Chapbooks by Beverly Dahlen and Jamie Townsend

Everywhere, a surfeit of essays and articles bemoan the declining fortunes of the book and the publishing industry’s deepening crisis. Even though there have been some recent hopeful reports of better times ahead, overall, the news is: the book is dead, there’s no hope. Get. Out. Now.

Despite this bleak outlook, there’s been a huge resurgence in the last few years of small, often experimental, publishers committed to the art of book-making and also excited by the technological innovations driving the written word forward into new venues, platforms, and futures. Each time one person or a few decide to launch a new small publishing venture, it feels like a mini-revolution, a stand against the pessimistic future envisioned for the book itself.

One of the local manifestations of this international movement in book design and publishing is Little Red Leaves. Little Red Leaves began out of San Marcos, Texas with a collectively-edited journal of writing that takes risks. They also began to publish E-books by innovative writers like Matt Timmons and Yedda Morrison (who used erasure to revive nature in her book Darkness). These E-books are available for free on the website as a PDF or also can be ordered physically through Lulu.

A local Houston writer and book devotée, Dawn Pendergast, pitched the idea to Little Red Leaves last year to do a series of handmade textile chapbooks as part of the LRL line. They took the bait and the rest is happening right now, right here in Houston as Pendergast plays her small part in the micro-publishing revolution with her LRL Textile Series. OffCite sent her some questions to find out what motivates her work, what she’s publishing, and what her thoughts are about the much-heralded demise of the book.

OffCite: How did the idea for LRL Textile Series come about?

Dawn Pendergast: The textile series grew out of a love for technology and chapbooks.

First, chapbooks. I love the form. The length, size, and feel of a chapbook is sort of special/singular/intimate. It’s a little appetizer. It’s a dose. Some poetry chapbooks are intervals on their way to full-length books, others are jaunty little cul-de-sacs. Either way I’m celebrating them in their them-ness, on their own little shelves, sans UPCs.

Not only is the chapbook a wonderful form, but it lends itself to handmade, homegrown, micro-production. Anyone with a printer and a stapler can publish a chapbook. Anyone. My collection reflects lots of different approaches to chapbooks, some traditional letter-pressed beauties and others of the off-the-wall variety (think, bracelet book). I love what the physical book can do to frame your experience of its content.

The odd thing about my love affair with handmade chapbooks is my mutual love for all that is digital. I love my laptop(s), my Kindle, my iPhone. (Yes I do) love reading PDFs. Do I mourn the death of the book? No, I do not. Because most of this dying is already dead. Here’s my thinking: With our ebooks on our e-shelves, our ‘real’ bookcases will no longer sag with row after row of standard sized, glued-together paperbacks. NO! Our future shelves will have/hold only those books that are really books; the ones that embrace their thingness; that explore the page, test its boundaries; the ones that are more than merely text delivery systems.

Off of these ideas bounced the textile series. A series of chapbooks that are comfortable (dowdy even), ramshackle things. My goal was to make something that people would want to hold in their hands. Something that could be passed around. Something both manufactured and made by hand. An ode to the machines that make production possible, to the errors permeating its materiality.

OffCite: What kinds of literature are you drawn to publishing as part of the series? Is there a particular aesthetic or concern in the writing?

Dawn Pendergast: The textile series is an aesthetic stepchild of Little Red Leaves, an annual online journal and ebook series that’s been publishing a range of innovative writing since 2005. LRL textile series is dedicated solely to experimental poetry. Our writers range from established literary figures like Beverly Dahlen to emerging poets like Jamie Townsend. I wish I could describe an overarching aesthetic. We read with our ears and love with our eyes. The writerly, the anti-writerly, the surprising, the concluding, the atoning, the coughing. It’s a very mixed bag. If there’s a principle guiding our selection, it’s probably a power animal like a goat. I love goats.

OffCite: How many books have been published so far? What are the plans for the series going forward?

Dawn Pendergast: The series kicked things off in April of this year with Beverly Dahlen’s A Reading: Birds published in an edition of 50. The chapbook was only offered online and sold out in 3 weeks! We’ve since published a second printing (50) of the book. All runs are 50. There are currently two other books available on the website for purchase or free on-line reading: MATRYOSHKA by Jamie Townsend and An Antenna Called the Body by Sarah Mangold.

We’re also starting to get calls from bookstores and libraries that will begin stocking our little chapbooks. We’ll be posting these locations online.

FYI – The LRL Textile Series is now accepting submissions for their 2012 line of chapbooks. If interested, see here for more information about how to submit.

Detail of Schindler House, Wikimedia Commons

When you first walk in, there’s a man, blindfolded and gagged with his hands and feet cuffed to parallel leather rods holding him in place in his chair. Two women in another room are knelt over blankets, sewing strings onto an accordion-folded long sheet of paper, with printed repeated images of rectangles at odd angles. Soft twenties jazz is playing on a record player. In the bathroom, an oracle intones softly through a tube coming through the ceiling; the female voice describes your own identity (past, present & future) by reading the characteristics of your particular bird-spirit. In the vitrine at the back of the house, something similar to a woman’s body contorts within the confines of a red, fabric bag.

Jen Hofer and Myriam Moscona. Photo by Rob Ray.

You’ve stumbled into an evening of performances called Both Sides and the Center organized at the Rudolph Schindler House in West Hollywood, California on the third weekend in August of this year. An innovative publisher, Les Figues Press, worked in conjunction with the MAK Center, which is dedicated to preserving Rudolph Schindler’s Modernist legacy in Los Angeles, to put together this festival featuring readings and performances by writers dealing with various experiences of proximity, intimacy, and distance in relation to the famous dual-family home.

The first night of the festival, there was a more traditional reading in one of the exterior spaces on the rear side of the house framed by two wings of the building. On the second evening, writers from L.A. and cities further afield (Mexico City and London among them) were invited to engage with the space and to perform work considering the architecture. As the Les Figues event info stated, these writers were asked to think about: “the physicality of space, house as stage, voyeurism, private as public, the strangeness in the familiar and the brutal nature of domesticity.”

I was fortunate to be able to attend these performances of potential answers to a number of questions: How is it possible to build a conversation between the literary arts and architecture? What is the history of this conversation? Its present? Its future? I especially found the performances compelling, because they moved beyond the writer-artist dichotomy that usually informs interactions between the visual and literary arts, i.e. the writer is there to comment, to reflect, to meditate, to ponder, to think about the art, but not to make art herself. This event suggests a different relationship: one based on writers as producers of art themselves, not merely commentators or critics.

The event functioned within a broad definition of literary arts as building a landscape of words spatially, or more broadly, as any kind of textual or linguistic interaction in space. And so if architecture means the construction of spaces through materials in the landscape, then the potential for interaction and conversation is much broader than previously thought.

Of course, the location of this festival was supremely important. The architecture of Rudolph Schindler⎯the father of Southern California modernism⎯has come to define a utopian aesthetic that is foundational to the image of Los Angeles architecture worldwide. Think Julius Schulman’s iconic image of two women perched in a Modernist home above Los Angeles.

Originally sent to work on homes in LA by Frank Lloyd Wright, Schindler stayed in the city and established his practice there in 1922 with his home on Kings Road, designed as a live-work space for two couples. Schindler went to work on over 400 projects, 150 of which were built, many of them low-cost homes for progressive clients.

The event pushed disciplinary boundaries constantly as it invited writers to do site-specific performances that reflected on architecture and space. Each writer responded in unique ways. Mexican poet Myriam Moscona and translator-poet Jen Hofer worked together on an intimate level, squatting and kneeling on the floor of one of the rooms. They’d laid down blankets and together sewed figures into a long accordion-folded single paged book, while music from the early twentieth-century played on a record player.

Anna Joy Springer turned a bathroom into an oracular chamber, in which a listener could hear their identity read through a particular bird-spirit. Michael du Plessis sat in a chair by a table with various knicknacks displayed and took requests for him to read individual endnotes from a recent book while in various states of self-inflicted bondage with leather straps, bars, blindfolds, and gags. Vanessa Place read passages from the SCUM Manifesto while Kim Rosenfeld typed it out like a secretary doing dictation for a demanding boss.

In what for me was the most emotional of the performances, Bhanu Kapil set up a table in a vitrine structure in one of the wings, wrapped herself in a red cloth bag and moved jerkily and slowly as a recording of her reading her text, Schizophrene, was played. The text moved between a butcher store in London and a park with South Asian immigrants as it thought critically about violence, imperialism, and the family. The recording repeated continually for the course of the final hour of Saturday evening.

Bhanu Kapil performs Schizophrene at Schindler House. Photo by Harold Abramowitz

Cover image cropped from Monu issue #14.

Houston has always had a tricky relationship with historic preservation. Unlike numerous other global cities, Houston often allows its older structures to grow over with weeds or be demolished, eventually making way for new development. Traditional preservationism would imply that this approach is morally wrong: not to preserve architectural history is to lose it forever.

Yet both the new issue of MONU: Magazine on Urbanism and a recent show called Cronocaos, curated by Rem Koolhaas at the New Museum in New York, question our common approach to preservation. Should old buildings be preserved in a pristine state forever, or should they be allowed to remain an active part of a city, even if they continue to deteriorate from use? Has historic preservation done more damage to cities than good, by airbrushing and sanitizing them for tourists and the wealthy, while making them less accessible and useful to citizens? The image portrayed by Koolhaas is of preservationists cleaning facades, scrubbing interiors, and then putting up metaphorical velvet ropes that prevent users from getting too close to the architecture—”please do not touch. Even clean hands can harm the art….etc.” Even the term preservation implies an object sealed off from the effects of time, petrified, as it were.

In his work and in his New Museum show, Koolhaas attempts to re-set our thinking regarding preservation. A few years back, in his competition entry for the deteriorating Hermitage museum in St. Petersburg, he proposed letting the sprawling museum continue to exist in a state of decay. He suggested, in effect, that the museum do nothing. Peeling paint and piled dust would remain as an artifact of aging and the toll of time. Artworks would hang within the ruin. The entire museum would exist as a marker of its own placement in history. The proposal ran counter to the cautious, pristine approach advocated by traditional preservationists. Nicholas Ouroussoff says, “in the realm of preservation, as in so much else, we seem to have become a world terrified of too much direct contact with reality.”

As a city, Houston seems to support Koolhaas’s approach, a kind of a counter-argument to rehabilitation. Where other cities often preserve even buildings of minor importance, Houston allows or encourages the demolition of structures that have fallen out of use. The result is an urban fabric full of vacant lots but also potential. This lack of planning (and of zoning) creates unexpected diversities, not only demographically but architecturally. Many Houstonians lament the fact that we don’t have better protections for our historic buildings, both notable and marginal. But maybe Houston doesn’t need the same preservationist approach followed by Paris or Philadelphia or New York. Perhaps it needs an approach to history tailored to this city: not the blanket preservation of historic structures but, as Koolhaas implies, a better sense of what we’re willing to give up. This would entail a theory of preservation’s opposite.

The Dutch urbanism journal MONU: Magazine on Urbanism raises similarly provocative arguments. This month’s issue, Editing Urbanism, questions the ways in which cities deal with their existing fabric. Koolhaas has an article here that covers much of the same ground as his Cronocaos show. In another essay, Felix Madrazo argues that architectural publications are to blame, by not publishing the work of preservationists and designers interested in renewal. And Lucas Dean proposes a kind of programmed urban death, in which parts of cities would be allowed to constantly undergo a process of rejuvenation.

Here’s MONU editor Bernd Upmeyer commenting on this month’s issue:

Despite the current urgency to deal with the enormous potential of the already-existing urban material as Urban Editors, there seems still to be a lack of interest in topics such as urban and architectural restoration, preservation, renovation, redevelopment, renewal or adaptive reuse of old structures among architects and urban designers. But ignorance in this matter can only be dismissed as socially irresponsible and economically and culturally unacceptable. But what might the reason be for the prevailing ignorance? Who is to blame? Why is Urban Editing considered so utterly unattractive?

You can browse the whole of MONU issue #14 on Youtube.

Yasufumi Nakamori gave a talk at the Architecture Center Houston. Photo by Hank Hancock.

On Wednesday, April 20, Yasufumi Nakamori, assistant curator of photography at The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, spoke about his recent scholarship to an audience invited by the Houston Public Library and hosted by Architecture Center Houston (ArCH) downtown for their series “Authors in Architecture.” Nakamori, having just hours earlier returned from Japan, presented an informal survey of Katsura: Picturing Modernism in Japanese Architecture; Photographs by Ishimoto Yasuhiro, the catalogue for the Summer 2010 MFAH exhibit.

Katsura book cover

Ishimoto’s photography is familiar to museum visitors through his photographs of Chicago streets, stairwells, and children, responding in part to the “New Bauhaus” aesthetic flourishing there just after World War II. Born in San Francisco, raised and schooled in Japan, he returned to the states to study architecture and then was put in an internment camp for two years in Colorado, where at age 21, he took up photography. With his dual cultural and geographical identity, Ishimoto quickly made a name for himself in Chicago, placing work in exhibitions, winning contests, publishing photos in Life magazine, and winning significant commissions, including one for the landmark “Family of Man” (1956). Nakamori identifies Mies van der Rohe and photographer Harry Callahan as formative influences for Ishimoto Yasuhiro.

Nakamori, assisted by a slide show featuring many of the plates from the catalogue, explained how Ishimoto returned to Japan in 1953 and 1954 to photograph Japan’s pre-modern architectural treasures and became particularly absorbed by the seventeenth-century Katsura Imperial Villa in Kyoto. Ishimoto documented with an eye toward material surfaces, the striking convergence of the garden and the palace, and decontextualized architectural detail, not to mention his ongoing interests in ephemeral detail as in the cast of sunlight and the shadows of trees on the grounds. Katsura had long been a subject of study and discussion, but it gained new significance in post-occupation Japan’s “tradition debate,” (dentō ronsō), wherein the villa no longer stood for timeless tradition, but as a means to understand Japan’s modernity. This was especially true once Walter Gropius visited the site and said as much himself. Ishimoto, on his own, had made explicit comparisons between the villa and Piet Mondrian’s groundbreaking forms.

Aiming simply to publish a book of photographs of Katsura, Ishimoto requested from Tange Kenzo, ten years his senior and by then a towering figure in Japanese architecture, the contribution of an accompanying essay. Tange was also an avid photographer, and he perceived many similar interests and aesthetic approaches with the young Ishimoto. He went much further than contributing an essay, ultimately taking control of the book project to pursue his own statement about modernity and tradition, his turn toward structuralism, and a need to disentangle the traditionalist from the imperialist. He considered the camera as a central part of architectural thinking. Tange once described Katsura, despite its central place in his thesis, as like a beloved woman who is beautiful in photographs but less impressive in person. Photography made it possible to think about tradition and modernity as part of an “internal reality.”

Tange took charge of Ishimoto’s photos, cropped them “drastically,” hired Bauhaus graphic designer Herbert Bayer to plan the layout, and then went on to fire Bayer so that he could select and sequence the photos himself, contracted with Gropius for another essay, and then released the book Tradition and Creation in Japanese Architecture in 1960, by which time Ishimoto had fairly disengaged from the whole project.

The book continues to enjoy its status as the foundational text in modern Japanese architecture. Nakamori pointed to the ArCH’s concurrent exhibit “Parallel Nippon: Contemporary Japanese Architecture, 1996-2006,” which was hung on the walls of the large multi-purpose space where the talk was held. It showed work by dozens of firms and designers, saying “All these architects, if you asked which is the one book that sets the stage, this one would be it.”

Nakamori’s MFAH exhibit and his own book for the first time fully showed Ishimoto’s photographs according to his own vision. Nakamori helpfully held the 1960 book and his own side-by-side, confirming their inter-relationship: they were identical in size and shape and share several font choices. (Nakamori’s book was designed by Daphne Geismar.) Both were published by Yale University Press.

It’s not entirely accurate to say that Tange’s “incredible interventions” somehow distorted or damaged Ishimoto’s work, as several questions from the audience seemed to presume. Ishimoto, who became a naturalized Japanese citizen in 1961, actually shared many of Tange’s ideas about photography and architecture, and the photos may even have helped Tange to clarify his own theoretical program. Ishimoto himself has made contradictory assessments of the book over the years, that his vision was obscured or that it was honored, and will admit that the Tange book helped to confirm his place as a leading Japanese photographer, whose long career we continue to study and discuss.

Uncropped photo by Ishimoto Yasuhiro

Related Link

Katsura: Picturing Modernism in Japanese Architecture Wins CAA Prize
An MFAH interview with Yasufumi Nakamori (March 10, 2011)

The duo is Robert Thomas and Richard Murray. They are well-credentialed: the former was then director of the program in Public Administration at UH, and the later is now director of the Institute of Public Policy at UH. The book is part of a series by the Institute of Governmental Studies at Berkeley, designed to promote “better understanding of the nature and working of the American system of democratic government, particularly in its political, economic, and social aspects.” We’re in the company of New York, London, Toronto, Stockholm, Montreal, Winnipeg, Indianapolis, and Leningrad, and have a place among them because we were a “unique case study” in a city where “it no longer seems appropriate to focus government intervention primarily on economic development alone, while ignoring societal ills and social objectives.”

Progrowth Politics’ clear explanations of local land use and redevelopment issues, MUD districts, and the push and pull between the city council and mayor are the book’s greatest strengths. They clearly show how things get done in the city, and by doing so provide both a fantastic reference for understanding political processes in the city and also develop their primary point about how these processes have consistently enabled economic growth to be at the center of the civic agenda. They show the nuts and bolts that allowed what Jan Morris called the “mighty resolve” of Houston to take the primary role in influencing the city’s form.

That’s not the book’s only civic service, though. Hidden amid wonkish chapter titles like “Growth Patterns” and “People and Politics,” this book provides a top-of-the-line, clearheaded historical narrative. While Stephen Fox’s Houston Architectural Guide recovers the history of the city neighborhood-by-neighborhood and building-by-building, Thomas and Murray connect all the dots, presenting a cohesive story from Allen to Whitmire. And though you wouldn’t know from its cover (never has book design so perfectly channeled the architectural spirit of the City Hall Annex), they actually make it quite entertaining.

Take, for example, the chapter on Houston’s annexation policies. The book gives exhaustive and energetic treatment to the drama underlying the annexation of southeast Harris County by the City of Houston under Mayor Lewis Cutrer. It’s one of many episodes in which the old-guard city council comes across like a kind of Houstonian id.

Cutrer made his proposal [for annexing SE Harris County] one week after the secret annexations. Since Houston’s legal position appeared to be solid, the suburban mayors were in a better position to gain territory through a compromise than through a lengthy court fight. Hence, they readily agreed to take Cutrer’s offer to their respective councils and resume negotiations later.

Cutrer’s strategy received a cold reception from council members and prominent civic leaders. Some segments of Houston’s leadership advocated a ‘Holcombe’ response. Their solution was to annex the entire county! The council rejected Cutrer’s argument that Houston could afford to negotiate because it enjoyed a superior legal position. ‘If we have such a strong legal position, they reasoned, ‘why should we give up anything?’

Of course, the City Council won that battle with the mayor, and ended up taking huge tracts of the county for the city. That incident isn’t an atypical example of our political past, and reading through so many of them will certainly make sure you never forget how much growth and expansion meant to city leaders. That road-map border outline will never seem quite the same.

Unsurprisingly, purchasing this book is either difficult or expensive. I found my copy in the Texana section at Half Price Books in Montrose, so perhaps some digging in similar sections may prove fruitful. A few are available for upwards of $30 used on Amazon. If buying isn’t an option, various libraries around town have it in their stacks. But it is certainly worth the time to track down Progrowth Politics somehow: It’ll help any Houstonian make some sense of it all.

Check out Aaron Carpenter’s other reviews of books on Houston:
The Last American City
Cinema Houston

Book design and photographs by Thumb

Encased in thick yellow boards and with a title reminiscent of a lopsided basketball game score, Oscar 102/Brasilia 50, immediately appealed to me. According to its graphic designers, Thumb (Luke Bulman and Jessica Young), “The book’s hybrid binding uses book boards laminated with yellow paper, trimmed flush to expose the edge of the boards. Over time, these edges will soften and ‘weather’ with handling.” Like the woman in Napoleon Dynamite, I whispered to myself, “I want that!”

With this publication the Rice School of Architecture again demonstrates its commitment to its forty-nine-year-old publication series, Architecture at Rice. AaR, as it is abbreviated on the book’s spine, was begun by the Rice School of Architecture’s visionary leader, Bill Caudill, in 1961. As the preface to an early example explained: “Architecture at Rice University designates a series of reports on thoughts and investigations from the department of architecture. It is published in the belief that the education of architects can best be advanced if teachers, students, practitioners, and interested laymen share in what they are thinking and doing.” Under Rice’s last dean, Lars Lerup, the series was reinvigorated in 1993 after a period when one book was printed in thirteen years. Since then the Rice School of Architecture has been producing interesting books intermittently, but you might not know it because of the stealth marketing. I reviewed AaR 44, last year for Offcite but only because I had previously seen a copy lying on a coffee table in Dawn Finley and Mark Wamble’s house during an RDA architectural tour. Somehow I missed AaR 45, but was notified of AaR 46 via a Facebook posting.

Oscar 102/Brasilia 50 is the work of Farès el-Dahdah, a longtime professor at Rice who changed his specialty about ten or fifteen years ago from literary tropes in architecture to what seems to me to be the much more appealing study of Brazil’s tropical modern architecture. Brasilia has a special place in el-Dahdah’s heart since, as he told us when I took his Brasilia seminar in 2001, it was where he attended high school and a place of much youthful pleasure. The title refers to the ages in 2010 of celebrated Brazilian architect Oscar Niemeyer (1907-) and that of its purpose-built capital city, Brasilia. He justifies the book in his typical light-hearted way: “The mere intersection of Niemeyer’s centenary (plus two) and Brasilia’s fiftieth anniversary was sufficient pretext to conduct a studio in the fall 2007 at Rice University’s School of Architecture.” The content includes eight essays by el-Dahdah examining various aspects of Brasilia and “causes célèbres in the history of Brazil’s contribution to modern architecture,” each supplemented by a student-produced “dossier” of computer models, diagrams, and occasional essays. The book begins and ends with spreads of splendid photos depicting several of Niemeyer’s best known buildings that the students visited during the course of the studio. I particularly liked these photos, which were taken by Luisina Wilfong and Lylse Oliveros, because of the manner in which they indicated effects of the passage of time on the modern buildings. There were smudges of black mold on the curving fascia of Niemeyer’s house in Rio de Janeiro. A slightly crooked chartreuse fire hydrant stands sentry with two costumed guards in front of the Planalto Palace. Some of the marble revetment looked about to pop from the awesomely long pedestrian ramp leading up to the roof of the Congress (which, by the way, has no handrails to speak of).

El-Dahdah has completely immersed himself in minutiae of his subject as the numerous references to letters in archives, emails to descendents of key players, and the inclusion of many sketches and drawings by Niemeyer and other architects of the period demonstrates. The most intriguing essays to me were those that explored the back and forth dialogue between Le Corbusier and his Brazilian colleagues. Le Corbusier visited Rio de Janeiro in 1936 at the invitation of the éminence grise of modernity in Brazil, Lucio Costa (1902-1998). A wily figure, Costa promoted modernism while at the same time serving as the decades-long director of the Serviço do Patrimônio Histórico e Artístico Nacional (the Brazilian national heritage service). Costa had been entrusted to the design of a new building for the Ministry of Education and Health and wished to consult with Le Corbusier, in his mind a visionary of an ability that only appears at “intervals of centuries.” The resulting building, completed in 1944, has been heralded as one of the canons of modern architecture. As the protracted design process stretched out over several sites and innumerable schemes, ego played its role and both the Brazilian design team lead by Costa and Niemeyer and Le Corbusier ended up claiming credit for what was clearly a solution that neither would have arrived at alone. In other essays el-Dahdah charts the nuances of similar situations with regards to such other famous buildings as Brazil’s pavilion at the New York World’s Fair (1939) and the United Nations Headquarters Building (1952).

The last three essays address Brasilia. The genesis of this city, its inaugural sectors built in short three years on an arid, treeless plain, more than 600 km from the nearest paved road, is almost legendary. Costa’s winning proposal for its design consisted of fifteen little sketches and accompanied by an essay that began: Não pretendia competir e, na verdade, não concorro—apenas me desvencilho de uma solução possível, que não foi procurada mas surgiu, por assim dizer, já pronta (“It was not my intention to enter the competition—nor indeed am I really so doing. I am merely liberating my mind from a possible solution which sprang to it as a complete picture, but which I had not sought.”), thus casting a wonderfully subversive, existential doubt on the entire project. The plan of Brasilia is composed of 120 large superquadras, or residential blocks, intended to house about 2,500 people ranged symmetrically in four parallel, curving rows about a shorter, perpendicular “monumental axis” containing the buildings of the government. Roadways on the scale of freeways connect the various parts of the city. Almost from the start, Brasilia has been criticized for its anti-urban qualities when compared to traditional, densely built cities. However, as el-Dahdah points out, “to live in a superquadra means access to ‘financial stability, home ownership, individual cars, schools, cinemas, theaters, clubs, green spaces, viable roads without traffic and where physical safety is guaranteed to go to work and back, in sum, access to the city in all it signifies as a way of life.’” It reminds me of living in Houston, another city criticized for the many of the same reasons. Although, el-Dahdah continues, “a city without the traditional street or street corner can very well have other viable public spaces and that social ecologies can easily adapt to unprecedented urban forms,” the sections on Brasilia do not seem to explore this in a significant way. It would have been fascinating if some of the student dossiers, which in general I found to be vague or burdened with jargon-loaded sentences, focused on what it is like to spend your days in such a place. Perhaps it would have uncovered some of the common ground between Brasilia, Houston, and other contemporary, suburban cities that make them desirable places to live for so many people despite the critics’ protests.

Oscar 102/Brasilia 50
Architecture at Rice 46, Houston: Rice School of Architecture, 2010

Wallpaper City Guide Houston redeems itself in the poetic summary of the city’s contemporary conundrum of coming to terms with the worst excesses of urban sprawl — “a place with little sense of place” and a repressed inferiority complex. That Wallpaper encourages the reader to overlook “the urban schizophrenia” and “discover the Houston underneath” credits the publisher’s expectations for tourists’ tenacity (or the occurrence of tourists in Houston to begin with). Indeed, were Rick Steve or even Lonely Planet to cover the city, gems like the Beer Can House or Jefferson Chemical Company Building would probably not receive mention.

Wallpaper’s guide makes for an interesting comparison with Placenotes: Houston, published by the University of Texas’ Charles W. Moore Center for the Study of Place. Stephen Fox’s Houston: Architectural Guide is in an altogether different category. Decidedly Texan, Placenotes emphasizes the city’s architectural heritage and — gasp — escapes into nature, as well as more easily-identifiable commentary by local architects and cultural literati. Although Placenotes offers a more thorough exploration of the city’s landmarks, you won’t find footnotes about booking the most decadent suite at Hotel ZaZa.

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 of his cross country drive. The journey, among the stories in his seventh book, City Ubiquitous: Place, Communication, and the Rise of Omnitopia, portrays our social landscape as generic and provides the foundation for his thesis: our world “has become condensed into an enclosure of the same place.”

Difference is dying, perhaps already dead. While Wood does not state this, it is heavily implied and argued that difference is now eclipsed by standardization; by the banal spaces characteristically found in places like airports, hotels, and shopping malls. He refers to these generic architectural typologies as interiorized enclaves and believes “that we should study the rise of an enclavic sensibility that attempts to control, encapsulate, and finally eliminate the possibility of an ‘outside world.’”

Wood argues enclaves, such as the Galleria or Downtown Tunnel System, create a ubiquitous environment that deprives its occupants of the feeling of being tied to a specific location. When inside ”the enclavic mall,” it is difficult to know which city one is in, since, he contends, malls [as well as numerous other building types] lack a sense of specific identity and are placeless places–a city ubiquitous.

While Wood is an academic using an analytical approach, he also spends a great deal of time re-counting his experiences traveling through airports in Tokyo, malls in Alberta, casinos in Las Vegas, and hotels in Atlanta. These stories, ranging from quiet walks through the world’s largest mall at 4:30 a.m. to being herded like cattle through the Tokyo Narita airport, provide a glimpse of the world through his eyes. He couples these stories with intellectual examination, such as his assessment of the Las Vegas casinos as “the post-tourist flâneur [that] employs the well-practiced gaze of the mall shopper and the amusement park patron.” The oscillation between analytical discourse and narrative provides a good balance to the text. The book reads like something between a textbook and a novel.

I strongly recommend City Ubiquitous: Place, Communication, and the Rise of Omnitopia to anyone who lives amidst the enclaves about which Wood writes so passionately. He argues that spaces similar to Houston’s Galleria “offer a uniquely modern enclave of endless interiors and forgotten boundaries” and that non-places, such as the Hyatt Hotel, have perfected “the art of building tiny worlds to serve as surrogates for the real one.” The book offers the reader a fresh perspective on generic spaces Houstonian’s interface with daily. By providing a greater self-awareness of the social and architectural impact of the ubiquitous enclave, the reader will never experience places like the Downtown Tunnel System in the same way again.

City Ubiquitous: Place, Communication, and the Rise of Omnitopia
By Andrew Wood, Professor of Communication Studies at San Jose State University
Non-fiction, 215 pages

Benson Bright Gillespie is a graduate student at Rice University’s Graduate School of Architecture

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 theaters of the 90s and 00s I grew up in, where the investment was not in decoration but in the number of screens and parking spots. This very American transition from the movie palace to the multiplex, amplified in our city, is given a definitive treatment in Cinema Houston.

Welling allows the theaters’ individual stories to gesture towards the greater narrative. A pattern is evident from the get go—a grand opening, a honeymoon period, a decline into pornography and dollar theater status, and subsequent closing. People move away from downtown and the theaters. Televisions appear in living rooms. Developers and a city government are disinterested in preservation, despite how popular the notion of saving the theater was with the community. It is a sobering feeling looking at all that we have lost—the destruction of the aforementioned Metropolitan, the proto-shopping center Uptown, and the grand Loew’s State seem particularly tragic.

McClendon III Drive-In 1981

The photography is fantastic throughout—a drive-in on the site of what is now the Williams Tower, one extravagant theater exterior after another, and lines around the corner of the Alabama theater for The Empire Strikes Back. Its detail is encyclopedic. Any theater constructed until the era of the multiplex around 1980 is given a definitive write-up, detailing everything from their opening films to changes in ownership to the decoration the concession stand. These stories carry with them surprising facts. The Hollywood Video on Westheimer and Montrose—formerly the Tower Theater—was once host to a performance by avant-garde composer Phillip Glass. There are also some colorful owners to be met. Most prominently is former local hero Fred Horwitz, a cinema empresario during the depression who both distributed pins to women to defend themselves in the darkness of the theater and organized “tin can days” to help feed the poor. When he was thrown into prison for an alleged mail fraud scheme involving lottery tickets, public outcry was such that 100,000 people signed a petition for his release. It, unfortunately, did no good.

Welling’s take on new theaters is also a bit surprising. He makes the point that many recent multiplexes, most notably the Edwards Grand Palace 24 in Greenway Plaza, are heirs to the spirit of grandeur and opulence that was present in the 30′s and 40′s. I hesitantly disagree. Though these massive, state-of-the-art structures are no doubt big improvements over their nondescript, 1980s predecessors, the design of their auditoriums rarely competes with the old movie palaces. I also find it hard to be convinced that they will age as well as the River Oaks.

Cinema Houston is fascinating, providing so much material for nostalgic reminiscences it is almost overwhelming. Even I, at 22, got the chance look back fondly at the old Town and Country 6, the defunct General Cinema Chain, and the recently closed Landmark Greenway 3. By allowing us to remember what we lost, Welling refines our perspective on what is worth preserving. At a time when many of our old theaters are rumored to be threatened, this is the book’s greatest asset.

Welling also maintains a well-constructed website and blog.

Cinema Houston: From Nickelodeon to Megaplex
David Welling
University of Texas Press, 2007

Aaron Carpenter is a Katy native and undergraduate at Duke University.

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 of Architecture.” Below Koush extends his reflection.

Everything Must Move was published on the occasion of the fifth Kennon Symposium honoring Rice School of Architecture (RSA) Dean Lars Lerup as he steps down this year. According to the subtitle printed on its bright red cover, the book documents “a decade-and-a-half of propositions about the suburban city in general, and Houston in particular.” (Author’s note: I was a graduate student who matriculated roughly in the middle of Lerup’s tenure.)

Most of the content consists of excerpted student projects, the kind that won their authors travelling fellowships, with additional commentary by their professors. Much of it was culled from the Working series of booklets published periodically by the RSA to document its output. In addition there are several recorded conversations between various faculty and a selection of new and reprinted writings by Lerup.

The carefully edited material in Everything Must Move allows for an analysis of the architectural program. What the editors chose to include (and what was omitted) speaks to the image the directors of the RSA wish to project to the outside world. The book is divided into seven numbered sections that the reader must decipher as they are not given titles. Series of photos at the beginning of each section and the selection of projects give a sense of the theme:

Section 1: Photos of an overpass under construction and what appears to be a road being paved near tract houses; a sort of overview or introduction to the experiential aspects of being in suburban Houston.

Section 2: More photos of tract houses and shopping strips; projects about small, individual buildings, particularly houses.

Section 3: Photo of hitchhiker and one of gated townhouses; projects that provide public services in depressed minority neighborhoods.

Section 3.5: Photos of self-storage buildings, Greenway Plaza, and the Texas Medical Center; projects for some larger buildings and groups of buildings, small-scale urban design.

Section 4: Photos of buildings downtown and of the tunnel system; projects reacting to higher density, presumably “urban” conditions.

Section 5: Atmospheric aerial night shots of traffic, fireworks, and polluted sunsets over refineries; formal and abstracted projects describing a design process and projects reacting to local and international environmental conditions.

Section 6: More atmospheric medium-distance shots with smog and night shots of the eerily lit city; projects relating to mitigating such environmental problems as flooding. (Note: The chapter title pages of the last two sections are misnumbered as 7 and 8.)

Section 7: Shots of a tanker in the ship channel, aerial shot of distribution center, aerial shot of subdivision under construction; projects about coastal environmental control and about the environment of such regions beyond of Houston as northern Mexico and New Orleans.

In the face of a seemingly intractable urban condition, the RSA under Lerup’s direction has positioned itself as critic rather than activist. The intentionally ambiguous organization of Everything Must Move, which prefers highly-charged photographs of Houston over words, speaks to the RSA’s method of judgment through selection and montage. Projects, especially those from early in Lerup’s tenure, seemed ad hoc and surreal. Their authors seem to take pleasure in the absurd juxtapositions quickly evident in the assembly of a few disparate snapshots. In these projects an elegant and economical form of critical observation substitutes for brute force as a critique of the contemporary American city embodied by Houston.

Such later projects as the monumental apartment buildings produced by Clover Lee’s studios and the regionally-scaled net-like devices to control coastal erosion produced in Chris Hight and Michael Robinson’s studios are futuristic and dreamy. Rather than negotiating with Houston’s existing diffuse urban spaces, they propose a drastic alternative. This is not to say these projects are not compelling and formally beautiful, but after living in Houston for some time I have changed my opinion about what ought to be done with this place. As Lerup wrote regarding Houston in one of my favorite essays, “Stim & Dross” (reprinted in this volume), “the European metropolis without crowds has skipped westward while radically transforming itself in a new creature, leaner, meaner and more superficial, but harder to catch, at once simpler and less bearable to live in” (244).

Houston has its own idiosyncratic and peculiar means of ordering itself and the way we live in it. It floods our houses, insists that we drive vast distances to go to work or to shop, leaves us a sweaty mess when we try to play golf or sunbathe, and provides stinging jellyfish to enliven our swim sessions in the brown waters of nearby Galveston. It bores a lot of us and makes others mad at its wasted potential. It also makes us hopeful when we realize the ease at which we can live here in super-cute houses that cost almost nothing, drive a new car we can afford because rent is cheap, eat delicious meals, and feast on a lively art scene.

June Arnold wrote in her novel Baby Houston, “Houston is a mess.” But the mess makes it real. It requires that we make internal adjustments; the most difficult kind since you have to admit a lack of control, to accommodate the situation rather than the other way around. Lerup captures this idea in his defense of a studio project: “…there is a kind of Buddhist proposition here. If you fall in the river and you’re a Buddhist, you don’t swim upstream you swim downstream. Then you have a chance to veer off and do something kind of nice by yourself on the shore.” Perhaps the only thing constant about Houston is the mess. But if you play your cards right, you can veer off and do as you please while everything else swirls slightly out of control.

In this relaxed, spontaneous method, there are the remnants of 1960s counterculture (the years when Lerup came of age); the détournement in an uneasy co-existence with capitalism, and mind-altering experiences of psychedelic subculture without the LSD. Such overwhelming disorder foregrounds the importance of navigating in the present. It makes the past seem pointless because it offers only a history of the same problems, and suggests the future might not appear because it is so much work to alter the course of destiny.

The projects that I liked best were those that did this. They make us look anew at this place, disturbing and banal, but so easy and comfortable that we don’t always think about it. Lee Moreau’s 1999 thesis directed by Albert Pope, “Houston, Inside Slowly,” consists of photographs collected during a suburban walkabout, depicting a city which Stephen Fox observed “has so little need of architects and what they have to offer” because of its instinctive “populist inclinations toward truculent independence and impulsive expediency” (31).

“Sweeny, Texas” was a graduate option studio led by Keith Krumweide in 2000 to produce a masterplan for this little town in Brazoria County. One scheme, “Flexible Sweeny,” presents a fantastic image of snowbirds congregating along the banks of the San Bernard River amid a large collection of adult tricycles with a collaged scan of Henri Rousseau’s “Combat du tigre” replacing most of scenery.

Brett Linden’s 2004 thesis directed by Nana Last, “As Found: Space—Light—Situation,” is a series of haunting montages created from shots of empty corridors and parking garages of low-budget office buildings that cause you to pause to try to figure out what it is that is that’s gone off-kilter. Brian Wesley Heiss’s “Reactor,” a graduate studio project from 1997 lead by Spencer Parsons and Gordon Wittenberg, proposes a gym clad with fifty-three articulated panels powered by kinetic energy from the exercise equipment. The more effort you expend the more disordered the building becomes.

Last, Larry Albert’s 1999 thesis, also directed by Albert Pope, “Houston Wet,” depicts simultaneously the futile efforts to save the sinking Brownwood subdivision and the efforts of NASA engineers a few miles south in Clear Lake to devise a way to get an American flag on the Apollo 11 flight to the Moon. Albert suggests Houston is a “war zone and laboratory” where people spend considerable energy to devise methods to temper existing environmental factors that are at once conceptually simple but technically complex and prone to failure. Albert’s cheeky commentary also serves as a cautionary tale for the increasingly technologically dependent and large-scaled projects coming out of the program at the end of Lerup’s tenure.

With the arrival of a new dean it will be interesting to see how the curriculum changes. Will Lerup’s wit be superseded by something more earnest; perhaps studios where every student is expected to design a building? Or will a truce be established? In any case, Everything Must Move presents an interesting fifteen years. Here’s to the next decade-and-a-half.

Everything Must Move
Architecture At Rice 44, 2009
Luke Bulman and Jessica Young, editors

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