“Why can’t you teach them to draw?”

“Every architecture student should be required to take at least four or five courses in the business school.”

“These kids need to be taught how to put a building together—not just to make pretty pictures.”

I have heard it all, and although I have great respect for these colleagues, I am genuinely dismayed at how little they seem to know about what really goes on in architecture schools today. Many of them seem stuck in the era of their own architectural education.

The 60-somethings think there isn’t enough emphasis on design and technical skills. There is too much “talkitecture,” they say—which is probably a valid criticism of the architectural education they received in the 1960s. The 50-somethings criticize an overemphasis on formalism in architecture schools where the well-rendered façade is the sine qua non. That probably reflects more their personal experience in the 1970s than it does design studios today. Forty-somethings question a concentration on abstract imagery, architectural language, and esoteric intellectualism. They think students should be grounded in making real buildings for real people to inhabit. Thirty-somethings are concerned about the worship of shape-making and novelty in architecture schools. They feel that students are too enamored of sexy computer models and have no idea how to really put a building together.

Although I believe that academia has a responsibility to be experimental and to constantly seek new territory, I am critical of the rapid “changing of the gods” that has occurred over the past decades in architectural education. Ours is a very broad field, in which it is easy to get sucked into one or a few aspects and lose sight of the big picture. Focusing students too tightly on a narrow set of issues, or indoctrinating them in a very specific architectural language, seems wrong-headed and irresponsible. It has certainly been a downfall of architectural education in the recent past.

It was heartbreaking in the early 1990s to see graduates of top architectural programs trotting around their portfolios with beautifully stippled Prismacolor drawings of façades filled with elaborate historicist allusions, then finding the work laughably out-of-date only a few years after school. It is similarly disillusioning to see the “globs and blobs” portfolios of a decade ago looking kind of sad and silly now.

I sincerely believe, however, that architectural education today is headed in a more durable direction—one more beneficial for students and more productive for our discipline as a whole. There seems to be a constantly increasing number of schools that view architecture as an inherently complex, multifaceted field, and believe architectural education should reflect just that. These schools are more pluralistic and less singular intellectually than their counterparts of the past few decades. There is more diversity of thought and less party line.

This conclusion comes in part from my long-standing experience as a faculty member at the School of Architecture at the University of Texas at Austin, as a former dean who has participated in endless meetings of architectural educators and administrators, and as someone who frequently lectures and serves on juries in a wide variety of academic programs. But it also comes, in particular, from intensive visits that I have made as an advisor–evaluator for five architecture programs over the past two years. These were not the “check-the-box” inquisitions sponsored by NCARB for accreditation purposes, but were sincere efforts whereby each program independently solicited counsel from educators and professionals as to how they might improve themselves. The five institutions—the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT); Tulane University; the University of Nevada, Las Vegas (UNLV); Louisiana State University (LSU); and the University of Michigan—are very diverse in terms of financial capacity, ranking, and geography. They constitute a pretty good representation of architectural education in the United States, public and private.

Each two- or three-day visit involved presentations; informal discussions with students, faculty, and staff; and dialogue with provosts or presidents of the universities. I was impressed in every case by the frankness of the conversations and the genuine desire for improvement.

What I took away from these experiences was a reassurance that architectural education in this country is rich and thriving in a wide variety of contexts. It turns out that many students can do hand drawings and physical models (which I knew very well from my own institution), and they can also represent architectural environments in an amazing variety of other media that is more sophisticated and communicative than at any other time in the history of our discipline.

They may not be taking too many courses in the business school, but they may well be participating in the Urban Land Institute’s Gerald D. Hines Student Urban Design Competition, where they work on a team to solve a difficult urban problem in a way that makes economic sense and produces a healthy urban environment. Their school will very likely offer design/build opportunities where they can learn intimately “how to put a building together.” They might be involved in one of the 20 Solar Decathlon teams that will construct, stick by stick (or SIP panel by SIP panel), a 1,000-square-foot sustainable house that will be rigorously tested in front of thousands of spectators on the Mall in Washington, D.C.

Many programs have sophisticated community design centers like the one at LSU, where every undergraduate spends at least one semester working with clients in neighborhoods that desperately need architectural services but cannot afford professional help. Other programs, including studios at MIT, concentrate on plugging into similar authentic design situations abroad, in China, Turkey, and elsewhere. Students who participate gain personal exposure to the challenges of global architectural practice as well as to environmental problems beyond the ones we face in the United States.

Rich, mature architecture programs have a host of strengths. They offer excellent history and theory courses as well as a rigorous technical curriculum. Their faculties experiment with rapid prototyping as an alternative production means, but also construct retrofit projects with saws and measuring tapes in their own buildings. From breadth comes cross-fertilization: The education on offer is not a one-liner indoctrination, likely to become obsolete.

The human products of these comprehensive programs are extremely impressive. One graduate student at UNLV was heavily involved in research with a faculty member involving sophisticated modeling of energy performance in buildings; he also helped teach thermal fundamentals to beginning undergraduates. At the same time, he was producing design work that was beautiful, sophisticated, and immaculately detailed. Likewise, MIT undergraduates in a studio on multifamily housing were remarkably capable of synthesizing urban design concerns with a sensitivity to individual residents’ needs.

There are, of course, those who cling to the notion of a school of like minds preaching a clear, distilled doctrine to be absorbed unquestioningly by impressionable young students. They point, often, to the Bauhaus as the ideal example of the well-crafted curriculum taught brilliantly by a cohesive faculty. If they could just repeat that pattern, they feel they would reach the apex of architectural education.

As it turns out, the Bauhaus was anything but that kind of singular, cohesive environment. In its most fertile era, it offered diverse points of view on a wide range of architectural topics. While Johannes Itten and Wassily Kandinsky were helping students get in touch with a mystical, spiritualist side of design, Walter Gropius was helping them understand the power of mass production. While Theo van Doesburg was emphasizing the beauties of rationalist geometry, Ludwig Hilberseimer was encouraging an efficient, nonhierarchical social fabric for the city.

I would encourage professionals to become engaged in an architecture school and discover the changes that have occurred in the past decade. Sitting on a jury or two, or going to a reunion, probably won’t do the trick. It might require becoming a really active mentor to a student, learning as much from him or her as you teach. It might involve taking on interns and asking them about life outside the office. Or teaching a design studio as an adjunct faculty member.

Breadth is not an easy thing to see at a glance. More and more, though, it is the strength of American architectural education.

The park, which occupies the equivalent of eight city blocks on the east side of downtown, is located across the street from the George R. Brown Convention Center, a block from the Toyota Center sports and entertainment arena where the Houston Rockets play, and two blocks from Minute Maid Park, home of the Houston Astros. Previously dominated by parking lots that remained empty except for periodic surges during events at the three large venues, the area lacked continuous everyday activity.

Houston Mayor Bill White and a group of civic leaders initiated a public/private partnership to secure the site for a downtown park in mid-2004. The city agreed to contribute 6.4 acres (2.6 ha) of land and $7.9 million toward the acquisition of an additional 5.4 acres (2.2 ha) for $24 million. The city council later approved $21.5 million for construction of a 670-car garage under the park to serve the convention center. The city deeded the land to the Houston Downtown Park Corporation, a public government corporation, which entered into agreements with the Discovery Green Conservancy, a private nonprofit formed by initial donors to the project, to develop and operate the park. The conservancy then raised more than $54 million in private funds to supplement the city’s contributions of land. Gifts from four Houston philanthropic giants-the Brown Foundation, the Wortham Foundation, the Houston Endowment, and the Kinder Foundation – led the fund raising effort, which eventually included hundreds of donors.

The conservancy board invited representatives from cities across the country to make presentations in Houston on what makes a downtown park successful and active. Project for Public Spaces, an urban and public space planning nonprofit organization based in New York City, helped orchestrate a series of public workshops and focus groups that contributed to the creation of a detailed program of activities and spaces.

In spring 2005, the conservancy conducted an international search for designers, eventually selecting a team led by the San Francisco landscape architecture and planning firm
Hargreaves Associates and including the Houston office of the architecture firm PageSoutherlandPage and local landscape architect Lauren Griffith. In addition, artists Margo Sawyer of Elgin, Texas, and Doug Hollis of San Francisco were on the team to identify art projects as part of the site plan and to produce commissioned works. A team of local and international engineers and consultants was added as site planning and design progressed.

The conservancy board worked closely with the team over a 14-month design and documentation period. In addition, the public participation process continued with workshops to solicit input, refine the program, and generate a constituency for the park’s future. “A civic project of this magnitude is hard work, and it requires the passion and commitment of so many people to succeed,” notes Nancy Kinder, former chair of the conservancy board.

The design of the park emphasizes connectivity to the city surrounding it. A north-south promenade replaced a street that had bisected the site and creates linkages to the ballpark to the north and the arena to the south. The major activities of the site are clustered along this promenade. An east-west path, shaded by the boughs of a double row of live oak trees already at the site, crosses the spine and connects the downtown core to the convention center.

Though the conservancy board members wanted a range of activities and programs, they also wanted the park to provide areas for respite. The park accommodates a wide range of activities while still providing the experience of a green oasis. The major challenge presented to the design team was to keep the park green while providing the diverse programming desired.

The result is a place that celebrates Houston’s garden heritage, but also features a wide range of amenities, including:
- a five-star restaurant;
- a casual cafe;
- an interactive water feature;
- a one-acre (0.4-ha) lake suitable for sailing remote-controlled boats in summer or for ice skating in winter;
- an old world Italian bocce ball court and a down-home Texas horseshoe pitch, both set within gardens;
- a scenic jogging trail;
- a putting green;
- a pair of dog runs for large and small breeds; and
- a great lawn for casual sports and large gatherings.

“If there is a universal comment, it is surprise that there is so much to do in just 12 acres without the park feeling crowded,” notes Guy Hagstette, president of the conservancy. “The conservancy’s initial focus on activating the park, combined with the design team’s elegant site plan, really paid off.”

The conservancy also wanted the park to meet high standards of sustainable design and to integrate art. Designed to qualify for Gold certification under the U.S. Green Building Council’s Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) rating system, the park incorporates 256 photovoltaic and solar hot water panels funded by a $1 million gift from Houston-based BP America. Building orientation and extensive shading devices also harness and deflect the sun’s light and heat.

Century-old trees on the site were protected and preserved and are supplemented by other large trees saved from destruction elsewhere. The design emphasizes native and climate-adapted plants and uses local materials wherever possible to reduce the energy consumption required to transport materials manufactured far away. Light-rail access and bike racks sprinkled through the park encourage alternatives to the dominant car culture of Houston.

Art and its integration into the overall design and activities of the park are a prevailing theme of Discovery Green. Sawyer’s Synchronicity of Color consists of multicolored panels covering the interior stairwells and the exterior walls of the underground parking structure on the south side of the park’s great lawn. Hollis’s water sculpture Mist Tree, nearthe children’s playground, creates an ironic blur between built and natural forms, and his carved limestone sculptures Listening Vessels, placed in a quiet garden, invite the same kind of participatory engagement as the rest of the park. French artist Jean Dubuffet’s grand, static Monument au Fantome, a $7 million donation from a downtown real estate investor, is also located in the park.

“From ‘day one, our board was focused on the long-term funding required to create and sustain a world-class urban park,” comments Kinder. “Without the money, the rest is just talk.”

Besides the initial fundraising effort, four continuing funding streams for the park were identified:

- Houston is committed by contract to provide $750,000 per year, adjusted for inflation, for maintenance and security – a sum estimated to be equivalent to the costs the city would have incurred if it managed the park itself.

- Rent from the park’s restaurant and cafe is projected to produce another $750,000 per year. Rent is calculated as a pure percentage of gross sales, which currently are exceeding expectations.

- The conservancy will hold a major gala every other year with a goal of supplying an average of $600,000 to $750,000 annually. The first gala, held in February, met the high end of that goal.

- Through programming sponsorships and rent from private events, the conservancy plans to raise another $650,000 to $750,000 each year.

Safety in the park has been a major operational concern. Security guards and field staff patrol the site 24 hours a day. Off-duty Houston police officers on bike patrol supplement permanent staff when the park is particularly active, and security cameras provide additional observation and monitoring. Security in the park is also provided by what Hagstette refers to as “crime prevention through environmental design”: the park’s spaces are visually continuous, light levels are high, and the buildings’ broad expanses of glass provide “eyes on the park.” “Many visitors have commented about how comfortable they are entering the park. The activity, site plan, and design have created an inherently safe environment,” he says.

White also credits this combination of a professional security presence and citizen self-patrol with creating the feeling of safety in the park. “The best deterrent to bad behavior is when you allow thousands of happy citizens to gather together in a place they consider their own. That is the key reason why Discovery Green feels so safe,” he says.

The response of Houston residents to Discovery Green has been enthusiastic. In its first four months of operation, more than 230,000 people visited the park, and attendance at individual events has surpassed 75,000. When asked about the response of his constituents to the park, White says, “Go look on any weekend and you will get your answer-hundreds if not thousands of people from all over the city enjoying the park, including families with their young children, people walking their dogs, couples listening to a concert, and natives bringing their out-of-town friends to the park to show off their city.”

The hoped-for revitalization of the east side of downtown is-’well underway. “From its announcement, Discovery Green has shaped new development on downtown’s east side with nearly $400 million of projects now under construction and another half billion dollars of development soon to follow,” says Bob Eury, president of Central Houston Inc., a private nonprofit corporation supported by area businesses and institutions. “Our vision of a high-density park district neighborhood is quickly becoming a reality.”

A 37-story multifamily residential tower, One Park Place, developed by the Houston-based Finger Companies, has topped out across the street from Discovery Green. The first new residential high-rise to be built in downtown Houston in decades, its promotional material makes it clear that its location on the park is a big selling point for moving downtown. Discovery Tower, a 30-story office building developed by Dallas-based Trammell Crow, is currently rising on the north side of the park, and its promotional release also cites the park as an amenity.

“The public really responds to high-quality, well-managed public space in an urban area,” Hagstette says. “Downtown sites offer unique opportunities to include activities that enhance life and generate revenues for ongoing operations.” Observes Brady Carruth, Kinder’s recent successor as chair of the Discovery Green Conservancy, the most important lesson from Discovery Green is “to show Houstonians what can be accomplished when local government and private interests come together with a vision to create a better city.”

I think we need to leave lasting artifacts for generations to come that will give them a window into our cultures and our time. I actually really like the era we live in. I like the students I see running around campuses all over America in shorts and T-shirts, plugged into iPods and connected to an enormous World Wide Web of people and information. It seems bizarre, however, to see them walk into a brand-spanking-new building that has all the pompousness and formality of Georgian England. Those buildings fit beautifully with powdered wigs and heavy black academic robes, but they are not a reflection of life today.

In university communities, we take great pride in being forward-thinking and progressive. Our research is meant to serve generations to come and stimulate society to even greater achievements. Indeed, our students are the makers of the future. Shouldn’t we be concerned about what our buildings will say about all of that enterprise to the citizens of our campuses a hundred years from now?

Unlike the speculative detritus lining our freeways that probably will not be with us in a couple of decades and almost certainly will not survive to midcentury, our campus buildings are likely to stick around. Hopefully the institutions that built them will have very long and productive lives, and if we are good financial stewards, we are constructing our buildings so they will be sustainable over a long period of time.

Great campuses, like great cities, should be agglomerations of all of the cultures and all of the times that make up their history. If everyone in every era builds well and builds authentically, the result is a rich record of the institution — and a perfect home for it to grow and thrive in.

I do not just mean that we should be building “modern” buildings as opposed to Gothic ones or Georgian ones. Modernism is the way of our grandfathers, who formulated fresh, modern buildings in the 1950s. I mean we should be making buildings that reflect the values, lifestyles, issues, and technologies of today. That does not mean any sort of style, and, given the fact that we are a very heterogeneous culture, it probably means there is not a one-liner answer to the question, “What does it mean to build a building of our own time?”

http://chronicle.com

Section: Money & Management
Volume 54, Issue 41, Page A12

The book is written in the first person as a series of letters to friends and colleagues on various topics. They recount Box’s own trajectory through architecture, beginning with his introduction to building in Miss Klimer’s first-grade class and his own decision at age 15 to become an architect. He fondly recalls his days as a student at the University of Texas studying under Martin Kermacy and Hugo Leipziger-Pearce. He describes the work and ideas of his early heroes and mentors like David Williams, Sam Zisman, Charles Granger, O’Neil Ford, and Harwell Hamilton Harris. He gives a detailed chronology of his own early career as a practicing architect, including a charming account of taking and passing the registration exam and a description of the intense decade he spent establishing an influential young firm in Dallas with James Pratt.

Box also recounts his extraordinary academic career in architecture, including his role in founding the School of Architecture at the University of Texas at Arlington and his 16 years of deanship at the University of Texas at Austin. He savors his collegiality in the latter role with scholars and designers like Anthony Alofsin, Michael Benedikt, Kevin Alter, and Charles Moore, who have clearly influenced his thinking and perspectives.

But Box is clear about the dire need for more knowledge of architecture, particularly among “amateurs,” if that thrill is to be engaged and if the built environment in our own era is to be substantially improved. And that is the point of the book as well. This is an excellent primer, offering basic lessons about the field of architecture and a key to understanding its importance as well as its seductive allure.

Three of Box’s lessons are particularly poignant. Early in the book, in a chapter called “Dreaming and Seeing,” he suggests “ten ways to explore and understand a building.” For those with little experience in thinking about architecture, this is an essential first lesson. Step by step, the author walks the reader through a building, suggesting ways to really look at architectural forms and spaces. He asks the reader, as a student of architecture, to pay particular attention to construction methods, materials, history, and context-key issues that might not occur to the novice.

A second very cogent lesson comes in the middle of the book in a chapter titled “Making Architecture with an Architect.” In 10 short pages, Box delivers a strikingly comprehensive description of what is involved in being an enlightened architectural client. He covers mundane things like fees, contracts, procedural relationships between owner/architect/contractor, and what is involved in various phases of architectural services. But he also gives sound advice on slippery topics like how to select an architect and how to pace the design process in terms of critical decision making. Coming from the perspective of someone who has had a lot of experience being a client for significant projects as well as being an architect, Box offers a savvy, balanced point of view.

An impressive third lesson comes in the chapter “Making Connections,” at the end of the book. Here, complex issues of city planning and urban design are dealt with clearly and in plain language that will make good sense to almost any reader. Box asks the question, “Can a city, historically laid out to sell real estate as a laissez-faire enterprise, pull itself together into an urban form that facilitates wonderful places to live and work?” He sees this as the fundamental urban design challenge of our era and provides a compelling argument for a very different alternative to the pervasive American sprawl city.

In an often autobiographical style, Hal Box has done a “memory download” of all the collective wisdom he has gained about the field of architecture during a long, productive career. Written without jargon, but with evident enthusiasm and affection for the field, this book is engaging and easy to read. It is almost like sitting around a dinner table in Box’s current home, in San Miguel de Allende, and listening to the ruminations of an architect with extraordinary experience, charm, and passion.

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.

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.

One of the early design issues that demanded this kind of careful response involved a serious conflict between town and gown over the site for the dormitory, a narrow parcel with its long west face backing up to the historic Audubon Boulevard neighborhood. At first, homeowners could not imagine any circumstance under which student housing could reside comfortably across their back fences. But by creating a long, thin building on the western edge of the site, with its quiet face to the neighborhood and its lively face to the campus, the architects established a boundary condition that satisfied both, university and neighborhood interests.

Dubbed the “ranges” after the second tier of buildings off the lawn at the University of Virginia, this oddly configured combination of private flats and two-story lofts with exterior access demonstrates how constraints have generated an appealing idiosyncrasy throughout the project.

Indeed, a circumstantial quirkiness seemed to the architects to be very much in the spirit of New Orleans, which Scogin describes as being all about mystery. Though clear enough in plan, the dormitory’s ensemble of buildings – the “ranges,” plus three larger, donut-shaped “houses” – generates an enigmatic series of in-between courts, gardens, patios, and terraces that provoke the kind of surprise and discovery for which the Crescent City is famous. Each of the three buildings strung along the east side of the site centers on a tall, top-lit garden lushly planted with palms and aspidistra to resemble the “secret” courts of the French Quarter. The soft Louisiana St. Joe brick, tall windows with interior wood shutters, generous balconies, and careful metalwork details also root the complex firmly in its locale.

The life that occurs here has the distinctive flavor and feel of New Orleans as well. Students sunbathe and read on the grassy lawns in front of the ranges and barbecue in the spacious courts between the buildings. Brian Jones, who operated the dormitory in its first year for the university’s Office of Residential Life, applauds the project’s abundant outdoor spaces,noting, “There are always people out on the balconies. A third of our students are from the Northeast, and they really enjoy a 75-degree January day.”

Jones is equally enthusiastic about the way the dormitory’s design accomplishes the client’s goals in terms of facilitating a sense of community inside the buildings. The three primary buildings accommodate about 100 students each and are currently programmed to house interdisciplinary living/learning units. Each floor of 25-30 students has a kitchen, lounge, laundry, study room, and terrace clustered together to encourage casual encounters at a more intimate scale. Generous private rooms with 10-foot exposed concrete ceilings and custom movable furniture vary widely in shape, size, and arrangement to emphasize individual identity within the larger whole.

Mack Scogin and Merrill Elam, along with former partner Lloyd Bray and local associate Wayne Troyer, have created a remarkably livable and endearing little jewel out of a building type that is generally characterized by crudeness and over-systemization. By superimposing a simple vocabulary of brick and stucco walls punctuated by taut glass onto an idiosyncratic set of volumes, they achieve strong visual interest with an economy of means. They do so in a context that has a rich tradition of taking a solid melody and improvising with riffs and flourishes to generate richness and complexity. The design process has resulted in a fresh and sophisticated architectural expression that makes magic out of the constraints of its program and place.

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.

The courthouse in Beckley bears some remarkable and ironic similarities to its visually very different sister facility in Central Islip, New York, by Richard Meier & Partners (this issue, page 78). The formal vocabulary employed there, which New York Times architecture critic Herbert Muschamp has called “a fusion of Le Corbusier and de Stijl,” represents an equally unapologetic homage to a different genre of much the same era. Both buildings are erudite formalist essays penned by authors who have reveled in their respective stylistic vocabularies for decades. Both projects are preoccupied with a postmodern predilection for image and visual code. Both offer nostalgic remembrances of sophisticated architectural expressions invented by the generation of their users’ great-great-grandparents.

In the case of the Beckley project, Stern advocates his particular historicist approach because he is convinced that “the way to accomplish… the lasting dignity and sense of stability that is at the heart of the rule of law, is to approach the design of the building from a classical perspective.” U.S. District Court Judge David A. Faber, who acted as primary client through much of the project, agrees, asserting that, “Older-style buildings are more in keeping with the dignity of the court.” He also believes that citizens “associate courts and law with precedent,” making familiar forms more appropriate than new ones. Besides, Faber confesses that he is personally “enamored of old things,” and notes with pride, “I love this building because it reflects old values.”

The context of the Beckley courthouse also encouraged its client and architects to take a traditional approach. Downtown Beckley, where the building is located, reads like a page out of a history book, with virtually every structure predating World War II. Fortunately, an ideal site was available for the project at the termination of Main Street, on one side of tiny Shoemaker Square-already the focus for the county courthouse and sheriff’s office as well as the municipal police headquarters. Formerly an open parking lot, the thin, 500-foot-long site offered challenges of a very irregular configuration and a 30-foot topographical change from the square on the east to First Avenue on the west.

The architects settled the big-for-downtown Beckley building into its site skillfully. They converted the program requirement for three functional elements-the courts, an IRS center, and a civic lobby-into three modestly scaled building volumes. Originally rigidly aligned, the three pieces were skewed a bit at the suggestion of competition jurors to merge even better with surrounding streets and buildings. According to
Judge Faber, the sensitive integration of the project in the downtown fabric has impressed both occupants and neighbors; people in the community feel like it has created an infusion of new life and has contributed to rejuvenating downtown.

Though local reaction to the project is generally favorable, there is also a realization that the architectural quality of the building represents a significant diminution of the tradition it is meant to extend. People are quick to compare the new building to the 1933 U.S. Courthouse and Federal Building which it replaced, just a block away. The old building, with its stone base and fine craftsmanship, is detailed to give a sense of heft and grandeur. The new building replaces stone with limestone-color precast panels; craftsmanship is rare, and facade articulation occurs within a depth range of a few inches. The building has that insipid postmodern thinness that provides an image of a traditional building, but without the real dignity, power, and soul of its predecessors.

Grant Marani, a partner in Stern’s office who handled the project day-to-day, acknowledges that the firm had specified higher quality materials in the original scope of the project – e.g., stone instead of precast concrete, lead-coated copper instead of painted metal. The construction budget, however, got into trouble because of unforeseen foundation costs and because new and very expensive security measures were added after the Oklahoma City bombing. The result is that the quality of construction is “not the best,” according to Marani.

Economic measures are perhaps most clearly visible on the inside of the building, where, other than a handful of modest exceptions such as the Richard Haas murals in the lobby and dark-stained oak paneling in a few offices and courtrooms, the finishes are quite pedestrian. Stock interiors feature Sheetrock walls, hung acoustical-tile ceilings with lay-in fluorescent fixtures, plastic-laminate elevator cabs and countertops, and off-the-shelf contemporary hardware. The “classical perspective” is barely evident in most spaces.

Is it possible in the current era to realize a really fine public building in a traditional style? This instance paired the talents of one of the country’s most capable and experienced architectural firms working in this manner with a committed client looking to upgrade its standards. And yet the building quality of the finished product pales by comparison to its counterparts from the 1930s, even in modest Beckley.

If the federal government in our own very affluent era is going to try to create architecture with the traditional dignity and quality achieved so beautifully in the depressed economy of the 1930s, it must commit substantially greater resources and conviction than are evident in the Beckley courthouse. Working in the genre of another era only makes more evident the diminution of true pride, respect, and esteem our culture today places in buildings for institutions like the federal judiciary. Building great public buildings in a classical style has always required political and monetary commitment beyond basic needs. This has never been more true than today. If public buildings of our own time are not to seem second rate, they must either be granted that kind of special stature or seek their value from sources other than just tradition. Judge Faber rightly observes that “any architecture is representative of the culture it springs from.” The representation presented by the new U.S. Courthouse at Beckley should give us pause.