Architecture swallowed postmodernism whole, gagged violently, and spit it out. In contrast, disciplines as diverse as science, psychoanalysis, literature, and philosophy partook of postmodernist thought more moderately, nourishing a generation of creative growth with genuine relevance to contemporary life and values. In architecture, the same seminal ideas that nurtured other fields became too…

CRITIQUE The new Robert C. Byrd United States Courthouse and Federal Building in Beckley, West Virginia, is an unapologetic homage to the architecture of another era. The General Services Administration jury that selected its design in a 1995 limited competition lauded its reference to 1930s WPA style, which they considered to produce "an extremely successful solution to making a public building…

Moshe Safdie is a refugee from the “style wars” that have swept across the international design landscape over the last three decades. Outspoken in his disdain for movements like postmodernism and deconstructivism, he has fled from trendy skirmishes between “hot” and “not” on favor of an independent career, producing work that is difficult to categorize or label. Not a media darling and rarely…

Preservation. In 1959, a decade after Alvar Aalto’s Baker House opened on the MIT campus, Steen Eiler Rasmussen wrote enthusiastically of it in his landmark book, Experiencing Architecture. ”The entire design is based on the functions of the building… For these young people Aalto has created a building which entirely avoids the stereotyped rooms and anthill atmosphere of old-fashioned…

Downtowns and close-in neighborhoods were once the real hearts of our cities-places where people lived, worked, shopped, and gathered for civic events. They contained the very broadest cross section of our population. They were home to schools, churches, industry, recreation, entertainment - all cheek-to-jowl beside each other and reveling in the messy vitality that makes urban life compelling…

With a sweeping new campus design, SMU intends to change its physical relationship with the city and improve its setting for students. Will it work?

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…

When Kallmann and McKinnell - consummate Modernists known at the time for their brutalist Boston City Hall of 1968 – produced the gentle, arcadian American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1980, it caused quite a stir among avid style-labelers in the Modernism/Postmodernism debate. Although noted critic Ada Louise Huxtable termed it "an architectural event of genuine significance... a…

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…

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…