas, the final determination in this instance was sensibly made by a panel of both academics and practitioners well versed in the subject matter. The selection jury was chaired by architect Ray Bailey of Houston and included architectural historian Blake Alexander of the University of Texas at Austin, William T. Cannady of Rice University, Larry Paul Fuller, then editor of Texas Architect, and architects Frank Welch of Midland and James Wiley of Dallas.

The committee’s intention was to produce a list of buildings, well balanced in both time and geography, to represent the best of the state’s building history. Most major periods of Texas’ architectural development are represented – from Spanish Colonial to Greek Revival, to Victorian, to Modern. As political expediency might suggest, four of the selections are from Houston, four from Dallas, four from San Antonio, three from Austin, two from Galveston, one from Fort Worth, and two from smaller towns.

Contemporary buildings (i.e., buildings built since 1945) receive a lion’s share of the list temporally. Although this period represents less than one-sixth of the total time period covered, more than one-third of the buildings included are post – World War II. The great boom of building in Texas during the last forty years probably justifies such a skewing by quantity of buildings represented, if not necessarily by quality.

It is interesting that the list, without particular intention, contains an even balance between buildings designed by in-state architects and out-of-state architects. Neglecting the missions (which could not really be called architect-designed), nine of the projects included were designed by out-of-state architects while eight were designed by resident architects. The design for the other two must be considered joint design efforts by in-state- and out-of-state collaborators.

The list is impressive, as well, for its balance and range of building types. Although there might be a temptation in such a selection to emphasize more “flashy” and visible building types, such as skyscrapers and public monuments, the list admirably contains not only these but also university buildings, recreational buildings, shopping centers, urban open spaces, and even single-family homes and industrial uses.

The selection jury itself represented a broad ideological background and the list reflects that breadth. There is no singular “direction” for Texas architecture established by the list. It is, like the body of work it represents, diverse and eclectic. Although I, as author, had nothing to do with selecting the buildings and would certainly have made some different choices myself, I have become more and more impressed by the selection jury’s wisdom and even-handedness as I have worked with the list. It is a good set of choices.

The modest text of the book is not intended to be definitive in any sense. It is directed primarily to non-professional architecture aficionados, although the “design community” may find it enlightening as well. The commentary is divided into fairly independent “bite-sized chunks” which should make the book easy to dip into and dip out of. I hope it will yield easy reading for those interested simply in finding out more about the environment around them.

Although the text is short, it still required many hands and minds to produce. I am indebted to James Poteet and Jamie Lofgren for their help with research, to Patricia Henderson, Ann Loberg, and Mack White for their help with typing and editing, and especially to Susan Hoover, who researched, advised, edited, and organized for me on this project as she has on so many others. I am also thankful to Graham Luhn for coordinating work with Richard Payne and to Richard Payne himself for being so fast and cooperative.