This Hear Our Houston audio tour mixtape and contribution to Unexpected City is a glimpse into the minds of 7th and 8th grade writers who attended Writers in the Schools Summer Creative Camp this year. Breaking the form of the usual Hear Our Houston tours, this mixtape will only let you follow along in your imagination, but it is rich with the insights of young people who we don’t often get to hear from and well worth a listen.
Out of 921 students in WITS Creative Writing Camp this summer, this is a sampling of recordings featuring work by Yuna Booyoung, Leah Chemaly and Rachel Barnes, Wesley Pierre, Mia Simmons, Rose Li, Clint Ferrell, Julie Dietrich, Anna Demecs, Aerial Starks, Veean Chen, Emma Bolton, Melody Voo, Divya Jain, Katherine Walters, Irene Vasquez, and Albert who were taught by Casey Fleming, Deborah Wiggins, Van Garrett and Olga Feliciano at Annunciation Orthodox School. Stay tuned for long format tours made by more WITS students this Fall for a rich take on our city from a younger point of view.
So turn up the volume, crack a smile, and get ready to walk down memory lane. Listen by clicking on the link below:
Writers in the Schools Mixtape
by Students of WITS Creative Writing Camp at Annunciation Orthodox School
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Trinity River in early 1900s
In this special series, OffCite focuses on water and waterways. If this interests you, be sure to check out the Rice Design Alliance civic forum, Water: Challenges Facing the Houston Region, Wednesday August 31, 6:30 pm, The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston’s Brown Auditorium.
“It may not be a nice thing to talk about around dinnertime, but you want them flushing those toilets [in Dallas-Fort Worth],” said Dr. James Lester, Vice President of the Houston Advanced Research Center, at the Rice Design Alliance civic forum on water scarcity held August 24. The audience chuckled and the scientist hammed it up. “That water molecule you are drinking today may have been through some other person up in Dallas-Fort Worth in the last few months, but it is still a water molecule.” His humor, though disturbing, was a needed moment of lightness during an evening of alarming analyses about Houston’s drought.
To see ten minutes of highlights from the forum, play the embedded video below or watch the video on Youtube. You can also watch the full video at the bottom of this post.
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Galveston Bay, photo from United States Geological Survey, Wikimedia Commons
In this special series, OffCite focuses on water and waterways. If this interests you, be sure to check out the Rice Design Alliance civic forum, Water: Challenges Facing the Houston Region, Wednesdays August 24 and 31, 6:30 pm, The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston’s Brown Auditorium.
Last week, I led a discussion of Kwame Anthony Apiah’s The Honor Code with a group of Rice University freshmen. In the book, Apiah explores moral revolutions. He finds that appeals to honor, not rational arguments, make the difference. When 19th-century British workers saw the trans-Atlantic slave trade as an affront to their own collective honor and when Chinese literati saw foot-binding as a source of national shame, those practices came to a rapid end. Appiah does not engage in this history as an academic exercise. He challenges us to use honor as a means to end injustices today.
In today’s Houston Chronicle, John Jacob’s op-ed decries our existing rates of water consumption. He focuses on an economic justification for conservation, but I’m going to recast his argument in terms of honor and morality.
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Homes in the Northwest Park Utility District at Atwood Grove and Mimosa Grove off Tomball Parkway
In this special series, OffCite focuses on water and waterways. If this interests you, be sure to check out the Rice Design Alliance civic forum, Water: Challenges Facing the Houston Region, Wednesdays August 24 and 31, 6:30 pm, The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston’s Brown Auditorium.
As editor of Cite, I have seen all kinds of houses, but a few months back while on the way to a photo shoot with Jack Thomson I saw a little suburban street that qualifies as one of the strangest I’ve ever seen. From a distance, it looked like a scene from 2001: A Space Odyssey. A huge blue monolith shot up from behind new houses. We pulled off the Tomball Parkway, parked at some distance, and cautiously approached. The monolith, on closer inspection, was a water well and tank for the Northwest Park Municipal Utility District or MUD.
Most Houstonians have no idea where their drinking water comes from, but for the folks in the MUD the opposite is true. Their water supply looms over them, at once more precarious and secure.
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Charrette winner Linh Dan Do stands in front of her team's design. Not pictured is team member Sarah Simpson.
If you think design is for snobs, it’s time you took a visit to Workshop Houston. The site is on a street in the Third Ward, empty lots all around, but it is anything but a dead end for the children who participate. The Bike and Chopper Shops, the best known of the five “workshops,” are in a little house packed with shafts, shifters, stems, nuts, clamps, frames, and torches. Read in Cite 84 about how Pedro designed and fabricated a wicked chopper there. Set off the street, in an old tenement, are the other workshops—the Beat, Style, and Scholar Shops. In the afternoons, the rooms fill with children and the sweet smell of pre-adolescent sweat. Read in Cite 85 about how Arbay designed her BMG line of clothes there.
While the current facilities have a certain gritty credibility to them, Workshop Houston would like to expand the number of students it can serve and improve the quality of the experience through architecture. Rice Design Alliance held a charrette—an eight-hour design competition—with seven teams challenged to create a plan for Workshop Houston.
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In this post, Christof Spieler finishes his series of reports on his trip to China for an upcoming special issue of Cite. Read more about RDA’s China initiative here, which includes a knockout lecture series in the Fall. To browse all of Spieler’s posts from China, click here.
The most startling aspect of the China is the feeling that everything is moving in fast forward. From the windows of the Beijing airport express train, speeding along the expressway on its way from the Norman-Foster designed terminal of the second busiest airport in the world, you can see farmers working small plots with their hoes. From their small houses they can see the five-star hotels and modern office buildings of the airport business park. This is 1911 and 2011, coexisting alongside each other.
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In this series, Christof Spieler gives regular reports on his trip to China for a special issue of Cite. Read more about RDA’s China initiative here, which includes a knockout lecture series in the Fall.
The Beijing-Shanghai high speed rail line opened on June 30; I rode it four days later. Cruising along smoothly at 190 mph, I could not help but be impressed by the ambition of this project. It’s 800 miles of new, double-track, grade-separated electrified railway. Eighty-six percent is elevated, including two major river crossings; where a hill got in the way it was obviated by one of 22 tunnels. Twenty brand new stations serve cities along the way, and the Beijing and Shanghai stations were completely rebuilt to serve high speed rail. Imagine traveling from Houston to Atlanta by train in 5 hours and you get the idea.
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In this series, Christof Spieler gives regular reports on his trip to China for a special issue of Cite. Read more about RDA’s China initiative here, which includes a knockout lecture series in the Fall.
This is the Chinese version of a planned community: 30 highrise residential towers, each 30 stories tall, all behind gates and security guards. There are enough people here to support an entire shopping complex, including a full-sized supermarket accessible from within the gates. There’s a whole private riverfront, too, on the banks of the newly cleaned up Suzhou Creek, for residents only. This is housing at a density that we can’t imagine in Houston, but it still seems familiar: a city designed as a series of self-contained gated enclaves, marketed for their private amenities and perceived safety.
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In this Hear Our Houston audio tour and contribution to Unexpected City, artist, musicologist, and historian Tierney L. Malone walks along Almeda from Southmore to Wheeler, in Houston’s historic Third Ward that has served as a major hub for some of Houston’s most talented artists and musicians
Almeda (mp3, 14 minutes, 11.7 MB)
by Tierney L. Malone
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Magic Island site at Southwest Freeway and Greenbriar Street. All photographs Paul Hester.
Paul Hester’s retrospective Doing Time in Houston at Architecture Center Houston—culled from his extensive archive documenting Houston’s architecture through all its transitions over the past 45 years–invites the viewer to contemplate all that has ever stood on this viscid alluvium we call home. Row houses razed to make room for rows of gated townhomes; first ring suburbs mowed down to clear space for skyscrapers. Here, a saddlery turned ballet parking lot; there, a sea food market turned newspaper headquarters. Even the buildings left standing have been stripped and fused and cloaked in marble panels or kitschy Egyptian temples (see my “Ancient Curse of Freeway Frontage Excavated from Archives,” Cite 81, Spring 2010).
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