Everything Must Move [Cover design Thumb]
The May issue of Cite (78) included a reflection by Ben Koush on the fifteen-year tenure of Rice School of Architecture Dean Lars Lerup. You can download a pdf of the article by clicking on the title, “Lars Lerup Goes to Rome: Former Student Reflects on Transition at Rice School of Architecture.” Below Koush extends his reflection.
Everything Must Move was published on the occasion of the fifth Kennon Symposium honoring Rice School of Architecture (RSA) Dean Lars Lerup as he steps down this year. According to the subtitle printed on its bright red cover, the book documents “a decade-and-a-half of propositions about the suburban city in general, and Houston in particular.” (Author’s note: I was a graduate student who matriculated roughly in the middle of Lerup’s tenure.)
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Monk parakeet sitings in Harris County [Map generated by ebird.org]
Houston appears to be churning along and growing in its seemingly unplanned, inevitable way. Besides the 99K house ribbon cutting, which we will get an OffCite post of its own, the story that stood out to me was Lisa Gray’s column on monk parakeet colonies in the Houston area. These birds have established wild colonies in cities all across America. What I love about the story is that the birds build their “condo” homes in transmission line towers. The ornithologist Gray interviews notes that the settlement patterns marks the northeast to southwest boundary between what used to be prarie and forest. The phenomenon seems paradoxical: both invasive and restorative, infrastructural and ecological, immigrant and in the native wild.
Thursday June 18
CYCLING NOTEBOOK A call for cleaner streets Road debris hurts city’s effort to be bike-friendly [Houston Chronicle]
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Cite issues 75 through 78
The Architecture Center Houston and the Houston Public Library hold a monthly program called Authors in Architecture. The series highlights one book or publication. It is held every 3rd Thursday of each month with a presentation and discussion at the Downtown Library and a following reception and book signing at the Architecture Center.
The Thursday June 18th event will feature Raj Mankad, editor of Cite: The Architecture + Design Review of Houston.
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When the Texas legislature ended its session, a bill that would have created a $500 million subsidy program for the installation of solar panels died. The Chronicle reported that despite broad bipartisan support for the bill Sylvester Turner killed the solar subsidy using a procedural tactic on the grounds that the twenty-cent fee per month would burden poor people. A few days later Turner flirted with another run for Houston mayor.
Sunday June 7
A Mod gets modernized: Business and pleasure [Houston Chronicle, Lisa Gray] “The Houston Architectural Guide calls them “The Macham Building,” and notes they were designed in 1959 by architects Thompson McCleary and Hamilton Brown, who used the larger of the brick boxes as their office.”
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A bronze chariot from the necropolis of Qin Shi Huang, first emperor of the Qin dynasty, on display at the Houston Museum of Natural Science [Photo S. J. Alexander]
This project was Lysle Oliveros’s 2009 Masters Thesis project. The concept originated as a point of humor during a dinner party. “I asked my neighbor if he recently mulched the yard (due to a pungent odor), and he replied that the smell was from a local landfill established previous to the housing development.”
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"Bicycle Freedom," an art work made from Hurricane Ike by Nicholas Auger and hung on the Hazard street bridge over I-59
In Amsterdam, Berlin, or Shanghai, masses of men, women, and children bicycling together would be nothing unusual. Why not Houston? Though the climate and flat terrain are ideal for bicycling, inadequate accommodations on Houston’s abundant roadways limit their use by “vehicular cyclists.”
An update of the City of Houston’s comprehensive Bikeway Plan is under way to boost Houston’s efforts to become a bicycling-friendly community.
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Possible site of future "gateway" to the Menil, Richmond Hall (left) and the Richmont Square Apartments (right) at the corner of Loretto and Richmond [Photo Raj Mankad]
In the May issue of Cite (78), Marc El-Khouri wrote about the recently announced selection of David Chipperfield Architects by the Menil Collection to create a new master plan. You can download a pdf of the article by clicking on the title, “Art Urbanism: Chipperfield and the Menil Master Plan.” Below is my interview of Josef Helfenstein, director of the Menil.
Raj Mankad (RM): How would you describe the currents stage of the master planning process?
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Cite 78, May 2009 [Facade detail of Wyly Theatre cover photo by Jason Grant, nostalgicglass.org]
Let’s start at the end. In order to set the context for the work featured in this issue, we asked Stephen Fox—the preeminent historian of Texas architecture—to trace the descent of architectural stars upon the state. His essay on the last page of this issue reveals just the tip of the iceberg. Visit his post on this blog for a comprehensive list of projects built in Texas since 1886 by prominent architects from other parts of the world.
We visited Dallas and San Antonio to follow up on the latest batch of stars transforming the Texas landscape.
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Detail from the book cover [above], Elsie De Wolfe and a room designed by her [below, Wikimedia Commons]
Since there are few serious studies of interior design, The Modern Interior, however slight and scantily illustrated, is a welcome addition to the library. Penny Sparke, an English critic, has written on the subject for several years, including Elsie De Wolfe: The Birth of Modern Interior Decoration (Acanthus Press, 2005). Sparke’s book is not a visual tour of modern interior design. Rather it describes the way people live in an industrialized world and identifies in different characters of the spaces they create for themselves the locus of the “modern life.”
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