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…

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,…

San Antonio, a city created by "act of will."

As time approached for Texas to celebrate the centennial of its independence, Dallas proposed to use the expanded site of the 48-year-old Texas State Fair as grounds for the new exposition, but with a completely new set of buildings. Dallasite George Dahl was selected Executive Architect for the ambitious project, with design assistance from the well-known Philadelphia architect, Paul Cret. The…

Architecture, at its best, embodies a society's consciousness of itself. It is a powerful means of cultural expression. The artifacts that result from the act of building can become a telling interpretation of their place and their inhabitants – a natural and quotidian way of expressing human experience, of transferring ideas and values. This sort of architecture has less to do with style or…

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…