Larry Speck

I am a big fan of parks.  My local park in Austin is Zilker Park with its famous Barton Springs Pool. There is a beautiful 1940s bathhouse at the pool, designed by Dan Driscoll, an early Texas modernist architect.  I often stage my visits to the pool at times that will require a change of clothes just so I can enjoy ...

When I travel, I love to just hang out and observe urban life – how cities support the predispositions of their residents and how city dwellers embrace their environments.  I’m happy as a clam watching how crowds behave and spying on urban pedestrian life.  Such was this case a couple of months ago when I visited Quebec City.  I kept asking myself: why is it so enjoyable to be in a place that has…

Recently, I experienced a sort of cosmic convergence of unrelated things happening.   First, an 18-year old undergraduate student came to my office to discuss an essay he’s writing about a building of his choosing that he admires.  He chose the Dallas Fort Worth Airport (DFW).  Initially, I thought that was a dubious selection, but he explained beautifully what he admired from a lay perspective.…

I love to revisit significant architectural projects over and over in their mature years to see how they are working and how people are using them.  Alvar Aalto was fond of saying he wanted his buildings to be judged by how they looked after 50 years.  I think that is a good yardstick. I had that opportunity to do the 50+ year test recently when I spent a morning walking around Lafayette Park in…

I recently traveled to Bolivia to participate in the XIII Seminario Internacional de Arquitectura, a biennial architectural conference held at the University of Santa Cruz de la Sierra.  I had spoken at the same conference fourteen years ago and, as was the case before, I really got my eyes opened about the current state of architecture in Bolivia and elsewhere in South America.  Three things…

This summer I visited Vancouver, certainly one of the most spectacular urban settings in the world.  While there, I met with Mark Reddington, partner of LMN Architects of Seattle, and Ken Cretney, chief operating officer for the Vancouver Convention Centre.  Ken came on board with the center six months before the building was finished; as such, he wasn't the original client for the project and is…

Several years ago, I visited the Weissenhof Estate, an experimental residential complex built on a hillside outside Stuttgart in 1927.  Some of the most recognizable names in 20th century architecture were contributors to the buildings and the project’s success, including Le Corbusier, Mies van der Rohe, and Peter Behrens, among others.  Their goal was to provide affordable housing, something…

A recent article by Aaron Betsky in Architect magazine took issue with a New York Times-sponsored program called the Energy For Tomorrow Conference.  Betsky was specifically concerned that the Times had not included any "urbanists, planners, or even an architect" but did include "leading urban expert Jeremy Irons." He queried, "What are architects when we're thinking about the future of the…

A few lines in Nicholai Ouroussoff’s recent article in The New York Times about the new Parrish Art Museum particularly caught my attention: “The design is a major step down in architectural ambition.  It suggests the possibility of a worrying new development in our time of financial insecurity.  It is a creeping conservatism – and aversion to risk – that leaves little room for creative…

I am convinced that style has very little to do with the real success of buildings.  Although we as architects spend a lot of time and energy screaming about “modernism” or “regionalism” or “post-structuralism,” in the end, design genre does not make any guarantee about design quality or the ability of a building to make a difference in its culture. This summer I had the opportunity to see two…

While in Dallas last week, I took a few minutes to walk from my office to the new Arts District where there are buildings by five Pritzker-Prize-winning architects within sight of each other—Nasher Sculpture Center by Renzo Piano, Meyerson Symphony Center by I.M. Pei, Norman Foster’s Winspear Opera House, Wyly Theater by Rem Koolhaas and, nearby, Thom Mayne’s Museum of Nature and Science.  All of…

We try so hard in American cities to get an active pedestrian street scene to happen.  In China, with a billion people and 17 million in Shanghai alone, there never seems to be an issue with action on the street day or night.  And, of course, where there are people around, cool things just seem to happen serendipitously.  On Nanjing Dong Lu in downtown Shanghai the mixture of aggressive…