Articles
Multi-Housing News, January 2, 2012
“Translating the “Outdoor Room” Concept for Apartment Living”
Project: Waterstone Condominium Development
Written by Larry Speck
One aspect of a sustainable lifestyle involves becoming more connected to the natural environment. As we have come to depend on conditioned air, we have become separated from the outdoors with its natural sounds, smells, light shifts, breezes and other sensory stimuli. Is it possible to re-inject those phenomenological experiences in our everyday lives by integrating outdoor spaces into the design of our living places?
Architype, Summer 2010
“Schools and Modern Architecture”
Written by Larry Speck
Schools are mostly workhorse buildings. Perhaps at the very high end of elite prep schools they can occasionally afford to be skittish, temperamental racers with stylish breeding and impressive pedigrees. But, for the everyday world, they need to be able to do their job well.
DesignIntelligence, March 2010
“Rescuing the Next Generation”
Written by Larry Speck
If architecture is to stay fresh and progressive, it needs a continual infusion of new professionals. Although it’s difficult to conceive of hiring during this era of layoffs, we can’t afford to lose the talent that the next generation has to offer.
Architect, November 2008
“A Higher Education”
Written by Larry Speck
The narrow, politicized ivory towers of yesterday have been replaced by architecture schools that value diversity of thought and practice.
Urban Land, October 2008
“Houston’s New Park: Discovery Green”
Project: Discovery Green
Written by Larry Speck
Discovery Green, a $122 million, 12-acre (4.9 ha) park with a lake, a restaurant, and a cafe located amid commercial and residential towers in downtown Houston, is the product of efforts by civic leaders who envisioned a new kind of urban park – one that would draw together the city’s diverse, cosmopolitan population.
The park, which [...]
The Chronicle of Higher Education, June 20, 2008
“An Architect Asks: Should Colleges Erect ‘Buildings of Our Time’?”
Written by Larry Speck
I love old buildings. There is nothing I like better than puttering around in a Gothic cathedral or climbing through Inca ruins in Peru or even reading in my all-time favorite library — a hundred-year-old Cass Gilbert building on my own campus. Part of what I love about these old buildings is that they connect [...]
Tribeza, October 2007
“Seeing Is Believing”
Written by Larry Speck
Think Like an Architect is a refreshingly personal book. Though it clearly fulfills its intention to “communicate ways to give the necessary care to designing buildings that’s needed to enhance the quality of life for the people who live with them as well as the environment around them,” it is also a warm and intimate [...]
Tribeza, October 1, 2003
“Perspective”
Written by Larry Speck
Two-and-a-half years ago I wrote a short piece for the first issue of TRIBEZA describing briefly the potentials, challenges and immediate outlook for architecture and urban design in Austin. Those were heady days in early 2001 when this City seemed ready to accomplish anything it set its mind to. Ambitious new museums, performing arts venues, [...]
Architecture, November 2002
“Elevated Study”
Written by Larry Speck
A quiet home addition provides space for contemplation
Architecture, September 2001
“Cool Jazz”
Written by Larry Speck
Mack Scogin and Merrill Elam riff on historic New Orleans architecture in their design for a new dormitory at Tulane University.
Architecture, May 1, 2001
“Taft Architects”
Written by Larry Speck
Taft Architects develops a new take on the postmodern sensibility that made the firm famous.
Architecture, January 1, 2001
“Robert C. Byrd United States Courthouse and Federal Building, Beckley, West Virginia”
Written by Larry Speck
CRITIQUE The new Robert C. Byrd United States Courthouse and Federal Building in Beckley, West Virginia, is an unapologetic homage to the architecture of another era. The General Services Administration jury that selected its design in a 1995 limited competition lauded its reference to 1930s WPA style, which they considered to produce “an extremely successful [...]
Architecture, November 2000
“Exploration Place Science and Children’s Museum”
Written by Larry Speck
Moshe Safdie is a refugee from the “style wars” that have swept across the international design landscape over the last three decades. Outspoken in his disdain for movements like postmodernism and deconstructivism, he has fled from trendy skirmishes between “hot” and “not” on favor of an independent career, producing work that is difficult to categorize [...]
Architecture, January 2000
“Becky’s Birthday”
Written by Larry Speck
As Laugier’s hut contrasted with the excess of its rococo context, so this modest ranch shelter provides an antidote to the intemperance of contemporary architecture.
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 [...]
Architecture, January 2000
“Back to School”
Written by Larry Speck
Fifty years later, Alvar Aalto’s Baker House still celebrates student life. Lawrence W. Speck visits a campus landmark.
Texas Architect, January/February 1999
“A Greater Whole”
Written by Larry Speck
Some of the most powerful and convincing environments we have produced in the United States over the last two centuries have been college and university campuses. Both in terms of architecture and urban design, the halls of academe and the lush grounds that surround them often are oases in the desert of commercial [...]
D Magazine, May 1998
“Concept and Design”
Written by Larry Speck
A critic looks at what the new arena can–and should–do for Dallas.
D Magazine, January 1998
“A Sense of Place”
Written by Larry Speck
With a sweeping new campus design, SMU intends to change its physical relationship with the city and improve its setting for students. Will it work?
Center, No.7, 1992
“Style Wars in the Final Decade”
Written by Larry Speck
When I was in college I had a friend who had a singing voice that was as beautiful as any live vocalist I have heard before or since. She had a gift. Her tone was clear and even like a bell’s. Her range was extraordinary—from piercing high trills through rich mezzo tones to a deep [...]
Center, No.5, 1989
“The Individual and the City”
Written by Larry Speck
In the introduction to her landmark book, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, published in 1961, Jane Jacobs states flatly, “This book is an attack on current city planning and rebuilding.”[1] “My attack is not based on quibbles about rebuilding methods or hairsplitting about fashions in design. It is an attack, rather, on [...]
Center, 1998
“Buildings and Reality: Architecture in the Age of Information”
Written by Larry Speck
On October 23-24, 1986, the fourth annual symposium of the Center for the Study of American Architecture, School of Architecture, University of Texas at Austin was held. The subject: “Buildings and Reality: Architecture in the Age of Information.’, Several of the papers in this issue of CENTER (those by Horace Newcomb, Peter Eisenman, Karsten Harries, [...]
Center, 1988
“American Academy of Arts and Sciences”
Written by Larry Speck
When Kallmann and McKinnell – consummate Modernists known at the time for their brutalist Boston City Hall of 1968 – produced the gentle, arcadian American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1980, it caused quite a stir among avid style-labelers in the Modernism/Postmodernism debate. Although noted critic Ada Louise Huxtable termed it “an architectural event [...]
Center, No.3 1987
“Regionalism and Invention”
Written by Larry Speck
I have long been struck by a very earthy quotation from the Roman writer Persius, who proclaimed the stomach the “teacher of the arts and the dispenser of invention.”[i] The quotation acknowledges a source of art and invention outside the head, that is, outside the realm of abstract intellectual constructs. I like the notion of [...]
Texas Architect, January/February 1987
“Texas Architecture: The State of the Art”
Written by Larry Speck
In 1941, the Architectural League of New York published Forty Under Forty, a monograph that identified little-known young architects from around the country considered “rising stars” by the League. Although some 70 percent of those on the list were from New York (no one ever said the League was impartial), architects from 11 states were [...]
OZ, Vol. 8, 1986
“Object and Landscape”
Written by Larry Speck
In several recent projects we have been inspired by an investigation into the roots of the quintessential American building pattern of placing pavilions in the landscape. This pattern, which has dominated American home building, community design, and even urban landscape for three centuries, is a deeply rooted part of the American environmental experience. Unlike more [...]