Offcite Blog | Design. Houston. Architecure.

Wallpaper City Guide: Houston

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, [...]

Book Review: City Ubiquitous

Galerías Mall, Maracaibo, Venezuela, courtesy Wilfredo R. Rodriguez H.

Imagine driving across the United States, from San José to New York City, without speaking to anyone. Sounds difficult, right? Credit card swipe machines, internet check-ins, and automated food ordering allowed Andrew Wood to accomplish this feat with only uttering four words, all in the first day [...]

Cinema Houston

Metropolitan Theater [Photos courtesy Houston Metropolitan Research Center, via cinemahouston.info]

The cover of David Welling’s book Cinema Houston is a stunning sepia photograph of the interior of the downtown’s lost Metropolitan Theater, known in its time for a booming Wurlitzer, disappearing orchestra pit, and opulent faux-gold Egyptian Hieroglyphics. Its extravagance bears little resemblance to the Houston [...]

Everything Must Move: Transition at Rice School of Architecture

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 [...]

The Infrastructural City: Networked Ecologies In Los Angeles, Edited by Kazys Varnelis

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 [...]

The Philip Johnson Tapes: Interviews by Robert A.M. Stern, Edited by Kazys Varnelis

Philip Johnson at age 95 [Photo by B. Pietro Filardo, Wikimedia Commons]

The Philip Johnson Tapes is a juicy romp through the greater part of twentieth-century American architectural culture narrated by Johnson (1906-2005) to his good friend and acolyte, Robert A.M. Stern, during the course of several months in 1985. Philip Johnson is dead, long live [...]