Larry Speck

This is primarily a picture book. Its being was provoked in large part by the pre-existence of a cohesive body of photographs by Richard Payne illustrating a sensibly selected sampling of Texas' best architecture. Those photographs were the product of an extensive effort on the part of Texas Society of Architects in 1983 to heighten public awareness of Texas' architectural heritage. That effort…

What is Texas architecture? Has Texas produced built artifacts that express its rich and colorful history over the last 150 years and even before? Has this culture recorded in its buildings the values and aspirations as well as the circumstances and resources of its populace over time? Are there at least the roots of traditions of Texas architecture which appropriately bespeak the culture of the…

Between 1680 and 1793, thirty-six missions were founded by the Spanish across Texas. Under constant challenge from the Indians, the French, and the rugged living conditions afforded by the land, only a handful of these survived for any period of time. The most impressive of the survivors are a series of five missions strung along the banks of the San Antonio River within a twelve-mile radius of…

One of the oldest and most distinguished state executive residences in the country, the Governor's Mansion is a delicate blend of frontier plainness and aspiring sophistication. Simple, but elegantly refined, the building stands not only as a telling essay on Texas culture in the mid-nineteenth century, but also as a repository of 130 years of social and political memories. It serves also as a…

Across the lawn from the Governor's Mansion the old Greek Revival capitol building of 1853 was badly gutted by fire in 1881 and, with little regret, demolished to make way for a much larger and grander capitol building at the terminus of Congress Avenue. The first capitol had always been too small and timid to live up to its focal location in the city plan. The state resolved in its second…

Nowhere was the rising affluence of Texas in the late nineteenth century more evident than in Galveston, dubbed at the time "Queen City of the Gulf." All of the promise and prosperity of blossoming American capitalism were here, fed by a booming port that had become the gateway to the New West. Heady Galveston was ready to tear down its modest frame structures and rebuild in brick and stone to…

The captains of commerce and finance who led Galveston to its glory in the late nineteenth century created for themselves a striking collection of imposing homes built behind stately rows of palm trees in what is sometimes called Galveston's "Castle District." A few of the wealthy barons called in prestigious architects from outside the state to design their new palaces. Notably, Mr. and Mrs.…

Some of the finest jewels of Texas architecture reside in its small towns, often little known outside their immediate communities, these buildings represent the ambitious aspirations and strong community spirit which has characterized rural Texas throughout its history. Agricultural life on the Texas prairie was a tough and rugged existence requiring firm resolve and a strong will. Settlers of…

When Cass Gilbert first visited the University of Texas campus at the request of the university's regents in 1909, he found a motley collection of eight buildings of widely disparate styles and materials which the university had collected over its first quarter-century of existence. Although attempts had been made when new buildings were added in 1903 and 1909 to create a "general plan" for the…

When Edgar Odell Lovett, the first president of Rice Institute (now Rice University), sought an architect to give physical shape to his recently founded institution in 1909, he searched for the best available talent in the country. In the end, he selected the Boston firm of Cram, Goodhue, and Ferguson, who were widely known and respected for their previous collegiate work at Princeton…

Good design is too often judged to be a luxury, accessible only to high-dollar public projects, prestigious corporate ventures, well-endowed institutional buildings, or homes for the very rich. Highland Park Village contradicts this premise and demonstrates how quality architecture can enhance everyday life, providing a significant virtue for even the most humble of building types. The town of…

The gracious Elbert Williams House in north Dallas was built as a tour de force of Texas regional expression in architecture, art, and craft. Its designer, David R. Williams, was the most prominent of a small group of self-styled artists and intellectuals who, in the 1920s and early 1930s, sought a particularly Texan expression in the arts. Their work, paralleled by similar interest in regional…

As time approached for Texas to celebrate the centennial of its independence, several cities vied for the honor of hosting a world's fair to commemorate the event. Although San Antonio, Austin, and Houston all offered greater historical claim to the occasion, Dallas offered more money and was designated the home of the Centennial Exposition a scant two years prior to the proposed opening date of…

In September 1921 a disastrous flood ravaged downtown San Antonio. Water depth was measured at more than eight feet on some downtown streets. Over fifty people were killed and property damage totaled more than $50 million. Public outcry demanded that a solution be found. San Antonio would double its population in the decade of the 1920s, and the growing city keenly felt the need to heal the…

The growing desire in the 1930s for an architectural expression in Texas appropriate to its place is nowhere more evident than in the work of the young architect O'Neil Ford. A colleague and traveling companion of David R. Williams, Ford was an outspoken advocate of the same sort of unaffected simplicity based on pioneer values that the Elbert Williams house illustrates. But Ford was also an…

If you blur your eyes slightly it is easy to imagine the Trinity University campus as an inherited relic of marching time – a sensitive, piecemeal aggregation of buildings and spaces collected over several centuries by a rich, culturally eclectic city. The campus is, of course, not old at all. It is, in fact, quite new, having been built from scratch in various phases from 1948 to 1976. But the…

By the mid-1950s, as evidenced by his early work at Trinity University, O'Neil Ford had reached his stride as a designer and was distinguishing himself as a leader among architects in the state. He had blended his deep-rooted appreciation of tradition with a hardheaded search for innovation and invention. Like others of the era, he was particularly interested in tinkering with structure and the…

A few blocks from the Tenneco Building in downtown Houston sits the modest little Kellum-Noble House of 1851. Simple, clean, taut, and undecorated, the house is an elegant and unaffected response to mid-nineteenth-century residential needs. Its simple, squarish plan yields plain but flexible interior spaces. The deep double-decker porch that surrounds it on all four sides shields it from the hot…

The story of the success of the Kimbell Art Museum begins, not with the hiring of its esteemed architect in 1967, but two years earlier when the trustees of the Kimbell Foundation appointed Dr. Richard F. Brown as director of the budding museum. Industrialist Kay Kimbell had bequeathed his personal collection of more than 350 art objects from which the museum's holdings would grow. He had also…

When New York architect Ralph Adams Cram first visited the site assigned him for Rice University just south of Houston in 1909 he found a "level and stupid" site – 277 acres of bare prairie land broken only by a few scrub oaks in one corner. A scant forty-five years later, when Chicago architect Mies van der Rohe first visited a site virtually across the street from Cram's which had been assigned…

No building in Texas has created more excitement in the process of its coming to being than Pennzoil Place did in Houston in the early 1970s. Already graced by such refined modern works as Mies' Museum of Fine Arts and SOM's Tenneco Building, Houston was ready to break away, to raise buildings which would reflect its ambitions and vitality. Pennzoil gave a palpable presence to the city's…

The idea of converting a beer brewery into an art museum is tinged with an irresistible irony. The delicious antipathy of the two uses would, for most, render the idea of their sharing quarters improbable, even if the arrangement were to be sequential and not concurrent. San Antonio, thankfully, has never been a city to shy away from the improbable. When existing quarters became unbearably tight…