A model of a taco truck by Donna Kacmar's design studio at the Initiatives for Houston exhibition.
The conversion of the Architecture Center Houston (ArCH) into a think tank of what Houston is, could be, and should be is worth the visit. The curated exhibition of Rice Design Alliance’s Initiatives for Houston Grant Program captures ten years of thinkers, dreamers, and designers putting their heads together to better understand our city and steer its future.
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The coming of the new year brought year-end and decade-end posts including the Swamplot awards. “Lakes of” won favorite Houston design cliché of the year. Christof Spieler looked back on a decade of transit megaprojects. Also of note, the Chronicle published two pieces on philanthropist Cynthia Woods Mitchell, who passed away (1, 2). A good story I missed in the last headline post was the Rice News piece on Chris Hight’s and Michael Robinson’s studio on Brays Bayou and their website hydraulicity.org.
Monday January 4
Black medical museum to honor pioneers Facility will be located in historic Freedmen’s Town and focus on the struggles of black doctors to provide care [Houston Chronicle] “Historians hope to restore the home at 1319 Andrews owned by the Rev. Ned P. Pullum, a minister and entrepreneur, and transform it into the Pullum Health and Business Museum. The Pullum Museum would become part of an educational and cultural park corridor in Freedmen’s Town that includes the Rutherford B.H. Yates Museum – another reclaimed historic home. Freedmen’s Town, just west of downtown, is the only remaining post-Civil War, freed-slave historic district of its kind.”
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Rather than plainly document a bounty of recreational attractions, the recently-released Wallpaper City Guide: Houston (published jointly by the Wallpaper magazine and Phaidon) postures itself as the “fast-track” guide for the discerning traveler, offering a “tightly edited,” “ruthlessly researched,” “rigorously selected,” and “discreetly packaged” list of the city’s design-conscious locales. Instead of the design-minded denizen, the target audience is the weekend tourist or business traveler — so it’s tempting for a local to scrutinize the 100-page volume.
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Mayor-Elect Parker is flanked by TxDOT's Delvin Dennis, Congresswoman Sheila Jackson Lee, Councilmember Gonzalez, Public Works Director Mike Marcotte, and members of the local Boy Scout Troop. [Photo from Houston Bikeways]
After a long wait, the MKT rail-to-trail that connects the Heights with Downtown was officially opened. Annise Parker was there not long after winning the Mayoral election. The University light rail line passed a major federal hurdle and has entered the engineering phase. The Metro president called it “a great holiday present” for Houston. Read on to catch up on what’s going with Houston architecture, engineering, construction, and urban planning.
December 22
Museum idea could save threatened Heights church: One man’s plan could provide a way to keep a historic structure from demolition [Houston Chronicle] “On-again, off-again plans to raze Houston Heights’ historic but long unused Immanuel Lutheran Church may be in limbo again today as preservationists float a plan to convert the striking Gothic Revival sanctuary into a museum for Texas art. Ken Bakenhus, president of the church’s governing body, which overwhelmingly favors demolition, said the 1932-vintage building at 1448 Cortlandt St. likely will be torn down this summer unless feasible plans to save it are proposed.”
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Graphic Design by Michael Rock
Looking for a crash course about typography, identity, branding, print design, interaction/experience, information, and sustainability by four of the world’s leading graphic designers? Sorry. You missed it. In January and February of 2009, the Rice Design Alliance (RDA) held a sold-out lecture series featuring Steven Heller, Andy Altman, Ellen Lupton, and Michael Rock. However, in an effort to reach those who could not attend, the RDA is making videos of the lectures available in the post below. We hoped to make this information available sooner but experienced a long learning curve on handling large video files. Now we know and will be presenting more from past lectures on OffCite.org and ricedesignalliance.org.
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Map of HCC/Ensember area [Courtesy Morris Architects]
Cite Editor, Raj Mankad, and Editorial Chair, Christof Speiler, spoke on KPFT 90.1 FM radio’s Connect The Dots with host Robert Muhammad on Wednesday, December 9, 2009. They were on during the final fifteen minutes of the show to discuss the new issue of Cite (number 80) and an article about the future of Midtown and Houston’s other “inner loop neighborhoods”.
The full audio of the Cite magazine segment can be downloaded and listened to below in mp3 format:
Click to Listen to Cite on Connect the Dots
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Cite 80 cover [Art by Jorge Galvan, Color Aid paper, thread, and pins]
Letter from the Editor
In the 1990’s, a new wave of architecture professors at Rice University took on Houston as an experiment in urbanism. Whereas American cities like Boston and New York offered infill and contextual strategies by which to analyze and investigate, the seemingly blank canvas of the “Space City” offered up the idea of a new breed of city, or anti-city. As students we were rolled out to all corners of the region to investigate the hidden city — how the industrial warehouse, the bayou, the suburban tract, the mega-mall, the parking lot, and all the spaces in between created the tapestry that is Houston.
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Farnsworth and Chambers Building, Home to the Manned Spacecraft Center 1962-64 [Image from NASA]
Houston’s historic Farnsworth & Chambers building, located at 2999 S. Wayside, held its grand reopening opening last night following the rehabilitation of this architecturally and historically significant building. Visitors, many who had not set foot there in decades, marveled at how the building looked the same yet felt much lighter and updated — a great complement to the project team. The building is presently known as the Gragg Building after the second owners who sold it and the surrounding acreage to the city in the late 1970s.
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Houston FBI Office, Design by Larry Speck of PageSoutherlandPage in a joint venture with Leo A Daly [Image from FBI.gov]
Illustration by Amir Kasem
The next issue of Cite is at the bindery. Enjoy this preview and subscribe or join the Rice Design Alliance now to get the whole issue.
It was soil, not oil, that determined the location of Texas’ largest cities. It was good dirt that drew people here—good dark, rich soil that is found in two prominent strips: the Texas Blacklands that extend from Dallas to Austin and San Antonio, and the coastal Blacklands that run from Houston to Corpus Christi. Seventy percent of the population of Texas now reside on these relatively narrow Blackland strips, most of them oblivious to the role of soil in their history.
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