Texas Architecture: The State of the Art
Writing
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 included, with representation from California, and from…
Impressions
Writing
IMPRESSIONS of a TRAVELER I Four and a half centuries ago, the shipwrecked Spanish explorer Nunez Cabeza de Vaca was cast ashore along the Texas coast on an island the Spaniards called Malhado-"Wretched." For six long years he and three companions trekked across the sparcely inhabited Indian territories from what is now Galveston to Corpus Christi, Austin, San Antonio, Big Spring, and El Paso. In…
Church of Reconciliation
Writing
The Church of Reconciliation in San Antonio both acknowledges and extends a longstanding tradition of centrally planned churches. From Bramante's plan for St. Peter's or Borromini's Sant' Ivo to Eero Saarinen's Christian Church in Columbus, Indiana, or Louis Kahn's Unitarian Church in Rochester, New York, the centralized plan has been called upon, not only to focus attention on a spiritual locus…
TSA Headquarters
Writing
Imagine the modernist Corbusian dream of the 1920s - spaciousness, light, health, and urbanity - a perch high above the city with sweeping views to hills and plains - a place surrounded by the sky yet blessed with a bit of the earth in the form of landscaped terraces occupying almost a third of the usable floor space. Then imagine almost the opposite – a Ruskinian reverence for craft, detail, and…
On Continuity in Architecture
Writing
I recently visited Richard Meier's evocative new seminary building in Hartford, Connecticut. It was everything the photographs promised it should be – pure, clean, and elegant, an exquisite mastery of space, light, and shape. It is a consummate work of an eminently skilled designer. Proud and robust from the outside, serene and moving on the interior, it is a truly beautiful object. But visiting…
Architecture in Australia: A Texas Counterpart
Writing
When I was a boy in Houston, I was told that a hole dug deep enough straight through the center of the earth from Texas would eventually reach China. It was a lie. The other side of the world is actually Australia-a place which bears some striking and even uncanny environmental similarities to Texas, its geographic counterpart half-way around the globe. The international stereotype of both Texas…