Cave of New Being, made using digital modeling and fabrication technologies, and recently installed near the Gerald D. Hines College of Architecture

A new Texas-based design research alliance called TEX-FAB, co-founded by Houstonian Andrew Vrana, is holding an international competition called REPEAT. Here’s the description:

REPEAT is a competition established to foster the creative spirit in the burgeoning field of digital fabrication. We encourage the generation of cutting edge design proposals for an outdoor structure of your design with the only caveats being it must serve a purpose, be generated and conceived digitally, incorporate repetitive elements, and be produced through fabrication technologies available within Houston, Texas.

Why call a design competition REPEAT? Isn’t design about originality?

Digital fabrication allows designers to translate their ideas directly into physical, tangible objects. Repetitive elements can be joined together to make eye-popping shapes with new visual and structural properties. Digital fabrication has the potential to unleash tremendous amounts of creativity and cut costs for innovative projects. In February, OffCite reported on a good example, the Cave of New Being, built by University of Houston students in studios led by Ben Nicholson, Joe Meppelink, and Andrew Vrana.

Vrana is an architect with the firm Metalab. You can read about the history of Metalab and its award-winning prefabricated system Framework House in the online Cite 70 archive.

Want to learn more? Attend one of TEX FAB’s workshops:

TEX-FAB Houston will present four distinct workshop sequences that begin with basic skill building and progress with each session till the attendee gains a broad understanding of the topics presented. It is strongly encouraged that you register for all the sessions in one topic area to gain the broadest understanding of that topic.

Sylvan Beach Pavilion, designed by Greacen & Brogniez, 1953. Photo by Hank Hancock.

The citizens of La Porte may be forgiven if they just can’t figure out what their elected officials have in store for the Sylvan Beach Pavilion, a significant work of civic architecture located at Harris County’s only public beach. For twenty years, the city of La Porte rented the structure for cheap from Harris County and operated the venue—a dancehall, a performance space, a banquet room, a conference hall—in just the way that a municipal government will do when it finds itself in the hospitality business, which is to say, reluctantly, negligently, and sporadically. Interested renters were turned away without explanation. The space often sat empty on weekend evenings, when one might expect it to turn some business. Once recognized across the region as one of the foremost entertainment venues, the pride of La Porte, the Sylvan Beach Pavilion withdrew into obscurity, a generational bookmark. The city put off making regular repairs, as required by its lease, so the place just got shabby.

Aerial image of Sylvan Beach Pavilion

The building was erected in 1953 (there had been two previous pavilions at that location since 1896, each destroyed by storms), designed by the firm Greacen & Brogniez. Raymond Brogniez graduated from Harvard’s Graduate School of Design under Walter Gropius and Marcel Breuer. Thomas Greacen’s best-known work in Houston is the First Unitarian Church (1952). The architects gave the pavilion its modernist sensibility. New materials like folded plate reinforced concrete allowed for unprecedented adaptation of space to reflect function. At the pavilion, this is reflected in the way separate parts of the building suit their separate roles: its tiered and multi-storied entranceway; its indoor/outdoor concessions that join together the lobby and deck areas; and its iconic 10,000 square-foot glass-walled ballroom overlooking Galveston Bay. The octagonal ballroom, a prize-winning example of mid-century modernist aesthetic, nevertheless recalls the 150-year tradition in Texas of polygonal dance hall spaces that consolidated and strengthened their communities.

Sylvan Beach and La Porte share their history and their origins in the last decade of the nineteenth century. Before the ship channel, before the incursion of the petroleum industries, La Porte was established as Houston’s beachside resort community, a classy Victorian retreat for harried urban recreationists. For 100 years, generations attended company picnics, live radio extravaganzas, big band dances, and traveling performances by national acts, as well as banquets, fund-raisers, and family celebrations of graduation, anniversary, and retirement. In some ways, the pavilion today is a victim of its past, ever recalling the golden years of the 1930s when a previous pavilion structure hosted the great bandleaders Rudee Vallee, Phil Harris, and Benny Goodman in a circuit that included Galveston’s Hollywood Club and the Rice Hotel. Desegregation in 1962 opened significant new opportunities for black performers and audiences in contemporary soul and R&B. In 1974 the headlining event was a nostalgic big band revue “Return to Sylvan Beach” hosted by the 70-year-old Phil Harris, remembering as always the old days at Sylvan Beach.

Finally in September 2008, Hurricane Ike inflicted some significant damage on the structure, so it was boarded up and left to rot. Citizens of La Porte and architectural scholars and enthusiasts had organized six months earlier to block a County Commissioner’s proposal to replace the pavilion with a hotel and convention center. (Again the curse of nostalgia: it would have a “retro theme dating to the 1920s.”) Now it looked as if Ike would provide them indisputable justification for a teardown.

Ted Powell, a chemical engineer and the most vocal organizer of efforts to preserve the Sylvan Beach Pavilion (he runs the site savethepavilion.com), disagrees with the grim assessments of city and county assessors, including that the building is “uninsurable.” He and his many allies in La Porte insist that the building is structurally sound, easily salvaged, and could be feasibly operated as it was originally designed. They have been assisted by the economic collapse over the last few months in 2008, which did much to the cool the heels of eager developers.

Ever since Ike, the city, the county, and preservationists have forwarded competing claims of insurance liability; costs for repair, restoration, or replacement; and eligibility for federal and state grants. One year after Ike, Powell submitted forms to nominate the Sylvan Beach Pavilion in the National Historic Register, effectively preventing federal money from being used to destroy it. Stephen Fox, a fellow of the Anchorage Foundation of Texas, assisted Powell with the registration effort.

The city and county aren’t saying much now about what’s in store, though the pavilion’s historic register and its popular preservation campaign now make it politically risky to suggest knocking it down. The city of La Porte broke its lease with the county in October 2009, getting out of the dance hall business for good. County Commissioner Sylvia Garcia’s office still insists that it never made plans to demolish the pavilion, despite language in a November 2009 proposal to the state of Texas outlining plans for “clearance and reconstruction.” According to spokesman Mark Seegers, that language was only so much boilerplate to satisfy eligibility requirements, and no one should have taken it seriously.

Whatever the record may indicate about the County Commissioner’s practices and priorities, Sylvia Garcia apparently has no clear vision now for the Sylvan Beach Pavilion, insisting definite plans must wait to see how much funding can be secured. Garcia’s recent election to co-chair the H-GAC Ike Recovery Committee (responsible for distributing FEMA funding in the area) makes no difference at all. Just this week, Sylvia Garcia authorized the county to sue the insurer to recover money to make repairs and reopen the building.

For his part, Ted Powell sees the past two years of delay as part bureaucratic incompetence and part willful obstruction. He hopes to raise funds outside of the tax, grant, and insurance systems to keep the Sylvan Beach Pavilion alive and well and planning for its future. He wants the pavilion to be secure, and operating a viable business, by the time the economy regains its footing and developers in Texas again set their eyes on La Porte’s Sylvan Beach.

Selected Images from Romance of Old Sylvan Beach by Erna B. Foxworth

Related Links:

NPR report on Texas dance halls

KUHF Report on Lawsuit to Recover Funds

Book design and photographs by Thumb

Encased in thick yellow boards and with a title reminiscent of a lopsided basketball game score, Oscar 102/Brasilia 50, immediately appealed to me. According to its graphic designers, Thumb (Luke Bulman and Jessica Young), “The book’s hybrid binding uses book boards laminated with yellow paper, trimmed flush to expose the edge of the boards. Over time, these edges will soften and ‘weather’ with handling.” Like the woman in Napoleon Dynamite, I whispered to myself, “I want that!”

With this publication the Rice School of Architecture again demonstrates its commitment to its forty-nine-year-old publication series, Architecture at Rice. AaR, as it is abbreviated on the book’s spine, was begun by the Rice School of Architecture’s visionary leader, Bill Caudill, in 1961. As the preface to an early example explained: “Architecture at Rice University designates a series of reports on thoughts and investigations from the department of architecture. It is published in the belief that the education of architects can best be advanced if teachers, students, practitioners, and interested laymen share in what they are thinking and doing.” Under Rice’s last dean, Lars Lerup, the series was reinvigorated in 1993 after a period when one book was printed in thirteen years. Since then the Rice School of Architecture has been producing interesting books intermittently, but you might not know it because of the stealth marketing. I reviewed AaR 44, last year for Offcite but only because I had previously seen a copy lying on a coffee table in Dawn Finley and Mark Wamble’s house during an RDA architectural tour. Somehow I missed AaR 45, but was notified of AaR 46 via a Facebook posting.

Oscar 102/Brasilia 50 is the work of Farès el-Dahdah, a longtime professor at Rice who changed his specialty about ten or fifteen years ago from literary tropes in architecture to what seems to me to be the much more appealing study of Brazil’s tropical modern architecture. Brasilia has a special place in el-Dahdah’s heart since, as he told us when I took his Brasilia seminar in 2001, it was where he attended high school and a place of much youthful pleasure. The title refers to the ages in 2010 of celebrated Brazilian architect Oscar Niemeyer (1907-) and that of its purpose-built capital city, Brasilia. He justifies the book in his typical light-hearted way: “The mere intersection of Niemeyer’s centenary (plus two) and Brasilia’s fiftieth anniversary was sufficient pretext to conduct a studio in the fall 2007 at Rice University’s School of Architecture.” The content includes eight essays by el-Dahdah examining various aspects of Brasilia and “causes célèbres in the history of Brazil’s contribution to modern architecture,” each supplemented by a student-produced “dossier” of computer models, diagrams, and occasional essays. The book begins and ends with spreads of splendid photos depicting several of Niemeyer’s best known buildings that the students visited during the course of the studio. I particularly liked these photos, which were taken by Luisina Wilfong and Lylse Oliveros, because of the manner in which they indicated effects of the passage of time on the modern buildings. There were smudges of black mold on the curving fascia of Niemeyer’s house in Rio de Janeiro. A slightly crooked chartreuse fire hydrant stands sentry with two costumed guards in front of the Planalto Palace. Some of the marble revetment looked about to pop from the awesomely long pedestrian ramp leading up to the roof of the Congress (which, by the way, has no handrails to speak of).

El-Dahdah has completely immersed himself in minutiae of his subject as the numerous references to letters in archives, emails to descendents of key players, and the inclusion of many sketches and drawings by Niemeyer and other architects of the period demonstrates. The most intriguing essays to me were those that explored the back and forth dialogue between Le Corbusier and his Brazilian colleagues. Le Corbusier visited Rio de Janeiro in 1936 at the invitation of the éminence grise of modernity in Brazil, Lucio Costa (1902-1998). A wily figure, Costa promoted modernism while at the same time serving as the decades-long director of the Serviço do Patrimônio Histórico e Artístico Nacional (the Brazilian national heritage service). Costa had been entrusted to the design of a new building for the Ministry of Education and Health and wished to consult with Le Corbusier, in his mind a visionary of an ability that only appears at “intervals of centuries.” The resulting building, completed in 1944, has been heralded as one of the canons of modern architecture. As the protracted design process stretched out over several sites and innumerable schemes, ego played its role and both the Brazilian design team lead by Costa and Niemeyer and Le Corbusier ended up claiming credit for what was clearly a solution that neither would have arrived at alone. In other essays el-Dahdah charts the nuances of similar situations with regards to such other famous buildings as Brazil’s pavilion at the New York World’s Fair (1939) and the United Nations Headquarters Building (1952).

The last three essays address Brasilia. The genesis of this city, its inaugural sectors built in short three years on an arid, treeless plain, more than 600 km from the nearest paved road, is almost legendary. Costa’s winning proposal for its design consisted of fifteen little sketches and accompanied by an essay that began: Não pretendia competir e, na verdade, não concorro—apenas me desvencilho de uma solução possível, que não foi procurada mas surgiu, por assim dizer, já pronta (“It was not my intention to enter the competition—nor indeed am I really so doing. I am merely liberating my mind from a possible solution which sprang to it as a complete picture, but which I had not sought.”), thus casting a wonderfully subversive, existential doubt on the entire project. The plan of Brasilia is composed of 120 large superquadras, or residential blocks, intended to house about 2,500 people ranged symmetrically in four parallel, curving rows about a shorter, perpendicular “monumental axis” containing the buildings of the government. Roadways on the scale of freeways connect the various parts of the city. Almost from the start, Brasilia has been criticized for its anti-urban qualities when compared to traditional, densely built cities. However, as el-Dahdah points out, “to live in a superquadra means access to ‘financial stability, home ownership, individual cars, schools, cinemas, theaters, clubs, green spaces, viable roads without traffic and where physical safety is guaranteed to go to work and back, in sum, access to the city in all it signifies as a way of life.’” It reminds me of living in Houston, another city criticized for the many of the same reasons. Although, el-Dahdah continues, “a city without the traditional street or street corner can very well have other viable public spaces and that social ecologies can easily adapt to unprecedented urban forms,” the sections on Brasilia do not seem to explore this in a significant way. It would have been fascinating if some of the student dossiers, which in general I found to be vague or burdened with jargon-loaded sentences, focused on what it is like to spend your days in such a place. Perhaps it would have uncovered some of the common ground between Brasilia, Houston, and other contemporary, suburban cities that make them desirable places to live for so many people despite the critics’ protests.

Oscar 102/Brasilia 50
Architecture at Rice 46, Houston: Rice School of Architecture, 2010

Architects Filo Castore and Catherine Callaway. All photographs by Eric Hester

The launch of Cite 82 was celebrated in style at Canopy on July 20. The Montrose restaurant, designed by architect Dillon Kyle with Eames-style chairs, earthy tones, and a natural, but contemporary ceiling sculpture that mimics a bird’s nest, provided the perfect backdrop to ponder the theme of Cite’s latest installment: 60s and 70s sites of counterculture. Writers, activists, university professors, architects, designers, and artists came to lift their glasses, indulge in delectable hors d’oeuvres, and revel in one of Cite’s most memorable issues to date.

Guests celebrating at Canopy

Cite 82 Guest Editors Michelangelo Sabatino and Bruce Webb

Julia and Joe Mashburn

Kimberly Hickson and Dan Gilbane

Katie Plocheck, Jenny Lynn Weitz Amare-Cartwright, Scott Cartwright

Raj Mankad, Cite Editor, and Ben Koush

Fernando Brave and Carlos Jimenez

DONATE ONLINE – Please note “The Osprey Fund” in the comment box.

DONATE BY MAIL:
Buffalo Bayou Partnership
ATTN: The Osprey Fund
1113 Vine Street, Suite 200

Because the pontoon boat is a necessary bayou educational tool, as well as a much-needed revenue source for Buffalo Bayou Partnership’s operating budget, the organization hopes to replace the vessel as soon as possible.

As the Rice Design Alliance prepares to honor Houston engineer and Executive Director of the Harris County Public Infrastructure Department, Art Storey, at RDA’s annual gala in November, we are reminded of the importance of bayous to the city of Houston. Some of Storey’s most significant contributions have involved transforming the county’s bayou systems from “mere drainage ways maintained with mowing machines and heavy equipment, to waterways that play multiple roles in Houston’s urban fabric,” according to Kevin Shanley, president of the SWA group and a partner with the flood control district on several bayou improvement projects.

Buffalo Bayou Partnership has been a key partner in changing the way Houstonians see the bayou.

Cite 82 cover, illustration by Gary Panter

The Summer issue of Cite (82) is now in the mail and will soon be at the Brazos Bookstore, CAMH, MFAH, Issues, Domy, River Oaks Bookstore, and other stores. Below guest editors Michelangelo Sabatino and Bruce Webb share a letter about the special issue and the Table of Contents.

By the time the Media Center at Rice University opened in February 1970 and Gunnar Birkerts silver-sided Contemporary Arts Museum hosted its first exhibit in 1972, the Aquarian generation had already gathered at Woodstock for a festival of peace and music. John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King were dead and the first public demonstrations against the Vietnam War had taken place in Washington. Both the center and the museum became prominent sites of Houston’s participation in the counterculture that was agitating America. They were the tip of the iceberg, temples for performing rituals of the avant-garde; but all around Houston there was a proliferation of places and activities that belonged to the “youthful opposition” that historian Theodore Roszak identified in “The Making of Counter Culture.”

Counterculture was never more than a small part of the total social-cultural scene, but it left an important legacy in Houston. Its vivid aberrancies stand out against a more uniform and grayish background of an America dominated by McCarthy-era investigations for “un-American activities” and Leave it to Beaver morality. In this issue of Cite we set out to examine not only the cultural implications of the counterculture itself but the sites in the city of Houston that it built, inhabited, or otherwise made use of.

America’s great countercultural era ran from the mid-1960s to the early ‘70s. It portrayed a society radically divided along generational lines, where youth openly rebelled against ingrained attitudes of the past, protesting the war in Vietnam and demanding equality for all races and genders as well as sexual liberation. It was not simply a political movement, but also created its own alternative subculture of wildly trippy music and art, graphic design, drugs, music, festivals, and communal living.

How did Houston participate in this new consciousness and lifestyle? Did the city have its own version of Haight-Ashbury, and was it Montrose or Market Square? Did the University of Houston–with its mandate to educate the working-class student provide alternative sites of learning that opened up new pedagogical opportunities? Did the university’s coexistence with the surrounding historically African-American Third Ward (and neighboring Texas Southern University) help shape a forum for radicalizing a disenchanted population of largely middle-class students? Did rethinking domestic architecture offer opportunities for designers and builders to subvert mainstream expectations of dwelling?

Anderson Fair block party circa 1975

It didn’t always come together easily. Tensions were aggravated by a new attitude of cultural and social empowerment and aggressiveness. Reflecting confrontations that were sweeping across the country, young people in Houston led protests against the Vietnam war and supported social movements for civil, gay, and women’s rights. Normative society was bewildered and antagonized by the lifestyle, music, and stance of the counterculture with its rejection of Main Street values. Inevitably this free expression of beliefs and desires led to confrontations with authority and violent encounters between police and protesters.

Most of the sites discussed in this issue that put the Houston counterculture on the map in the 1960s and ’70s have either changed or been gentrified, but evidence of their character and influence can still be found throughout the city. While this era in American culture and society opened up new possibilities, it seems that today, with a few exceptions, the counterculture in Houston has been absorbed–or smothered–into the mainstream. With each step towards publication of this issue came another tip about a key counterculture site missed, and the realization that these sites were more ubiquitous than we had expected and had a major impact on aspects of Houston now taken for granted. We offer these scant pages, then, as a provocation to preserve records of, call attention to, celebrate, and critique the era.

Michelangelo Sabatino and Bruce Webb

Table of Contents

Citings

NEWS: Material World Lecture Series, Initiatives for Houston Grants, Charrette, Gala

ARCHITECTURE: Mexico City Lectures, Responses by Carlos Jimenez and Camilo Parra

Features

Counterculture U: Discontent and Liberation at the University of Houston
by Bruce Webb

Space City! Underground
by Raj Mankad

Artists, Activists, and Weirdos: The Anderson Fairytale
by Hank Hancock

Sites of Subversion: Domestic Environments Between Protest and Poetry, 1968-1977
by Michelangelo Sabatino

The Evolution of Queer Space in Houston: A Testimony
by Ray Hill

Hippie Landing: Love Street Light Circus Feel Good Machine
by Catherine Essinger

There’s Something about Mary’s: Where Leather Picked Up Politics
by Brian Riedel

Flashpoints on the Road to Black and Brown Power: Sites of Struggle in Houston in the ’60s and ’70s
by John Pluecker

Vim and Vigor, Indelicate Language and Bursts of Temper: The Story of the de Menil Cadre and the
Emergence of Houston’s Counterculture Arts and Politics
by Miah Arnold

The Mad Mix: Montrose, The Heart of Houston
by Thorne Dreyer

Readings

Ant Farm the Movie by Laura Harrison & Beth Federici
by Celeste Williams

MFAH Bookstore Recommends: Books on architecture and design for all types

Hindcite

Floating Along—In Search of Creative Friction
by Jose Solis

Morris Architects

If you thought that stylish living for pets began and ended with couture rain coats, high-design pet carriers, and organic day spas, you can now add innovative, state-of-the-art doghouses to the list. For years, creative individuals have been using their talents to design and build functional (and stylish) doghouses for their four-legged friends. Last year, Houston Pavilions hosted its first Barkitecture design competition, bringing together designers, architects, builders and artists who constructed dozens of unique homes for man’s best friend. Here are a few of the houses from last year’s competition:

Page Southerland Page

Harrell Architects

Newberry Campa

Dump Truck

English Associates

Architects Without Borders

This year, Barkitecture is back and seeking participants for its second annual competition on Saturday, October 23. If interested, please visit barkitecturehouston.com to sign up by August 1 and learn more about participating. All houses will be publicly displayed at Houston Pavillions and auctioned off in a silent auction benefiting Pup Squad. While there is no entry fee, participants are asked to cover the costs associated with designing and building the doghouse. Doghouses can be as wild, crazy, conservative or refined as you can imagine. Aside from raising much-needed funds for charity, the doghouses will also be eligible to win Peoples’ Choice, Kid’s Choice, and Best of Show awards. Better yet, if design is not your thing, you can attend a “Yappy Hour” event from 5pm to 8pm on Friday, October 22.

1904 Decatur house, MC2 Architects, photograph by Hester + Hardaway from Cite 51

Recently Mayor Annise Parker has brought forth the possibility of new development restrictions in Houston’s historic districts. On a June 9 kuhf public radio broadcast, Parker commented on the potential changes to ordinance, saying, “If you’re building in a historic district, the expectation is that you will build something that in mass and scale and general appearance fits into the district. If you want to come and put a big metal ultra-modern townhome in the middle of the district you will not receive a certificate of appropriateness.”

Architecture is an ever-evolving field, and modern architecture, specifically, represents a step away from building styles of the past, pushing the limits of materials and form. However, a tension exists between preserving the historic integrity of designated districts, and pursuing progressive design in the field of architecture. How do we maintain the historic identity of a neighborhood, while simultaneously moving into the future?

“Past Imperfect” an article by David Theis in Cite’s 51st issue looks precisely at this issue, referencing the modern house by MC2 Designs in Houston’s Sixth Ward. To some, this building sums up the image that Parker is painting of the “big metal modern”—the one house on the street that steals the show with its sleek form and shift in materials. Others argue that MC2’s design picks up motifs in the neighborhood, playing with traditional forms and materials to produce a modern commentary. This controversial project really represents the issue at large. Is there a place for the contemporary in historic districts, or are these neighborhoods to be left alone as living exhibits commemorating the past?

As a graduate student pursuing a Masters in historic preservation, I came to Houston to spend the summer working and writing for the Rice Design Alliance. RDA’s platform seemed a suitable spot to take in the city’s architecture, old and new. Coming in, I knew only the basics—Houston had no zoning (gasp); The city’s preservation ordinance had long been criticized as being overly differential to developers; And the general sentiment for old buildings often does not stop the ever present, ever powerful demolition.

Biking to work on my second day at RDA, I noticed a bulldozer and crew parked at a house on the corner of North Boulevard. By my ride home later that afternoon, the house was gone, leaving only piles of broken glass and crumbling brick and mortar. Demolition in a day.

And so it is easy to tear things down, and not every building can avoid demolition. It happens everywhere, buildings are abandoned, neglected, decaying, unhealthy, unusable, or just plain unwanted. Buildings are knocked down. This is the reality, and too often, preservationists are quickly written off as the overly sentimental or nostalgic that just want to save everything.

Preservation is not about freezing time and ensuring all buildings never change, and places never evolve. In fact it is just the opposite. Preservation helps people understand the evolution. By maintaining older buildings, a place suddenly has a visible history that you can read by simply walking down the street.

9 Shadowlawn Circle, a 1961 unobtrusive modern courtyard house of steel, brick, and glass. Designed by Anderson Todd. Next door, 11 Shadowlawn Circle, a 1926 formidably-scaled neo-Georgian house designed by William Ward Watkin.

Perhaps Houston’s lack of zoning allows this quality to shine, revealing multiple histories in rather short distances. As an outsider looking in on Houston, it is riveting to witness the layers. To cruise down a tree-lined residential street, flanked by houses matching in massing and scale, then turn the corner and come face to face with the shining glass curtain wall of a skyscraper, before the quaint residential street resumes. Old and new, small and large, the shift in materials, scale, light and form— Houston makes for great possibilities in architecture.

However, these juxtapositions are also telling of Houston’s enormous growth. Founded in 1836, Houston has grown from a small town of 2,000 to a city of over 2 million. It is at Chicago’s heels, vying for the spot as the third largest city in the country. Houston welcomes more people, more growth and more development each year, and in 1995, the city adopted Houston’s Historic Preservation Ordinance, in an effort to prevent new growth from usurping examples of the past. As the steady growth continues, the protections in place for preservation seek to prevent development from eating away at the historic building fabric entirely. Preservation ensures that the city reads with multiple layers of history, rather than solely new development.

Contemporary house on Bissonnet designed by Allen Bianchi

In his Cite article, Theis comments that replicating traditional styles seems to be the path of least resistance for new construction in historic districts. Is the only guideline and goal for new construction to be non-controversial? Neatly packaged historic replicas may be in keeping with the district, but style control can be like a straight jacket for architects. At the same time, it can also be argued that replicating historic styles is, in a sense, falsifying history. In fact, false historic facades are a big “no no” in the world of preservation. Attempting to reproduce historic styles in new modern materials and forms is not only confusing, but can also quickly go wrong. Simply put, slapping on a set of columns and decorative ornamentation does not magically create history.

Constructing carbon copies of buildings in historic districts, every time the option for new construction arose, would be a huge missed opportunity. It all boils down to considerate design. A Neo-Georgian or Neo-Queen Anne may pick up the traditional style of a district, but can be equally alarming or out of place if inconsiderately executed. Any design, regardless of the style, requires a thoughtfulness of scale, massing, materials, and form, when brought to life in a historic district.

5306 & 5310 Institute Lane

The “big metal modern” seems painted as the bad guy, but really, it deserves a little defense. Preservation is not solely focused on charming historic houses. Preservation of modern architecture continues to gain strength, as many structures built in the 1950’s, ’60’s and ’70’s are now over or approaching the fifty year benchmark that carries historic status.

Such is the case with 9 Shadowlawn Circle, an unobtrusive contemporary home built in 1961 that has held its own among eclectic country houses from the 1920’s and 1930’s. Flanked by a 1933 home by H.A. Salisbury and a 1926 formidably scaled Neo-Georgian house by William Ward Watkin, this contemporary example revealed an obvious shift in design and form. However, 9 Shadowlawn Circle is in no way a blaring example of contemporary architecture that detracts from the history of its venerable neighbors. Instead, the architect, Anderson Todd, thoughtfully situated this house on its site, worked in a palette of familiar building materials, and scaled back the project so as not to disrupt the cohesion of the neighborhood. In fact, the street facade almost entirely blends into the landscape, coated with thick Spanish moss.

9 Shadowlawn Circle, street facade.

In order to read the visible history that these houses provide, we must not muddle their story. Blaring examples of modernism, over-scaled replicas of historic styles, and any sort of inconsiderate design threatens to confuse this visible history. There is no formula for doing it right, but strengthening the ordinance provides the opportunity to clarify the rules and ensure that new design plans work within their district. Theis poses the question, “is there a third way to build in a Houston historic district? Is there a type of design that is simultaneously, and paradoxically, contemporary, humble, and exciting?”

1203 Mt. Vernon, built in 1979.

I believe that there is. In reality, the small window for new construction in historic districts is really exciting. It is often a huge challenge for architects to work within guidelines that reign in historic districts. The materials, design, form, color, and even landscaping are all considered. In most cases, designs come before a review board that ultimately decides whether the plans fit the district. It is by no means an easy task, but it is a tremendous opportunity. To work with form and mass and scale to produce a building that smartly fits in the landscape is a huge feat.

Such a feat was accomplished in 1951, ten years before Anderson built at 9 Shadowlawn Circle. Philip Johnson was designing a home for the de Menil family in Houston’s architecturally conservative River Oaks neighborhood, and his long, low-slung brick design was far different than the opulent, multi-story mansions that lined the streets. The de Menil house revealed a minimalist, post-war architecture, new to the River Oaks neighborhood. Johnson himself showed subtle restraint, stepping away from the purity of his all glass houses, in order to considerately and artfully insert this building into the landscape.

The de Menil House by Philip Johnson, Photo by GHPA.

The effect of the de Menil house was not to reproduce an entire block of look-alikes, but rather, it represented a shift in form, a change in style, and inspiring new design. An anomoly at the time of its construction, today it has reached the 50 year historic benchmark, with all of its associated status. It represents the need for architecture, and preservation, to continually evolve.

Every year, Houston gets a little older, and its buildings add a bit more to the story. Preservation seeks to sustain this story, rendering it readable in the building fabric—it celebrates the neighborhood that represents early 20th century architecture, while simultaneously, switching gears and considering modern skyscrapers that dot the downtown. Houston has reminded me of this, with its tangled, criss-crossed layers of history.

Rendering by Peter Muessig showing a mixed oceanside population of vacationers and residents on the East End Flats of Galveston, land created with dredge material from the ship channel.

Over half of the United States population lives on or near the coast. Almost forty-percent of the world’s population lives within one-hundred kilometers of the water’s edge, and more are arriving at these shores each day. This situates the global littoral—the area closest to the water’s edge—at a critical location where environmental forces meet the tides of globalization making these locations compelling sites to witness the effects of 21st century political ecologies.

The graduate studio, “Last Resorts,” at the Rice School of Architecture taught by myself and Michael Robinson, and in collaboration with John Anderson, Maurice Ewing Professor of Oceanography, has completed a five-year program of design research on the global littoral, or coastline, and its political ecologies.

In 2006, the studio identified Galveston as a site of investigation for globally relevant issues—global climate change, sea level rise, coastal development pressures—from which to project future histories and destinies. In 2007, it investigated the island’s biopolitics, gave forms to invisible processes, and entangled the relationship between nature and culture for the final proposals. In 2008 the studio created proposals to anticipate damage wrought from catastrophic storms while acknowledging the gradual progression of time. In 2009 the studio evaluated previous year’s speculations in the aftermath of Hurricane Ike and generated responses to the storm. This final year continues to project alternative futures for the region and Galveston in particular, focusing on the redevelopment of the seawall and an area known as the East End Flats.

View East End Flats, Galveston in a larger map

Along the coastline, no building or infrastructure can be thought of in isolation because its design is likely to have significant effects on factors such as erosion rates, flooding, wind speeds or debris. This shifting from discrete forms of thinking demands a consideration of design as an intertwining performance between natural, political/economic and architectural/aesthetic ecologies. In this regard, the seawall is quite literally and conceptually an infrastructural line that attempts to delineate natural forces (coastal ecology, storms, erosion) and human representations (tourisms, landscape, branding, historicism). In a broader sense, the seawall can be understood as merely the largest example of infrastructures and processes that alter the steady state of the ecology for human use, such as dredging and land “reclamation” that characterize the gulf coast, especially, Galveston Bay, and which now determine its ecosystem.

The seawall can itself be divided in two. The western part forms the primary tourist beachfront. However, the last of the easily available sand in the area was used to replenish the beach after Ike left the foundations visible in places. This sand will last only a decade or two, less if another storm strikes. At this point, there will be no more beach and the seawall will become structurally compromised. Different uses and qualities for this edge need to be explored if Galveston is to have any future, or if the seawall is to continue.

The eastern part of the seawall now bisects the island due to the accretion of soil in front of the seawall over time. Indeed, the eastern edge of the island has the only accreting beach in the region. High-rise development has occurred on this beach, but in a fragmented fashion. On the northern side of the seawall lay the East End Flats, an area formed largely by dredge dump material that is perhaps the most important open site on the island. There are plans to develop this area, but they are inadequate to serve the future of the city in both terms of vision and pragmatism.

In order to work in locations like these, architects need to leverage our traditional expertise into new contexts in order to renovate and expand our conventional boundaries of practice. Design research shows how structural innovations can produce alternative design strategies for development in coastal regions.

Such a design-based approach calls attention to the inadequacy of current planning and legal determinations. For example, today the edges of development are determined by locating the first blades of wetland grasses and then literally connecting these dots into a border between nature and culture. While such a line is absurd, natural systems do not operate according to such geometries. Once drawn these fictions become legal and economic fact and landowners seek to reinforce it to protect their property often exacerbating collateral problems.

This suggests the need to take into account dynamic systems and how one might live within them rather than against them in the manner of top-down infrastructural planning of the 20th century at both the macro-scales (such as Galveston’s 18 foot high seawall) or micro scales (such as private bulkheads that attempt to arrest wetland encroachment). Indeed, legal geometry cannot be separated from material performativity, or “planning” from design. Architecture can, among other things, provide an image and a figure for alternative “worlds” that may result from re-combining our knowledge and technologies in a synthetic and integrated way. Featured below are outstanding examples of student’s proposals from the last iteration of the course in Spring 2010.

East End Outposts
by Peter Muessig

The Island of Galveston annually depletes its budget and material resources in order to support a temporal population of weekenders in the western territories while the potential of the Seawall, along its eastern corridor, is squandered. This project proposes an alternative Galveston that leverages the full potential of the Seawall as a barrier, an experience, and a new coastal typology. The project strategically locates remediated dredge material produced each year in order to maintain the shipping channels in the region to both fortify the seawall by raising the area behind it to protect the island from the sea-level rise expected over the next hundred years. Just as important, the design of this new ground produces a new territory along the Seawall, transforming its uninformed line into a continuous circuit of landform-archipelagos. Collectively, these “outposts” provide all the cultural, social, and material amenities needed to support a mixed oceanside population of vacationers and residents. At a local scale, augmented retaining walls compose both the architecture and infrastructure that define specialized activities, giving each outpost identity and purpose as a community and a destination.

Above, the masterplan for the transformation of the seawall edge shows the concentration of program and key points and the construction of new landscapes for leisure along the water’s edge, including protected beaches. Below, a section perspective shows how the existing seawall is subsumed into an earthen rampart that increased its protective capacity, and how Seawall Boulevard is relocated behind this new landform to produce an active commercial street. The sea and the city are connected via the occupation of this public park, with underground parking, and resort hotels whose public lobbied create a sectional connection between the street and the beach.

Reclaimed Cohabitation
by Amy Westermeyer

Reclaimed Cohabitation is a development aimed at achieving a balance between nature and inhabitation, using dredge remediation wetlands as devices from which development emerges and successfully integrates with the local ecology.

Galveston offers a unique design problem in its dynamic coastal ecology and strong magnetism for those who enjoy coastal living. As it stands now, there is an enormous divide between the naturalized edge and the dense urban fabric. There is a lack of cohesion and integration of these polar conditions.

This project aims to reintroduce and reinvigorate Galveston’s natural wetland ecology while simultaneously offering a new coastal residential and commercial development typology. The two can coexist in a network of territories and clusters that provide both immediate access to modern convenience and exposure to natural flora and fauna. This proposal hopes to offer density and an urban lifestyle within an environmentally conscious network of communities and wetland environments. The variation of networks and densities offer a variety of experiences and qualities unique to the specific conditions of the site. It attempts to negotiate the transition from urban to residential to undeveloped, using readily available resources and natural processes to integrate the common thread of native ecology, growth, and renewal into a cohesive urban community.

Click on the image below for a larger image. The diagrams on the left present the reasons for reversing current development trends and encouraging development along the eastern end of the island. The central diagrams show the processes through which a new water edge could be created using remediated dredge while the diagrams on the right show the diversity of landscapes and programs fostered.

Galv_restore
by Timmie Chan

This proposal produces an alternative future for the city, focusing on the revitalization of the dredged area on the East end flats by turning it into a resource for land growth on the Gulf side of the island. Five hyper-accumulator plant species native to Galveston Island can remediate different volumes of dredge in different time spans, for example, the shallow rooted Rapeseed plant can remediate one foot of dredge in approximately one year while the deep rooted Black Willow tree can remediate 10 feet of dredge in approximately 10 years. At various stages of remediation and after remediation, the East end flats will be open to tourists for eco- tourism activities like bird-watching, hiking and educational purposes. When the dredge is fully remediated, it will be transported via trucks along new infrastructure to deposit sites on the Gulf side that produce marinas, protected pocket beaches and other diverse kinds of edges that foster program growth.

Click on the image below to see a larger version.

The design derives from the logistics of remediation and land formation. In the East End Flats, the open terrain is subdivided into patches for remediation, each surrounded by earthen berms that also allow access. On the water front, this process is reverses as new land is produced via the accumulations of parametric patches calibrated to program densities and sizes as well as to circulation and edge condition.

Further Reading about the East End Flats

Galveston hopes to own East End Flats by 2046 by Rhiannon Meyers, The Daily News

Let’s start now on East End flats by Heber Taylor, The Daily News

Picture from What We See blog showing a participant in “Jane’s Walk,” where Toronto students donned Jacobs-styled spectacles and were asked guiding questions to engage their senses about their neighborhood

We cannot always see for ourselves how the world is changing.

Jane Jacobs, the most important urban theorist this country has known, published her first book, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, in 1961 to challenge the restrictions, the assumptions — the prejudices, really — that had for decades determined who would live where, and why. If the city would shape how the country changed, Jacobs argued, then we had the obligation to shape our cities better.

“To [her],” Robert Sirman writes, “design was political.” Sirman, a Toronto-based arts advocate, is one of 35 writers whose work is collected in What We See: Advancing the Observations of Jane Jacobs (New Village Press, 2010, edited by Stephen A. Goldsmith and Lynne Elizabeth).

Standing on Jacobs’s shoulders, as it were, the selections here range from arguments like Sirman’s to quieter reminiscences about the woman’s influence, meditations on urban spaces to nuts-and-bolts discussions of environmental initiatives, portraits of cities to stories about revitalized neighborhoods. There is even an imagined conversation between political figure and community advocate Daniel Kemmis and Jacobs herself, as the two “stroll” through Missoula, Montana.

In one of the collection’s most memorable pieces, Clare Cooper Marcus, a professor at Berkeley, writes about “cluster housing,” a trend in which homes are built around a shared green space where children (and parents, too) can play in nature, safe from traffic and yet still within earshot of a mother’s dinner shout.

In another Janine Benyus tells a story about her work in biomimicry, the study of nature’s designs to deal sustainably and smartly with our engineering problems. She writes:

In sun-scorched places, architects are mimicking the pleats of a self-shading cactus to reduce a building’s cooling needs. … Windows can be covered with an antireflective coating that drinks in light, a secret borrowed from the eyes of night-flying moths. Rather than painting a surface, designers are creating transparent thin films that will refract light the way a butterfly’s wing does … . (201) (You can watch her Ted Talk here.)

Fascinating though these projects are, What We See cannot be breezed through. At times, the collection is weighed down with policy. Some readers might find the prose too dependent on jargon. And most of the essays assume the reader’s familiarity with Jacobs’s books and biography. Still, if What We See requires, at times, a professional’s duty-bound doggedness, it rewards the general reader’s generosity. The best selections inspire a kind of covetousness, as they present projects or politics you might want for your own city, for your own family to use and enjoy.

As Jacobs recognized, since cities are never finished, it is never too late to remember our ideals and revise our plans. We all are accountable, and we all count. Sirman, in “Built Form and the Metaphor of Storytelling,” reiterates this lesson. “[If] a city’s built form impacts all who pass through it, then all who pass through have a vested interest in the decisions that underlie how the city is built,” he writes. “The end users of a new building or road or subdivision are not simply the landlords or primary occupants, but virtually anyone who comes in contact with the space” (161).

We might be, as in 1961, at the beginning of another upheaval in 2010. The oil pouring into the Gulf Coast might staunch one kind of dependence. Our world might be changing. Meanwhile, the ideals and plans featured in What We See — sustainable building initiatives, bicycle greenway networks, neighborhood revitalizations, recycling programs, residential planning that considers the needs of the family — are all gaining momentum in the collective imagination, and all are plans to make our cities better. To change them, as Jacobs urged almost 50 years ago, we must learn to see them again.

What We See: Advancing the Observations of Jane Jacobs, ed. Stephen A. Goldsmith,
Lynne Elizabeth. New Village Press, 2010.
$26.95, hardcover

An interactive website and blog called What We See: A Civic Engagement Project expands on the themes and questions of the book.