I bought this book because I liked the way it looks.
On the cover appears a tightly cropped view of a cell phone tower disguised as an enormous palm tree framed against a lavender-colored sky. The Infrastructural City, put out by trendy Barcelona-based Actar, is of a smallish size with matte paper pages and lots of soft, washed-out photos exuding the pungent smell of Spanish ink. For me the attraction was physical.
Clayton Carriage House, Birdsall P. Briscoe/Glassman Shoemake Maldonado [Photo by Raj Mankad]
The Chronicle published a good articleon the rehabilitation of the Clayton House. The carriage house, pictured above, was rescued from disuse.
Friday March 6
Gray: The strange political career of Bogota’s ‘Citizen Man’ [Houston Chronicle] Lisa Gray’s writes about one of the main speakers at the De Lange Conference.
Construction has begun on the new East End light rail line at Harrisburg [Photo by Christof Spieler]
The new issue of Cite (77, Winter 2009) includes a brief update on Houston’s light rail expansion. METRO plans 30 miles of new light rail in addition to the current 7.5 miles. In all, the system will have 64 stations, putting a significant part of Houston’s urban core — including Downtown, the Texas Medical Center, Greenway Plaza, Uptown, the University of Houston, Rice University, Texas Southern University, the University of St. Thomas, Midtown, the Near North Side, the East End, the Third Ward, Neartown, and Gulfton — within walking distance of light rail.
Rendering of Julia Ideson Building Restoration and Expansion [Courtesy of Gensler]
In the Spring 2008 issue of Cite (74), Anna Mod wrote an article entitled “The Librarian Returns: Rehabilitating Houston’s Beloved Julia Ideson Building.” Click here to download a pdf copy. After the recent groundbreaking, Raj Mankad interviewed Barry Moore, a frequent contributor to Cite and a lead architect on the project.
Raj Mankad (RM): How did you become an expert in preservation?
Barry Moore (BM): By the time I completed my architectural education and joined the family firm, my father already had a reputation as the first preservation architect in Houston — he was one of the founders of The Heritage Society in 1954.
Map showing Houston Pavilions in its context [Background map from houstondowntown.com. Photo below from Main street courtesy of Houston Pavilions.]
In Cite 77, Max Page reviews the new Houston Pavilions in an article entitled “Downtown’s Downtown: Houston Pavilions and an Urban Dilemma.” Click here to download a pdf copy. Below Christof Spieler responds.
Max Page looks at the design decisions that turned the Houston Pavilions into something akin to an urban mall. Those decisions might be the project’s undoing. But the Pavilions suffers from another problem as well, and one that is a familiar problem in Downtown Houston: connectivity.
Jack Tar Motor Hotel Pool Terrace, 1961 [Courtesy of Guy W. Carwile]
While we enjoy the feelings of glamorous nostalgia when looking at images such as the one on the cover of the latest issue of Cite (77), our society has a difficult time evoking wonder and admiration when large physical remains – namely buildings – survive beyond their useful lifetime. They appear worthless, outdated, inefficient and “old.” Our culture embraces the newest, cheapest, and most efficient to define what is “best.” Cite 77 is about memory. Daily, we choose to reuse what we inherit, or demolish and rebuild. The Jack Tar Hotel has been replaced by the Emerald Isle Condos, which has the feel of little more than half-full retail and concrete. Is it better than what was razed?
Cite magazine, the architecture and design review of Houston, has been published quarterly
by the Rice Design Alliance
since 1982.
