Alexandra Kelley, Carla Munoz, Debra norris, and Juan Negrete of Internum

Yesterday evening, Cite celebrated the release of its new issue at Internum, a recently-opened high-end furniture store. The clean lines of the furniture and the crisp white walls made everyone look sharp. No one made speeches or declaimed poetry. It was an evening of good conversation and taking joy in beauty.

Guest editors Steven Lewis and Thomas Colbert

Graphic designer Joe Ross

Ben Koush and Anna Mod

Joe and Jessica Ross

Scott Cartwright & Jenny Lynn Weitz-Amaré Cartwright

Nicole Zaza

Matthew Johnson and Harbeer Sandhu

Amanda and Everett Valentine with Miah Arnold

Allyn West

Chris Charles and Nadia Hussain

Raj Mankad, Brian Hammer, Mary Swift, and Cathy Bauer

Fernando Brave and Serge Ambrose

Michelangelo Sabatino and Christof Spieler

Debra Norris, Juan Negrete, and Alexandra Kelley

About the Cover: Ningbo History Museum designed by 2012 Pritzker Winner Wang Shu. Photographed by Lv Hengzhong.

The Spring 2012 issue of Cite (88) was mailed and is arriving at the Brazos Bookstore, CAMH, MFAH, Issues, Domy, River Oaks Bookstore, and other stores. Below is a letter from the editor about this issue, followed by the Table of Contents.

When New York Times architecture critic Ada Louise Huxtable visited Houston in 1976 she called it, “The city of the second half of the twentieth century.” She found herself excited by the dynamism and explosive growth of the city but she also found Houston to be “a study of paradoxes” and “disturbing.”

That’s pretty much the same reaction that our intrepid reporter Christof Spieler had to some of China’s most rapidly growing cities when he visited them last summer. It was clear in 1976 that Houstonians would ever question our obviously questionable building habits. But here we are today, questioning the burgeoning cities of China and, in their reflection, our own as well. What do Houston and the great cities of China have in common? The answer is, a lot. Cheap fossil fuel and global capital markets, automobiles, the internet, emerging construction technologies, and contemporary paradigms of architecture and urban development to name but a few of the forces that link all global cities.

Despite the universal forces that seem to be shaping cities, there are forces of resistance and modification at work. Regional political issues and cultural forces also shape the character of places and local communities. But how exactly does this work?

In order to gain some insight into this issue we interviewed some of China’s best-known architects. Their visits to Houston as a part of the RDA Fall Lecture Series allowed us to ask how their practices have responded to the pressures of dizzyingly rapid growth and urban erasure. Interestingly, the architect whose work was most centered on the poetic preservation of China’s historic craft traditions and building typologies, the architect whose work can be seen as the most resistant to the forces of erasure has now won the Pritzer Prize. The first Chinese architect to receive this award, Wang Shu, deeply embeds his work in vernacular construction technologies as well as modern ones.

Houston design firms have also played a big role in China. In fact, part of SWA Group’s Houston office moved to Shanghai last year under the leadership of Scott Slaney, who, in an interview for this issue, has described positive shifts in urban planning and land use.

Elsewhere, we include a variety of perspectives on China including a photo-essay of street advertising, a translation from a Chinese magazine that highlights migrants from the countryside to the cities, and an interview of Nobel Prize laureate Amartya Sen that puts economic growth and architecture in the larger perspective of freedom.

The idea for the focus on China came from and architect in Houston community, Camilo Parra, whose wife Meng Yeh teaches chines at Rice University. We hope, in turn, that many of you will contribute back to this community-supported publication by reflecting on the relevance of these articles to local, national and international questions and sending your thoughts to mankad@rice.edu.

Table of Contents

Citings

News: Sally Walsh Lecture, Brazil Tour, Houston Initiatives, Anything That Floats, Mission Impossible, Mike Simonian the Impractical
Calendar
Transit: Proposal for Central Station

Features

Time Warps: Finding Houston in Shanghai, Beijing, and Shenzhen
By Christof Spieler

A Story of Him, Him, and Him
By Brian Hammer

3 Chinese Architects on Tradition, Innovation, and Business: Conversations with Pei Zhu, Wang Shu, and Qingyun Ma
By Julia Mandell

Freedom and Architecture: An Interview with Feminist Economist Amartya Sen
By Raj Mankad

Cultured City: Forward to the Past: The Politics of Reappearance in Shanghai
By Steven Lewis

Taming the Concrete Dragon: An Interview with Scott Slaney
By Thomas Colbert and Raj Mankad

Readings

One Hundred Million Acres & No Zoning by Lars Lerup
Review by Kayte Young

MFAH Selects: New Books on Architecture and Design

Hindcite

The Farmer is the Man
By Shannon Stoney

Wang Shu’s drawing for the Xiangshan Campus, China Academy of Art, Hangzhou, all images courtesy Wang Shu

In the Fall of 2011, the Rice Design Alliance (RDA) brought three architects from China to lecture in Houston at The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. One of the speakers, Wang Shu, was just announced as the next winner of the Pritzker Prize. RDA has once again shown its knack for bringing master architects to Houston before they emerge as Pritzker Prize winners. Past lecturers have included Richard Meier, Aldo Rossi, Robert Venturi, Rafael Moneo, Renzo Piano, and Glenn Murcutt.

Bringing great architects from China to Houston is no small effort and does not happen very often. Cite followed up on the great opportunity. The morning after each lecture, Julia Mandell, a designer and writer, interviewed each of the visitors at the Hotel Zaza over breakfast. I had the privilege of sitting in and recording the conversations. Wang Shu had a strikingly calm intensity about him. He was focused and aware of his tight schedule for the day but decidedly not in a rush. He did not plug a laptop into the wall. He did not answer his mobile phone or send texts.

Sticks used for measurement in vernacular Chinese construction.

Some architects tell me, ‘I really enjoy your work; I want to do something like you,’ but I tell them it is not easy because it is not just about design. First, it is about your way of working. If you don’t change your way of working, you can’t do something like this. You just draw on the computer.

Second, you have to change your way of life. Some people just want to change their ideas. No, changing an idea is not enough. You need practical experience—experience influences you more than your thinking. I say, ‘Your hand controls your brain; it’s not your brain that controls your hand.’

Simply drawing by hand, however, is not enough, according to Shu. He added:

The life most now have is one of speed. Just 100 years ago, Chinese were the slowest people in the world, the ones who most knew how to enjoy a relaxed way of life. Now you can’t imagine the Chinese like this. Now the Chinese are the fastest people in all the world.

To slow down means that on your way to your office, you go to a small courtyard, to a garden, then through your neighborhood, along a small street, and finally to an office building. Now life is very fast. You have an apartment unit, you take an elevator down, you take a train directly to an office building, then you take the elevator and go up.

To read the full interview of this extraordinary architect and principal of Amateur Architecture Studio, subscribe to Cite or join the Rice Design Alliance. The special issue on China will be out at the end of March.

Wang Shu with a head craftsman.

by Raj Mankad

This will be Josh and my first Valentine’s Day as a married couple. So I thought rather than focus on the traditional gift giving this year, I would share some ideas for subtler gifts and experiences.

Josh and I have made a point to write notes to each other on Valentine’s Day. It reminds us of what is special about our relationship, and provides a moment of reflection on how far we’ve come. PH Design Shop in the Rice Village is a perfect spot to find some amazingly beautiful cards with just the right amount of romance and cheesiness for the occasion.

Etsy will always be a great place to find handmade gifts. Maybe I’ll steer Josh to this site.

My husband is a book lover, so this year, I might head over to Domy Book Store and find some things there that I know he would love (in addition to me). A collection of love stories edited by Jeffrey Eugenides might make the cut.

But if I think about it, we definitely don’t need more books in our house. At print from justafewprings.com of an art work made from the spines of romantic books would be better?

Recently, we’ve gotten into cooking together. The tasting, the adventure, it can be a great couple activity. And rather than going out this year, I was thinking we could take a trip to Penzey’s in the Heights and find some intoxicating spices for an exotic evening of flavor.

If a gift is what you are looking for your chef partner, Penzey’s has great gift boxes and these measuring spoons would be a great addition.

If there’s one spot we will always end up going to for dinner, it’s Divino. This sweet spot of Italian food and delicious wine will consistently deliver. It’s also where we met, so a Valentine’s Day dinner might just be in our cards.

In addition to reading, cooking, and eating, Josh and I love music. And there are few songs that will forever inspire romance for us. And if it’s on vinyl, even better. Cactus, Black Dog, and Sound Exchange are some great places to find records in Houston.

With a Girl Like You – The Troggs

Song for You – Alexi Murdoch

Love and Some Verses – Iron & Wine

Home – Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros

“Home” is a favorite of ours, and we danced in the moonlight to Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros playing live in Marfa, so it kinda has to be on the list.

It Was You – Aretha Franklin

A version of “It Was You” was our first dance song at our wedding. Nothing beats Aretha. Except maybe Etta. And this year honoring her sultry voice might be part of our evening.

Sunday Kind of Love – Etta James

If you must give me a gift of jewelry, it’s not like I’ll refuse it. These earrings from Anthropologie would make me smile for sure.

Or what about a road trip?! Instead of a bunch of roses that will die in a week, take a trip to the Antique Rose Emporium, just an hour and a half outside of Houston. Maybe you could bring back a plant to remember the day with. And have roses for years.

Kenneth Cobonpue’s Croissant table.

This post covers the second lecture in the Rice Design Alliance’s three part series, “FURNISH.” If this or our earlier post on Mike & Maaike captivate you, be sure to attend the final and not-to-be-missed lecture by Jurgen Bey.

Locally sourced. Organic. Sustainable. Hand-made. These buzzwords are now ubiquitous in every design discipline. And, at the RDA lecture featuring Kenneth Cobonpue, I heard them a lot. I started to wonder which came first: the design or the buzzwords? Is he following a deeply considered process or cashing out on a marketing trend?

Cobonpue grew up around design in the Philippines. His mother, an interior designer, worked with rattan furniture and even secured patents for a lamination process. In 1987, Cobonpue attended Pratt Institute, followed by a stint in Europe working through several apprenticeships. In 1996, he returned to the Philippines to take over his mother’s workshop. He found a much different world than the one of his education. Where Cobonpue had been trained to design for machine production, the Philippine workers offered him their hands.

Shiro Kuramata’s How High the Moon chair

Cobonpue's "Yin Yang" chair

Cobonpue's "Yoda" sofa

Cobonpue's Phoenix car

Cobonpue's Retaso table

Rendering of proposed Central Station by Snøhetta

On the evening of Tuesday, January 24, the Houston Downtown Management District, along with Metro and its design-build component, Houston Rapid Transit, hosted a public presentation of five proposals for the new “Houston Central Station.” They were the result of an invited competition whose impressive advisory panel featured among others the new, and apparently well-connected, deans of Houston’s two schools of architecture, Patricia Oliver of University of Houston and Sarah Whiting of Rice University. Entries were presented by Chris Sharples of SHoP Architects, New York; Paul Lewis of Lewis.Tsurumaki.Lewis, New York; Neil Denari of Neil M. Denari Architects, Los Angeles; Mark Wamble of Interloop—Architecture, Houston; and Craig Dykers of Snøhetta, New York and Oslo. (I would have liked to see women architects like Jeanne Gang or Toshiko Mori also included.)

They are all decidedly avant-garde, modernist firms who have begun in the last several years to build increasingly large and prestigious projects. Collectively, they tend to use computer modeling to create rather complicated swooping and angled designs that rely on the newish technology of digitally assisted, custom fabrication for their realization. As such, they tend to be highly regarded in architectural schools and in the architectural press where these techniques are the common currency in trade, though perhaps somewhat less by the general public who usually seems to be either awed, mystified, or repulsed by such work.

My initial fantasy image of fedora-clad Mad Men and buxom ladies in stiletto heels rushing to catch the midnight train in a moodily lit Central Station was quickly dispelled by the detailed introduction given by Lonnie Hoogeboom, Director of Planning, Design and Development for the Downtown District, who explained that, in fact, the project was for a modest open-air platform where two new light rail lines, the East End Line and the Southeast Line, intersect with the existing Main Street Line. The site is on Main Street between the existing Main Street Square Station and the Preston Station. It faces Houston’s great Art Deco setback skyscraper, the Gulf Building, completed in 1929, where the Sakowitz Brothers once had their department store. The Central Station will be inserted in the median between the existing tracks, and as a result, will only be about eleven-feet wide, but will run nearly the length of the block. The current budget is about $1 million, including design fees, and each firm was given a $20,000 honorarium for design and travel expenses. Once they accepted, they had about six weeks to design the projects they presented in Houston. That firms of such caliber enthusiastically participated in what is in reality a very small project is perhaps a signal of the clout of the advisory panel. The winning firm will subcontract to a local architect of record, selected by Metro, who will prepare the final construction documents.

Tuesday’s presentation was intended to gather public feedback, which will be given to the jury when they review the projects in the next few weeks. Just as impressive as the advisory panel is the list of jurors, which includes David Burney, FAIA, Commissioner, Department of Design and Construction, New York; Carlos Jimenez of Carlos Jimenez Studio, Houston; Michael Rock, Founding Partner & Creative Director, 2×4, New York; Carol Lewis, Director of Texas Southern University’s Center for Transportation, Training & Research, Houston; and Minnette Boesel, the Mayor’s Assistant for Cultural Affairs, Houston.

On to the projects.

Rendering of Central Station proposal by ShoP Architects

Section of ShoP Architects proposal.

Rendering of Lewis.Tsurumaki.Lewis proposal.

Proposal by Neil Denari Architects

Detail from Denari Architects

Proposal by Interloop Architecture

Diagram of Snøhetta proposal

Aerial rendering of Snøhetta proposal

Rendering of Snøhetta proposal

Divis table designed by Mike & Maaike

This post covers the first lecture in the Rice Design Alliance’s three part series, “FURNISH.” If this captivates you be sure to attend the next two.

In the earnest tone with which he delivered his entire talk, Mike Simonian suggested on Wednesday evening that, in a given body of work, “if everything is perfect, then there’s a certain ugliness to all that beauty.” This, from the designer who made the XBOX console beautiful? You’d be hard pressed to find a blunder among the offerings coming out of Mike & Maaike, the San Francisco-based industrial design studio led by Simonian and his partner, Maaike Evers. By looking for one, though, you’d also miss the point.

Simonian and Evers, with the support of an international cadre of young interns, push their projects through a concept-driven, rigorous process and produce compelling works. A sort of completed perfection, though, doesn’t come across as the primary objective. The designs pose questions without declaring answers. They stir up trouble, find intrigue in uncertainty and sometimes fly in the face of staid conventions.

Take the Divis project, which spurred the most rousing moment of the presentation at the MFAH. An exploration of the natural splitting that occurs in wood grains, the table is comprised of a top, which is punctured by voids that represent “splits,” and legs that engage into those voids. The crowd delighted in Mike’s admission that the generous amount of negative space in the Divis tabletop — the very feature that drives home the wood grain allusion and generates so much aesthetic appeal — effectively renders the piece useless as a functional dining table. With striations that literally drop out from the slab of material running the length of the table, it’s easy to imagine a dinner party devolving into a messy affair. Plates sliding onto laps, food and wine going everywhere. But this is the best part, argues Simonian, with his brand of infectious playfulness: when the table was realized, the designers found they’d “inject[ed] characteristics that make the product misbehave” and that such misbehaving “serves a different function than being a practical, ‘good’ table.” Perhaps a table that safely accommodates a dinner service is, in a world where possibilities and discoveries rule, a staid convention. I couldn’t help but buy this ridiculous proposal.

Neither could Council, the San Francisco company that struggled with the curious design but was so glamoured by its whimsical attractiveness that it eventually put the table into production. Council turned out to be an important character in the story of Mike & Maaike, as Simonian shed some light on the disparate experiences of working with such a small production firm and heavy-hitting players like Herman Miller (where Mike & Maaike’s designs have also come to fruition). Energy and ideas can move much more quickly toward a project’s realization within a smaller outfit like Council. Many of the pieces Simonian introduced in the talk were rushed into production shortly after their conception for design trade shows like ICFF (International Contemporary Furniture Fair), which can offer crucial exposure for design offices.

Juxtapose

ATNMBL

Poet and Inprint Executive Director Rich Levy and novelist Farnoosh Moshiri

Yesterday evening, English + Associates Architects hosted the release party for Cite 87 at their offices in the Sixth Ward. Kathleen English gave a short talk on how she adapted the 120-year-old church building at 1919 Decatur. From the lowest floor, we could see clear through a hole cut in the floor to the beautifully exposed bow trusses. Gwendolyn Zepeda read from her article about growing up in the neighborhood, which she knew as Del Sesto. Her wonderful style is a form of social criticism through humor, keen observation, and generosity. The party seemed to fortify and refresh the spirits of the scholars, designers, novelists, poets, musicians, and artists there before the arctic blast welcomed us back into the purple night.

Linda Sylvan introduces Kathleen English.

Gwendolyn Zepeda reads from her contribution.

Gwendolyn Zepeda

Jim Blain and Jane Creighton

Roger Wood

Laura Tait, John Earles, and Jennifer Blanco of Product Superior

Ben Koush and Mark Kusey

Raj Mankad, Kathyrn Fosdick, and Katie Plocheck

Rose Kuo and Carrie Schneider

Carrie Schneider and Harbeer Sandhu

Marilyn Jones and Miah Arnold

Cover photo by Jack Thompson.

The Fall 2011 issue of Cite (87) was mailed and is arriving at the Brazos Bookstore, CAMH, MFAH, Issues, Domy, River Oaks Bookstore, and other stores. Below is a letter from the editor about this issue, followed by the Table of Contents.

The cover of this issue shows Dan Havel and Dean Ruck’s latest work, Fifth Ward Jam. Fashioned out of an old house, it looks like Houston’s culture—heterogeneous, exploded, twisted, improvised, and strangely beautiful. The editorial team was drawn to Fifth Ward Jam because of the way the splintered wood seems to focus a terrifying energy, like a plane crashed into the house and left a stage in the crater.

This issue of Cite features two ostensibly separate and unrelated sections. Guest editors Terrence Doody and Rich Levy challenged Cite and our readers to reflect on the tenth anniversary of the September 11, 2001 attacks well after the flurry of television coverage has passed. The second section emerged from an effort led by Jane Creighton, Pat Jasper, and Carl Lindahl to commission writers who have insider stories about Houston places. No connection, right?

Texas Johnny Brown performs at Fifth Ward Jam. Photo by Vicky Pink, courtesy HAA.

The afternoon of October 1, Fifth Ward Jam officially opened with a little music festival. Prince Jabo and Texas Johnny Brown played in the zydeco and blues styles that developed right there on Lyons Avenue. The crowd was a wondrous mix of ethnicities. I knew about two dozen of the artists and writers. As for the locals from the Fifth Ward, I did not know a soul. Class and race differences are persistent and real, but the structure of Fifth Ward Jam suggests that communication is still possible. There is a potential “we” to Houston.

During the artists’ talk, Dean Ruck emphasized that Fifth Ward Jam now belongs to the Fifth Ward and that he hoped the community would take ownership of it. Rappers, zydeco bands, political debaters jam onward and forward. However, no Discovery Green-style public/private partnership will subsidize and schedule regular activity. Will Fifth Ward residents come to love and use an art work that resembles the abandoned houses next door?

In his contribution, Carl Lindahl, a scholar of Louisiana folk culture, considers the vernacular architecture of Frenchtown, a locale close by Fifth Ward Jam. The resilience of Frenchtown families and their commitment to their architecture is a powerful reminder that placemaking often emerges without big funders or institutions through bottom-up, creative engagement with tradition and history.

In their contributions, Terrence Doody and Rich Levy note a post-9/11 search not just for answers, but also for a way to frame the right questions. Levy takes solace in his son “tuning in to Al Jazeera” on his phone. Indeed, in less time than it took us to put together this issue, multiple Arab revolutions have inspired the leaderless Occupy Wall Street movement, arguably capturing the nation’s attention more than the excrutiatingly masterplanned rebuilding of Ground Zero down the street.

As far-flung and ununified an issue as this one is, a theme of bottom- up resilience runs through it all. The writing was so strong throughout that we leave the reader to imagine the scenes with only a gentle and skillful nudge from illustrator John Earles. Enjoy and let us know what you think.

Table of Contents

Citings

News: Spring Lecture Series, San Antonio Tour, Brazil Tour, The Concrete Whisperer, Pablo Ferro Packs the House
Calendar
Architecture: The Menil Café COMMUNITY: Rice Centennial House

Features

“What am I Looking at, Jack? What am I Looking at?” An Introduction to the Special Section on 9/11
By Terrence Doody

The Pictures I Could Not Take: We Have to be Able to Imagine What We Know
By Sally Gall

The Pictures I Had to Take: Because I Knew Words Would Fail Me
By Jack Stevens

Three Novels of 9/11: Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close, The Good Life, and Let the Great World Spin
By Terrence Doody

9/11, Houston, and Salman Rushdie: On the Other Side of Fury
By Rich Levy

Placemaking from the Bottom Up: An Introduction to Writing & C/Siting Houston
By Jane Creighton and Carl Lindahl

Shapes of Tradition: Accessing Insider Vision to Understand Architecture
By Carl Lindahl

Exile and Live Oaks: Stories Whispered from the Trees
By Farnoosh Moshiri

The Old Sixth Ward Historic District: Or As We Used to Call it, Del Sesto
By Gwendolyn Zepeda

Insider Visions Photo Well
By Jack Thompson, Rose Kuo, and Lawrence Lander

Keeping the Ghosts Happy: William B. Travis Elementary School
BY Robin Reagler

America Varshe America Kande: Hinduism, Ornament, and the Suburban Box
By Raj Mankad

East Side Ruins: Delighting in Unscripted Spaces Along Buffalo Bayou
By David Theis

Que Huong Supermarket: Rewinding 2600 Travis Street
By Long Chu

Sugarhill Recording Studios: The Story of a House
By Roger Wood

Readings

Art and Activism: Projects of John and Dominique de Menil
Reviewed by John Pluecker

MFAH Selects: New Books on Architecture and Design
By Bernard Bonnet

Hindcite

Ano Demo-Ni: The Death of Central Presbyterian Church
By Ben Koush

Dockside Green, Victoria, British Columbia.

LEED certification is often a sham. The point system used by the U.S. Green Building Council is too easy to manipulate for the sake of marketing. For example, bike racks and showers earn points even if the building is sited on the edge of a freeway. The proximity of one bus line in the suburbs is equal to a downtown grid crisscrossed by public transportation. I’ve seen aerial pictures of LEED-certified, green-roofed buildings surrounded by moats of asphalt parking. The situation is perverse. Isolated features are used to green wash environmental time bombs—the architectural equivalent of putting a few pieces of organic lettuce on a factory-farmed beef patty.

A new type of LEED certification, LEED for Neighborhood Development or LEED-ND, promises to address some of these deep flaws. I attended a workshop on October 25 at CITYCENTRE, 14 miles west of downtown, to find out about the new point system. Douglas Farr, the original chair of the committee that developed the standard, gave the presentation.

LEED-ND came about as a collaboration between the U.S. Green Building Council and two partners: the National Resource Defense Council and the Congress for New Urbanism. This last group is vilified, especially among academic architects, for requiring nostalgic aesthetics into their codes and for the distance between the ideals they espouse and the resort developments they design. So I went into the workshop skeptical both of the LEED point system and the New Urbanist partners.

Farr started off with examples from Normal, Illinois and BedZed, a suburb of London. Right away, it was clear that LEED-ND does indeed shift the consideration from individual buildings to urban context. He showed a waste treatment water feature at Dockside Green in British Columbia that residents pay a premium to face.

Sustainable urbanism needs to be commodified, legalized, and normalized, Farr argued. His slogans for changing social norms were especially entertaining:

“Sex is better within ¼ mile of mass transit.”
“I thought he was hot until I realized he drives more than 20,000 miles a year!”
“Your SUV Makes You Look Fat.”

Farr’s build up was very convincing, and then came the actual explanation and exploration of the point system. We broke out into groups. Each table attempted to determine whether a local development would qualify for LEED-ND certification. We played the role of inspector, ticking our way through a long and complex checklist, parsing out elaborate definitions in an accompanying binder as thick as a biochemistry textbook.

I sat at the table considering a superfund site in the Fifth Ward that developer Frank Liu is turning into a dense neighborhood of townhouses. Mr. Liu sat right next to me, brimming with energy and determined that his project would cross the silver threshold. LEED-ND is comprised of prerequisites that must be met and optional points added up at the end. The superfund redevelopment easily met the prerequisites for avoiding sensitive lands and it earned innovation points: it is the first and only superfund site to be cleaned up through private financing.

The prerequisites abolish buildings that are inaccessible to the pedestrian and the public street. No blank facades, no high fences lining the street, no security gates between the pedestrian and the front door. For that reason alone, I became a fan of LEED-ND.

The definitions and weighting of points for transit, income diversity, and proximity to jobs were less satisfying, though. METRO wisely does not run many buses by the superfund site now, but it easily could in the future. This type of chicken-egg problem came up again and again leading me to wonder if LEED-ND is compatible with underserved, low-income neighborhoods. Also, Mr. Liu was not rewarded enough for building close to downtown jobs. Perversely, the joblessness of the immediate environs of the Fifth Ward rob the development of points. Furthermore, the points rewarding a diversity of housing types were not strong enough to persuade Mr. Liu to accommodate low-income families.

I had other quibbles. Handicapped accessibility only earns one point. Ten points, awarded on a scale based on the percentage of accessible units, would be appropriate given that access is an instrumental freedom—a means and an end to the kind of society we ought to build. At least accessibility made the list, I was told.

On the whole, I was convinced that widespread legalization and normalization of LEED-ND would move the world closer to sustainability. It turns the technical architecture and urban planning world of sidewalk widths, intersections per mile, façade permeability, density of residential units, and diversity of uses into a branded, comprehensible process that a non-expert can more or less trust.

Duany Plater-Zyberk, the firm synonymous with New Urbanism did do the design for the superfund redevelopment. (See Swamplot’s Fifth Ward: New Urbanists Meet Old Toxic Waste.) However, the LEED-ND point system did not, for the most part, reward nostalgia or faux-Charleston styling. LEED-ND’s relative neutrality to aesthetics is a relief.

The barrier to legalizing LEED-ND would be lower, one might suspect, in Houston than elsewhere given our fame for no-zoning. The presentation and the exercise made clear, however, that our “minimum parking allotments” and “minimum setbacks,” as defined in Chapter 42 of the city ordinances, are major barriers. They turn the whole city outside downtown into a one-size-fits-all suburban zone.

Frank Liu decried plans for increasing parking requirements. “I hate to see new regulations that make doing the right thing harder,” he said, adding that, “SPUDs (Special Purpose Urban Districts) would be a game changer.”

No doubt, the new LEED-ND point system can be gamed. Somewhere, LEED-ND developments will replace existing neighborhoods or environments that should have been preserved. They will be enclaves, free of metal gates but marked affordability barriers, that perpetuate income inequality and segregation. That said, sitting next to Frank Liu, watching him respond to the challenges posed by the LEED-ND prerequisites and points, was very convincing. I could see his plans for the former superfund site becoming even more promising.

by Raj Mankad