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.
On July 6th, Buffalo Bayou Partnership‘s pontoon boat, The Osprey, was destroyed in a fire, leaving all boat tours on the bayou suspended. Just as city business leaders announce ambitious plans to transform the bayous, an arsonist attacked a boat that opened the eyes of hundreds of Houstonians to the potential of our waterways. Will you stand idly by?
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.”
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:
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.”
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.
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.
An excerpt from David Dillon's article in Texas Architect September 2009
David Dillon, architecture critic of the Dallas Morning News from 1981 to 2006, died suddenly of heart failure at his home in Amherst, Massachusetts, on 3 June 2010. He was sixty-eight years old.
David Dillon came to Dallas in 1969 as an assistant professor of English at Southern Methodist University. After leaving SMU in 1976, he worked as a freelance journalist and then became associate editor of D: The Magazine of Dallas. This was how he found his vocation: he wrote the cover story for the May 1980 issue of D called “Why is Dallas Architecture So Bad?” Dillon’s critique was electrifying. Although he did list the best new buildings in Dallas (and offered Houston as a case study of enlightened architectural patronage to which Dallas should pay attention), Dillon’s story revealed the important social role an architecture critic could play as a public intellectual. The next year the Dallas Morning News hired Dillon as its full-time architecture critic. Until his retirement in 2006, David Dillon was the only newspaper journalist in Texas whose only job was to write about architecture and urban development—and to write critically. Nearly thirty years later, the difference Dillon made is measurable. It’s now Houston that looks enviously at Dallas when it comes to ambitious architecture and imaginative civic spaces (see Cite 78, Spring 2009).
Photos by Steven Thomson
It is befitting that the Architecture Center Houston is positioned in the shadow of City Hall, and a glut of the city’s engines of cultural production — the Hobby and Wortham centers, Jones Hall — and the corporate headquarters that fuel them, as the site is currently host to an exhibition that examines the interactivity between these elements. Policy is a collaborative exhibition by Mary Ellen Carroll with Daniel Anguili, Alberto Govela, Samuel Jacobson, Matt Stilt, Kevin Topek, Carlisle Vandervoort, and Seanna Walsh. Although the show occupies a modestly-sized portal and narrow corridor beneath the Houston American Institute of Architects (AIA) headquarters, it proposes an intrepid level of discourse on the relationships surrounding policy, art, architecture, and urbanism.
Close to a year ago, Offcite published a popular blogpost around the controversial and much talked-about fate of Houston’s beloved Astrodome that caught the attention of people like soon-to-be mayor Annise Parker and Houston Chronicle writer Lisa Gray. Today, the conversation continues.
Interested individuals are invited to visit Reliant Park’s website and lend their opinion to one of three potential plans for the dome. Plans include demolishing the dome and replacing it with greenspace; transforming it into a multi-use venue with its shell remaining; and thirdly, in addition to the changes made in the second option, creating a mega-venue complete with a Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics Institute as well as a planetarium. To download the master plan book, click here. Please take some time to go their website to vote and comment on which option you think is best. And feel free to share your opinions here as well.
Cite magazine, the architecture and design review of Houston, has been published quarterly
by the Rice Design Alliance
since 1982.
