Larry Speck

THE CASS GILBERT ERA : 1910-1922 Cass Gilbert imagined a campus for UT that was grand and monumental. Even before actually receiving the commission, he produced ketches of a campus with powerful scale and clarity. His buildings conspired together to frame dominant vistas and define malls, courts, and plazas, creating memorable exterior spaces. In these images, the rural-feeling green lawns were…

From 1910 to 1942 the University of Texas at Austin built an extraordinary ensemble of buildings which demonstrated palpably to its public the ambitions of an emerging institution. In a relatively short period of time, the image of the University was transformed from a sleepy, small-town college housed in a hodgepodge of mismatched buildings into a powerful, sophisticated institution whose campus…

In the early years of the 21st century, it is easy to identify a handful of "stars" of the architectural world who have made their reputations substantially through the building of museums. Frank Gehry and Richard Meier in the United States, Herzog and de Meuron and Renzo Piano in Europe, and Yoshio Taniguchi and Tadeo Ando in Japan have all gained world renown significantly for their design of…

During his thirteen-year tenure as campus architect, from 1909 to 1922, Cass Gilbert made a seminal contribution to the University of Texas that would have a profound and far-reaching impact on the development of that institution. From his very earliest sketches, Gilbert portrayed an image of the university that was far more ambitious and sophisticated than had been imagined previously. In his…

Caudill, William W(ayne) (b Hobart, OK, 25 March 1914; dHouston, TX, 25 June 1983). American architect. Educated at Oklahoma State University, Stillwater (19337), and Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge (1937-9), he began his career as a design teacher at Texas A & M. University, College Station, in 1939. By the time he founded the firm of Caudill, Rowlett and Scott in Houston in…

Soleri, Paolo (b Turin, 21 June 1919). American architect of Italian birth. He received his doctorate in architecture from the polytechnic in Turin in 1946. A scholarship allowed him to travel to the USA, where he began working for Frank Lloyd Wright at Taliesin West in January 1947. Disenchanted with Taliesin he left with his friend Mark Mills in September 1948. They set up camp in the Arizona…

American architect. He served a three-year apprenticeship with Richard Neutra (1928-32), and was one of the earliest American members of CIAM, joining in 1929. He began his architectural practice in Los Angeles in 1933 and soon distinguished himself as a designer by the completion of a home for himself on Fellowship Park Way, Los Angeles (1935). This tiny wooden pavilion with removable walls,…

When Turnbull’s colleagues commented on their well known design effort at Sea Ranch a decade after its completion, they noted the group’s intention to create “a controlling image that gives people a chance to know where they are – in space, in time and in the order of things." They claimed "the fundamental principle of architecture is territorial. The architect assembles physical materials from…

In the southwestern United States, civilization still lies thinly over a vast landscape of broad prairies, lonely rolling hills and commanding promontories. This formidable terrain, the infinite sky and boundless horizons dominate even the most impressive human attempts to occupy the land. Here in the long valleys that terrace away from the banks of the upper Rio Grande River in New Mexico,…