heat and light thematised in the modern architecture of houston

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Heat and light thematised in themodern architecture of Houston

Michelangelo Sabatino Gerald D. Hines College of Architecture, University

of Houston, 122 College of Architecture Bldg,

Houston, Texas, TX 77204-4000, USA

Mid-twentieth-century modern architecture in Houston thematised responsiveness to the

natural phenomena of heat and light despite the fact that Houston’s most celebrated

modern buildings were designed to be completely reliant on central air-conditioning. An

examination of Houston buildings constructed from the late 1940s through the 1960s

demonstrates the ways in which modern architects sought to privilege the architectural rec-

ognition of regional climatic difference while also employing modern technology to allevi-

ate local climatic extremes of heat and humidity. The spectacular modern buildings that

represent this era in Houston raise crucial questions: How did architects reconcile the doc-

trine of climatic responsiveness to the equally modern desire for maximum transparency?

What proved more compelling: responsiveness to local circumstance or the imperatives of

modern structural and mechanical engineering? Did modern architects perceive that there

might be contradictions between responsiveness to climate and other aspects of modern

architectural identity, such as transparency? Because concern about the roles of building

design and construction in the responsible use of natural resources is current at the turn

of the twenty-first century, it is pertinent to examine the ways modern architects in a

particular climatic setting negotiated the issue of climatic responsiveness as modern

architecture became the dominant practice.

Introduction

Twentieth-century modern architecture was ident-

ified with an exploration of innovative building

materials and rationalised planning and construc-

tion practices. Walls of floor-to-ceiling plate glass

facilitated the internal absorption of daylight as

well as the nocturnal diffusion of interior electric

light while also playing a symbolic role in identifying

modern architecture as dramatically transparent,

poetically transcending the natural limits historically

addressed by thermal and structural mass.1 Some

architects working within the cultural, political and

economic realities that prevailed in the United

States during the post-war period strenuously ques-

tioned the universalising claims of the modern

movement by investigating regional building prac-

tices that registered material and climatic differ-

ence.2

Responding to the heat and humidity of Hous-

ton’s Gulf Coast climate and its abundant natural

sunlight affected the design of residential, commer-

cial and civic buildings in Houston from the post-war

1940s through the 1960s. Rather than treat sunlight

in exclusively functional terms as natural illumination

(or treat transparency in metaphysical terms as

poetic revelation), modern architects practising on

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the subtropical, sun- and heat-prone Gulf coast of

Texas explored such building types as the courtyard

house and incorporated such architectural elements

as sunshades, canopies and solar screens to exploit

both the functional and poetic qualities of daylight

while guarding against the thermal disadvantage

of overexposure to sunlight, heat and humidity.

Yet these buildings were almost all equipped with

central air-conditioning. Combining architectural

elements especially designed for specific climatic

conditions with mechanical devices that eliminated

the need for accommodation of and adaptation to

extremes produced a distinctive modern architec-

ture in Houston that thematised climatic responsive-

ness without sacrificing the benefits of modern

mechanical engineering.

Thematising climatic responsiveness was con-

nected to a broader discourse on the significance

of regionalism in mid-twentieth-century US archi-

tecture. Regionalism was understood by architects

and critics contributing to this discourse, some

writing from Texas, to register difference while still

conforming to mainstream design and construction

practices.3 For many of these commentators,

regionalism was interpreted as a representation of

‘individuality’ in conflict with (but not necessarily

rejection of) the dominant economy of capitalist

production. Negotiating climatic responsiveness in

fully equipped and serviced buildings was one way

to assert, as Paul Rudolph wrote in 1957 in an

essay called ‘Regionalism in Architecture’, that

‘true regionalism comes primarily through form

rather than use of materials.’4 The ambivalence

with which Rudolph advanced regionalist design as

a formal rather than material practice suggests

that, even for its advocates, regionalism seemed

tenuous and problematic. Examining the architec-

tural evolution of Houston buildings that addressed

the amelioration of heat and light thematically puts

into perspective the cyclical waxing and waning of

this trend.

Houston: climate and cultural landscape

During the 1940s Houston surpassed New Orleans

to become the most populous US city along the

Gulf of Mexico and in the American South. By

1960 it ranked as the seventh largest city in the

US, sixth by 1970, fifth by 1980 and fourth since

1990.5 An expansionary economy grounded in oil,

natural gas and petrochemical production, refining,

and distribution fuelled Houston’s property and con-

struction economy.6 As modern architecture

became the dominant type of architectural practice

during the post-war period, Houston presented

ample opportunities for new construction. Spread-

ing relentlessly across the flat plain belting the

coast of the Gulf of Mexico, Houston is character-

ised by long, sultry summers. Because the centre

of Houston lies only fifty miles from the Gulf coast,

area temperatures are not extreme by US standards

(93 degrees Fahrenheit is the average July daytime

high), but humidity levels that vary daily between

93 percent and 55 percent and a dew point of 72

degrees Fahrenheit produce conditions of extreme

humidity that suffuse the air with ambient heat.7

Unlike a desert climate, in which temperatures

may be much higher but in which the daily vari-

ations between warmest and coolest are more

extreme, and humidity levels and the dew point

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Heat and light thematised in the

modern architecture of Houston

Michelangelo Sabatino

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much lower, Houston’s climate does not cease to be

steamy and oppressive once the sun goes down.

Proximity to the Gulf also entails intermittent but

prodigious thunderstorms, contributing to the

humid subtropical haze in which the Texas coastal

region typically stews from late May until early

October.

Historically, architecture in Houston accommo-

dated climate. In the nineteenth century, standard

vernacular building types (eg, the one-storey,

centre-passage cottage; the two-storey, three-bay,

side-passage Southern townhouse; and such later

types as the shotgun cottage and L- and T-plan cot-

tages) were organised internally to promote venti-

lation and shade.8 Wood houses were raised

above grade on brick piers. Bedrooms were

located for maximum access to the prevailing,

southeast Gulf breeze. In Houston, porches, veran-

das and galleries provided shaded, roofed, open-air

living spaces such as those found in the oldest

surviving building in Houston, the Kellum-Noble

House (1847) (Fig. 1a-b).9 Louvered exterior

shutters and panels of diagonal wood latticework

modulated light and air penetration while screening

out visual penetration. The introduction of hinged

transoms above doors, retractable fabric awnings

for installation above windows, insect screening

for doors, windows, and porches, and eventually

electrical oscillating fans, ceiling fans and attic

fans during the first third of the twentieth century

ameliorated some of the worst consequences

of living in a chronically hot, humid climate. Non-

residential buildings incorporated some of these

arrangements and devices. Central pavements

were shaded by fixed, shed-roofed canopies while

fabric awnings were installed above upper-floor

windows.

The construction of tall buildings in Houston in

the first decade of the twentieth century challenged

accepted practices, as storey upon storey of brick-

faced walls absorbed sunlight and re-radiated its

heat into offices, hotel rooms and flats, not all of

which could be located for advantageous exposure

to the prevailing breeze (which did not always

prevail). As in other US cities, L-, U- and E-shaped

floor plates sought to facilitate light and air trans-

mission.10

John F. Staub, who began his practice in 1923,

was the first Houston architect to move beyond

the simple accommodation of climate creatively to

distort the historical models he typically deployed

in order to register the effects of climate on

shaping habitable dwelling space in Houston.11

Staub stretched houses out in one- to one-and-a-

half room deep configurations and oriented rooms

for the best exposure, even if this meant that

living and dining rooms faced the back yard and

the kitchen faced the street. In 1937, Staub pro-

duced his first modern design, the Robert

D. Straus House (Fig. 2).12 His client was the distribu-

tor for Carrier air-conditioning equipment in

Houston. The street front of the house was a

nearly windowless facade; its principal aperture

was a large fixed panel of translucent glass block.

In a design approach repeated frequently in the

first generation of Houston buildings to be built

with central air-conditioning incorporating humidity

control, the exterior of the house was hermetic.13 Its

lack of windows advertised its modern technological

liberation from climatic responsiveness.

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706




Figure 1a. Kellum-

Noble House, 1847,

Francis Mc Hugh builder

(photograph by

Michelangelo

Sabatino).

Figure 1b. Kellum-

Noble House, 1847,

Francis Mc Hugh builder

(measured and drawn,

F. Brown, Historic

American Building

Survey).

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Modern conundrum: nature versus

mechanisation

In 1949 the American Institute of Architects

launched a national design awards programme.

Houston buildings were selected for recognition in

1949 and 1950. St Rose of Lima Catholic School

(1948; Award of Merit, 1949) by Donald Barthelme

& Associates and Foley’s department store (1947;

Award of Merit, 1950) by Kenneth Franzheim exem-

plified the diametrically opposed ways Houston

architects of the early post-war period dealt archi-

tecturally with climatic exigency. Barthelme, one of

Houston’s first modern architects, ingeniously

shaped the classroom wing at St Rose of Lima

(which was not air-conditioned) to maximise

natural illumination with a long east wall of oper-

able glass windows sheltered against the morning

sun by a broad canopy (Fig. 3).14 The school’s long

west wall was fitted with louvered vent panels

instead of glass windows. As was true of other

Texan architects who built their practices on

school design in the 1940s and 1950s,

Barthelme sought ingenious ways to facilitate

natural illumination and passive cooling in build-

ings that had to be built quickly and for extre-

mely low budgets.15 Climatic responsiveness in

the late 1940s and early 1950s was as much a

matter of material as of form; Texan architects

asserted the performative superiority of

modern design because they were prepared to

work with the climate rather than merely

accommodate it.

In contrast, Foley’s continued the trend visible

in Staub’s Straus House. Kenneth Franzheim

made the elimination of all but ground-floor

display windows at Foley’s a triumphant symbol of

its modern reliance on electrical illumination and

all-year air-conditioning (Fig. 4).16 The modernist

doctrine of climatic responsiveness as a legitimate

generator of form confronted the modernist doc-

trine of application of state-of-the-art industrial

technologies with no clear direction for spatially

resolving differences between the two positions.

The Austin and Dallas architect Harwell Hamilton

Harris, director of the school of architecture at the

University of Texas at Austin from 1951 to 1955,

called for a ‘regionalism of liberation’ in an

address delivered in 1954 that had considerable

influence on later twentieth-century regionalist

debates.17 Yet rather than clarifying what the archi-

tectural implications for a regionalism of liberation

might be, Harris concluded his talk by asserting

that ‘The development of the American continent,

the most important occurrence of its kind in the

nineteenth century, was accomplished by means of

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Figure 2. Robert

D. Straus House,

Houston, 1937, John

F. Staub (photograph by

Elwood M. Payne, River

Oaks Magazine, 4

[March, 1940], p. 14.)

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technology. . ..’18 Without a compelling theory of

regionalism that could synthesise the thesis of the

imperative of industrialisation with the antithesis

of the imperative of climatic responsiveness,

modern architects faced a conundrum. The English

critic Colin Rowe, who taught at the University of

Texas from 1954 to 1956 and at the University of

Houston from 1956 to 1957, observed in an essay

written in 1956–1957 that the contradictory pos-

itions he discerned in current US architecture

stemmed from the ‘dilemma which can result from

advocating a dual doctrine and failing to recognize

its duality.’19

A pair of modern Houston houses from the early

1950s explored ways to circumvent this conundrum.

The architect Lars Bang designed the Bendit House

of 1952 by appropriating Southern Californian prac-

tices (Fig. 5).20 The three-bedroom, three-bath-

room, flat-roofed house is compact but seems

quite spacious because Bang used floor-to-ceiling

sliding glass panels to open bedrooms and the com-

bined living-dining-kitchen space to east-facing

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Figure 3. St Rose of

Lima Catholic Church

and School, Houston,

1948, Donald

Barthelme & Associates

(photograph by Photo

Associates,

Architectural Forum, 92

[June, 1950], p. 104.

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walled courtyards and a south-facing rear terrace.

Skylights and garden courts bring light and greenery

into the house. The flat roof plate has overhangs to

shade glass walls on the east and south. The interior

of the house feels like a sheltered enclosure that is

continuous with, rather than closed off from, the

house’s flat, suburban plot. Instead of air condition-

ing, Bang inserted an even more luxurious Southern

Californian feature: an architecturally integrated

swimming pool. In its interior openness, informality

and Neutra-like spatial extension along brick wall

planes, the Bendit House embraced its subtropical

setting. Yet, Bang’s optimism notwithstanding,

Houston is not Santa Monica. Sliding screen doors

indicate that the seductive erasure of distinction

between indoors and outdoors was not practicable

in Houston, where mosquitoes and cockroaches

complement the steamy climate to deflate such

romantic modernist notions.

In contrast, a much larger modern house that the

New York architect Philip Johnson designed for the

French emigres and collectors, Dominique and

John de Menil (1948–51), appropriated climatically

ameliorative elements to code the house as climati-

cally responsive, although it was built with central

air-conditioning (Fig. 6a-b).21 Johnson incorporated

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Figure 4. Foley’s

Department Store,

Houston, 1947,

Kenneth Franzheim

(photograph by Jim

Parsons).

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a walled garden courtyard in the house as a

memento of the patio of a house in Caracas that

his clients had previously occupied.22 Transoms or

louvered panels above doors gave the house,

which was designed according to Miesian practices,

a distinct Southern accent. To enhance the house’s

crisp linearity, the flat roof did not overhang the

planar walls, even though the south-facing rear

wall was all glass. Since central air-conditioning

could not prevent the fading and cracking that pro-

longed exposure to intense sunlight can cause, the

clients had to have the Houston architect Howard

Barnstone install retractable canopies above south-

facing window walls and a tall canopy above the

walled courtyard.

Yet despite its problematic confrontation with

climate, the Menil House forecast the trend archi-

tects would pursue in accommodating Houston

modern buildings to the city’s hot, humid, sunny

(and rainy) climate. Climatic responsiveness could

be treated as a design theme without compromising

the superior level of comfort that only central air

conditioning, with its humidity control, could

deliver. Photographs that the New Orleans photo-

grapher Clarence John Laughlin made of the

house in 1957 exploit the perceptual sensation of

immediacy/distance visitors are apt to experience

in the living room, suspended in air-conditioned

comfort between the tropical courtyard and a lush

rear lawn, with art from the Menil’s collection and

their eclectic furniture enhancing the dream-like

reverie this sensation can induce.23

In Houston, this mildly hallucinatory experience

came to be associated with the flat-roofed, glass-

walled, Miesian courtyard houses produced by

Cowell & Neuhaus, Bolton & Barnstone, Burdette

Keeland, Neuhaus & Taylor, Kenneth E. Bentsen

and Anderson Todd in the 1950s and 1960s.24

Night views by the photographers Ulric Meisel,

Frank Lotz Miller and Fred Winchell, with the

interiors of the houses brilliantly lit, became an

icon of Houston modernity in the 1950s because

they performed the theme of modern transparency

so spectacularly.25 Central air-conditioning facili-

tated modernist transparency in Houston even as it

altered both time-honoured methods of climatic

accommodation and the modernist enthusiasm for

inventing new spaces and techniques of climatic

amelioration.26

In Houston, universal air-conditioning was associ-

ated with the 1960s rather than the 1950s, although

during the course of the 1950s decade air-condition-

ing became standard equipment in more and more

Houston building types.27 Two university building

groups demonstrate that passive climatic responsive-

ness was still understood to be relevant to modern

architecture in producing experiences of place iden-

tity. Philip Johnson’s campus master plan (1956–57)

710




Figure 5. Bendit House,

Houston, 1952, Lars

Bang (photograph by

Ben Hill).

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Figure 6a. Dominique

and John de Menil

House, Philip Johnson,

Houston, 1948–51

(photograph by

Michelangelo

Sabatino).

Figure 6b. Dominique

and John de Menil

House, Philip Johnson,

Houston, 1948–51

(plan).

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and first three buildings (1957–59) for the University

of St Thomas, a Roman Catholic institution, organ-

ised two-storey buildings designed according to

Miesian practices along two-storey, canopied steel

walkways that framed garden courts and, as the

system was expanded in the 1960s, the university’s

central lawn (Fig. 7).28 Although university buildings

were air-conditioned, Johnson used the shade- and

breeze-enhancing walkways to evoke associations

with monastic cloisters and the columned walkways

of Thomas Jefferson’s Academical Village of the

University of Virginia.

At Rice University, the Houston architects George

Pierce-Abel B. Pierce designed the Earth Sciences

Group (Biological and Geological Laboratories,

Space Science and Technology Building), and a

companion, the Hamman Hall auditorium (1956–

58), as analogues of the university’s original build-

ings, designed in the 1910s by the Boston archi-

tects Cram, Goodhue & Ferguson (Fig. 8).29 As at

St Thomas, Pierce-Pierce’s three-storey laboratory

buildings and Hamman Hall were centrally air-con-

ditioned. But the use of south-facing open-air

terrace decks in place of interior hallways on the

laboratory buildings and the provision of canopied

walkways and porticoes in all three buildings para-

phrased the arcaded passageways of Cram,

Goodhue & Ferguson’s buildings, although Pierce-

Pierce’s buildings were resolutely modern in their

design, construction and servicing. Exposure to

heat, humidity and occasional tropical thunder-

storms in open-air passageways was tolerable as

long as classrooms, laboratories, offices and assem-

bly spaces were air-conditioned.

Tall buildings and regionalisation

Tall buildings in mid-century Houston presented

some of the most dramatic examples of climatic the-

matisation. The first modern high-rise office building

in Houston, the twenty-one-storey Melrose Building

(1949–52) by Lloyd & Morgan of Houston, featured

horizontal bands of windows recessed beneath tiers

of projecting concrete trays (Fig. 9).30 Yet sun-

shading as a modernist theme was challenged by

the allure of technologically fabricated curtain

walls. Skidmore, Owings & Merrill’s first Houston

building, the eighteen-storey Medical Towers (1956,

with Golemon & Rolfe), featured a curtain wall that

in-filled a grid of closely spaced aluminium mullions

with turquoise porcelain enamel spandrel panels

and punched square windows, reserving the sunsc-

reen grill for the parking garage occupying the

podium above which the office slab rose (Fig. 10).31

Even more dramatic in its rejection of the architec-

tural theme of climatic amelioration was the six-

storey Gibraltar Building (1959, Greacen & Brogniez

with J. V. Neuhaus III).32 Its street elevations were

the first in Houston to be faced entirely in grey,

712




Figure 7. University of

St Thomas, Houston,

Philip Johnson, 1956–

59 (phototograph by

Frank White).

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insulated solar glass (Fig. 11). When lit at night, the

Gibraltar Building externalised interiors designed by

the Knoll Design Group.

Ludwig Mies van der Rohe adhered to this

approach when he designed the first phase of a

two-stage expansion of the Museum of Fine Arts,

Houston (1954–58: Fig. 12).33 Mies’s Cullinan Hall

addition to the 1920s’ museum building was

essentially a giant, north-facing window that, as

photographed by Hedrich-Blessing at the time of

its dedication, externalised the performances of

modernity that prevailed when the curators

Jermayne MacAgy and James Johnson Sweeney

installed breathtaking exhibitions in Mies’s awesome

space.34 Modern climate control technology

complemented modern curtain wall technology,

making it feasible to deal with excessive daylight

transmission and glare through the ephemeral

media of interior blinds and draperies. As one of

Houston’s foremost modern architects, Howard

Barnstone, explained to the critic and historian

Esther McCoy in 1963:

The regionalism or vernacular buildings in Texas

were all designed to catch the breeze in the

summer with wide-open porches and for small,

easy-to-heat interiors during the short winter

months. Today with the climate-controlled

interiors and our continued desire to wear suit

jackets no matter what the weather, none of

this makes much sense. I find nothing immoral

in a complete change of architecture once you

control the interior temperature efficiently.35

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Figure 8. Keith-Wiess

Geological Laboratory

(far left), Rice University,

Houston, 1958, George

Pierce-Abel B. Pierce;

M. D. Anderson

Biological Laboratories

(right) (photograph by

Stephen Fox).

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It was under the architectural regime of Mies that

the thematisation of climatic accommodation

achieved its most expressive form in Houston

during the 1960s.36 Gordon Bunshaft of the

New York office of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill

designed the thirty two-storey First City National

Bank Building (1958–61) as a glass tower shaded

by what SOM called an ‘exo-skeleton’, achieved by

deeply insetting the glass curtain wall within the

marble-clad steel structural frame.37 Three blocks

to the west, Edward Charles Bassett of the

San Francisco office of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill

produced an even more authoritative and refined

rendition of the glass tower shaded by its structural

steel exo-skeleton, the thirty three-storey Tenneco

Building (1958–63) (Fig. 13a-b).38 Here the myth

of heat and light as an hallucinatory experience

that could be savoured (rather than being oppres-

sive and annihilating) was performed in a high-rise

office building that adhered rigorously to the

universal imperatives of modern engineering while

deferring architecturally to the particularities of

climate. An Architectural Forum article on the

Tenneco Building was quick to point out that: ‘For

architects Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, the American

southwest has long been a proving ground for

their favourite solution to sun control: a structural

cage behind which glass walls are recessed so the

overhanging floor slabs become sunshades—and

provide continuous galleries for window washers’.39

During the day, the steel frame (which, as Colin

Rowe observed in an essay published in 1956,

‘has. . .become the architecture’)40 was highlighted

while the glass curtain wall receded in dark

shadow, a perception reversed at night when the

internally illuminated floors of office space glowed

between the backlit external grid. The forty four-

storey Humble Building (1958–63) by Welton

Becket & Associates of Los Angeles, the tallest build-

ing constructed in Houston during the 1960s, was

also a glass tower ‘regionalised’ with continuous

tiers of horizontal sunshade canopies banding the

tower and cantilevered a distance of 7 feet from

forty one of the building’s forty four floors, not

unlike the broad-brimmed Stetson hats that Texan

ranchers and businessmen wore to shield them

from ambient heat and light (figs. 14a–b, 15).41

Like the First City National Bank Building and

714




Figure 9. Melrose

Building, Houston,

Lloyd & Morgan, 1949–

52 (photographer

unknown).

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Mies’s Cullinan Hall, the Humble Building was white

in colouration, figuring dramatically against the

intense blue of Houston’s heat-saturated summer

skies in a way that conveyed an impression of

serene coolness, a perceptual trope for its state of

total air-conditioning. In contrast to the flat,

machined curtain walls of the Medical Towers Build-

ing and the Gibraltar Building, sun-shading devices

imbued these towers with a sense of external volu-

metric amplitude.

The impact of these three towers can be seen in

the work of Houston architects. The fifteen-storey

Willowick Apartments (1963) by Neuhaus & Taylor,

the twenty five-storey American General Building

(1965) by Lloyd, Morgan & Jones, the twelve-

storey Southwestern Bell Telephone Company Build-

ing (1965) by George Pierce-Abel B. Pierce and

Wilson, Morris, Crain & Anderson, the nine-storey

3616 Richmond Building (1966) by Caudill Rowlett

Scott and the seven-storey Harris County Family

Law Center (1969) by Wilson, Morris, Crain &

Anderson were among the most architecturally dis-

tinguished multi-storey buildings to materialise the

heat and light theme with glass curtain walls

shaded by projecting floor plates or exo-skeletons,

identifying them with the Houston form of regiona-

lised modernism.42

Yet the production of impressive works of archi-

tecture was no guarantee of consensus on what

constituted a regionally responsive modern architec-

ture in Houston. The slab-shaped, ten-storey Great

Southern Life Insurance Company Building (1965)

by the New York office of Skidmore, Owings &

Merrill had windows only in its short dimension,

denying access to daylight to most of those who

worked in the building.43 That the long walls of

the building (which faced east-west) were used as

plenums for the air-conditioning system was no

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Figure 10. Medical

Towers Building,

Houston, 1956,

Golemon & Rolfe with

Skidmore, Owings &

Merrill (photograph by

Paul Dorsey, Progressive

Architecture, 38 [June,

1957], p. 192).

Figure 11. Gibraltar

Building, 1959,

Greacen & Brogniez

and J. V. Neuhaus, III,

Houston (photographer

unknown).

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compensation for the conditions under which all but

the top executives had to work. Houston’s most

celebrated building of the 1960s, the Astrodome

sports arena of 1965, although designed by Lloyd,

Morgan & Jones and Wilson, Morris, Crain & Ander-

son, revelled in the magnitude of its consumption of

energy resources. It was the first professional foot-

ball and baseball stadium to be totally enclosed

and air-conditioned.44

In modern Houston architecture of the 1950s and

1960s, architects—and their clients—welcomed

central air-conditioning as an unmitigated blessing.

Central air-conditioning not only cooled Houston’s

interminable summers, it also evaporated humidity

and greatly diminished such chronic nuisances as

dust accumulation, mildew infestation and the

encroachment of pesky insects. Air-conditioning

made it feasible to construct buildings featuring

extensive glazing rather than force architects

designing buildings in Houston to work through

such contradictions as achieving maximum transpar-

ency while also ensuring thermal comfort. Rain or

shine, hot or hotter, inside was always perfect

thanks to modern technology.

Once coping with heat and humidity was no

longer a critical concern, architects in Houston

could still address the modern doctrine of climatic

responsiveness symbolically. Air-conditioned build-

ings with sealed glazing systems performed regional

responsiveness through the application of shading

devices that did cut down on heat gain and interior

glare, even if the buildings they protected no longer

depended on such devices to be made habitable. In

the mid-1960s US architectural practice began to

shift toward buildings with thick, solidly walled

masonry exteriors rather than thin glass mem-

branes. In these buildings too, modern mechanical

engineering rather than ingenious climatically

responsive design was what made them comforta-

bly habitable.

After the mid-1960s, developers aggressively

entered Houston’s office building market. In con-

trast to the architectural patterns associated with

the First City, Tenneco, Humble, American

General or even the nearly windowless Great

Southern buildings, all designed and built for the

corporations that occupied them, developers intro-

duced new formulae for assigning value and calcu-

lating profits in buildings in which they leased

space to corporate tenants. To sacrifice income-

producing space by recessing curtain walls behind

the exterior face of a building was unthinkable,

however desirable the environmental conse-

quences or architectural imagery might be. When

Gerald D. Hines Interests constructed its first

central Houston building, the fifty-storey One

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Figure 12. Cullinan

Hall, The Museum of

Fine Arts, Houston,

1958, Ludwig Mies van

der Rohe and Staub,

Rather & Howze

(photograph by

Hedrich-Blessing).

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Shell Plaza of 1971 by the Chicago office of Skid-

more, Owings & Merrill, the designer Bruce

Graham’s expressive treatment of his partner

Fazlur Khan’s framed tube structural system

meant that the structural carapace of the building

was thick and solid rather than thin and tenuous,

and that vertical window slots replaced horizontal

bands of curtain wall.45 Even after the Arab Oil

Embargo and energy crisis of 1973–1974 precipi-

tated a new wave of concern with energy-saving

practices, it was in such corporate-built complexes

as Caudill Rowlett Scott’s Shell Woodcreek Explora-

tion and Production Buildings of 1980 and Kevin

Roche, John Dinkeloo & Associates’ Conoco Build-

ing of 1985 that the issues of heat and light were

addressed architecturally in Houston, not in central

office towers, the best-known of which was Philip

Johnson and John Burgee’s all-glass Pennzoil Place

of 1976 built by Hines Interests.46

In examining Houston as a case study of proble-

matic issues in mid-twentieth-century modern

design, it is clear that patterns that prevailed in

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Figure 13a. Tenneco

Building, Houston,

Skidmore, Owings &

Merrill, 1958–63

(photograph by Ezra

Stoller).

Figure 13b. Tenneco

Building, Houston,

Skidmore, Owings &

Merrill, 1958–63 (detail

drawing).

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other Southern cities experiencing the construction

of striking modern buildings in the 1950s and

1960s—Dallas, San Antonio, Fort Worth, New

Orleans, Memphis, Sarasota and Miami to name

the most obvious—were operative there as well.47

What Houston’s experience demonstrates is that as

air-conditioning became pervasive, architects

moved from addressing problems of climatic

responsiveness in material terms—to use Paul

Rudolph’s distinction—to addressing them in

formal terms. The imperatives of modern structural

and mechanical engineering, Harwell Hamilton

Harris’s ‘means of technology’, exerted far greater

impact on Houston architects’ practices than did

the impulse to register regional difference architec-

turally. If architects working in Houston perceived

that there were contradictions between responding

to climate and responding to other aspects of

modern doctrine—what Rowe described as failure

to acknowledge the duality of modern architecture’s

dual doctrine—they did so with the confidence,

voiced by Barnstone, that once interior temperature

could be controlled mechanically, architects were at

liberty to change architecture.

718




Figure 14a. Humble

Building, Welton Becket

& Associates, Houston,

1958–63 (photograph

by Michelangelo

Sabatino).

Figure 14b. Humble

Building, Welton Becket

& Associates, Houston,

1958–63 (elevation

and section drawing).

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In his foreword to Barnstone’s book on the archi-

tecture of nineteenth-century Galveston, The Gal-

veston That Was of 1966, James Johnson Sweeney

linked the individualism-conformity binary to

regionalism: ‘Regionalism in art is one means

toward the protection of individualism against the

total encroachment of conformity. . .. Regionalism

can no longer be expected to dominate any

expression of contemporary art. But where it sur-

vives, dominated by the broader international disci-

pline, it can give vitality to our art, as individualism

can to our lives.’48 Rowe, nearly ten years earlier,

had recognised that in the discourses of modern

architecture in the US regionalism functioned as

the dialectical antithesis of the Miesian thesis.49

What modern architects achieved in Houston by

1960 was a locally resonant synthesis of these

tendencies. In historical perspective, what these

compelling buildings suggest is how regionalism

consistently surfaced in twentieth-century architec-

tural discourses to challenge dominant tendencies,

especially those associated with conformity to the

imperatives of modernisation and industrialisation

as materialised in structural and mechanical

engineering. Addressing the modernist doctrine of

climatic responsiveness symbolically deferred to

rather than transformed compliance with the

imperatives of industrialisation.

Regionalism might be sustained as a formal prac-

tice but its relevance as a material practice was

restricted not by the historical eclecticism that

Harris and Pickens decried but by such technological

advances as central air-conditioning. As escalating

social crises in the US during the second half of

the 1960s made the individualism-conformity

dilemma of the 1950s seem irrelevant, the synthesis

achieved in Houston’s architecture of heat and

light dissolved also. The energy crisis of the 1970s

renewed the relevance of climatic responsiveness

in American architectural discourse. But in the

1970s cycle responsiveness tended to be addressed

in technological terms. It was with the advent of

Postmodernism, which began to affect architecture

in Houston in 1980, that the individualist critique

of conformity resurfaced, not in the form of

regionalism but of ‘contextualism’, the author of

this discourse being Colin Rowe. Problematising

the architecture of heat and light in Houston

reveals the existence of discursive cycles in twenti-

eth-century architecture in which the antitheses

remain constant but the forms of argument and

strategies of persuasion differ.

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Figure 15. Stetson

Hats: San An and Lone

Star models.

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Acknowledgement

This essay is dedicated to my dear friend and col-

league Stephen Fox. Together we have endured

the challenges of excess heat and light in Houston.

Notes and references1. From this period, the architectural historian William

H. Jordy assessed what he understood to be the

contemporary, and by no means unproblematic,

legacy of the Modern Movement in his essay ‘The

Symbolic Essence of Modern European Architecture

of the Twenties and Its Continuing Influence’,

Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians,

22 (October, 1963), pp. 177–182. Jordy noted on

p. 178: ‘Nor is there anything especially functio-

nal. . .about extensive glazing, where only American

prodigality with appliances since World War II has

made such interiors completely livable, and this by

concealed equipment outside the realm of architec-

ture.’

2. Henry-Russell Hitchcock articulated the mid-century

line on cultural standardisation in his introduction to

the catalogue of the exhibition Ten Years of

Houston Architecture, organised by Howard Barn-

stone and Burdette Keeland at the Contemporary

Arts Museum in 1959: ‘But the post-war years,

since building production revived internationally

about 1948, have seen on this continent an almost

universal acceptance of certain common architectural

standards; while those same standards, partly Euro-

pean in origin, have also been widely accepted—

under increasing American influence—on other conti-

nents. From coast to coast, from Dallas to Toronto, in

most fields of building similar standards now rule.’

Hitchcock, ‘Introduction’, Ten Years of Houston

Architecture (Houston, Contemporary Arts Museum,

1959), unpaginated.

Buford L. Pickens, head of the department of archi-

tecture at Tulane University, made the case for ‘Con-

temporary Regional Architecture’ in the September,

1947, issue of the Journal of the American Institute

of Architects, volume 8, pp. 114–120. Pickens

sought to dissociate regionalism from historical eclec-

ticism, holding up the Chicago School-Prairie School

as a legitimate historical example and identifying

the architects of the San Francisco Bay area and the

Pacific Northwest as exemplars of ‘contemporary

regional unity’. Vincent B. Canizaro has published

many of the key documents on the topic of regional-

ism in Architectural Regionalism: Collected Writings

on Place, Identity, Modernity and Tradition, ed.,

Vincent B. Canizaro (New York, Princeton Architec-

tural Press, 2007). On regionalism in Texan architec-

ture see Peter C. Papademetriou, ‘Texas

Regionalism, 1925–1950: An Elusive Sensibility’,

Texas Architect, 31 (July-August, 1981), pp. 36–41.

Texas’ foremost regionalist proponent was the

Dallas, subsequently San Antonio, architect O’Neil

Ford: see Mary Carolyn Hollers George, O’Neil Ford,

Architect (College Station, Texas A&M University

Press, 1992) and David Dillon, The Architecture of

O’Neil Ford: Celebrating Place (Austin, University of

Texas Press, 1999).

3. Jackson Lears acutely analyses the anxieties he dis-

cerned in surveying critical commentaries of the post-

war period in his essay ‘A Matter of Taste: Corporate

Cultural Hegemony in a Mass-Consumption Society’,

in Recasting America: Culture and Politics in the Age

of Cold War, ed., Larry May (Chicago, University of

Chicago Press, 1989), pp. 38–57.

4. Paul Rudolph, ‘Regionalism in Modern Architecture’,

Perspecta, 4 (1957), p. 15.

5. Campbell Gibson, ‘Population of the 100 Largest Cities

and Other Urban Places in the United States: 1790 to

1990’, Population Division Working Paper No. 27,

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Population Division, US Bureau of the Census,

Washington, DC, June, 1998, http://www.census.

gov/population/www/documentation/twps0027/

twps0027.html (accessed 16.07.10.)

6. Joseph A. Pratt, The Growth of a Refining Region

(Greenwich, JAI Press, 1980).

7. ‘Climate of Houston’, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/

Climate_of_Houston (accessed 16.07.10.)

8. Ellen Beasley identifies an array of ninetenth-century

vernacular house types characteristic of the Gulf

coast of Texas in her Galveston Architecture Guide-

book (Houston, Rice University Press, 1996),

pp. 250–252.

9. On the Kellum-Noble House, see Dorothy Kendall

Bracken and Maureen Whorton Redway, Early Texas

Homes (Dallas, Southern Methodist University Press,

1956), pp. 162–163. Houston’s Forgotten Heritage:

Landscape, Houses, Interiors, 1824–1914 (Houston,

Rice University Press, 1991), by Dorothy Knox Howe

Houghton, Barrie M. Scardino, Sadie Gwin Blackburn

and Katherine S. Howe, discusses the spatial accom-

modations Houstonians made in the late-nineteenth

and early-twentieth centuries to ameliorate the city’s

trying climate. See Howe, ‘Interiors’, pp. 273 and

281, and Houghton, ‘Domestic Life’, pp. 307 and 316.

10. On the history of the skyscraper in Houston see ‘Scrap-

ing the Houston Sky, 1894–1976’ in, Barrie Scardino,

William F. Stern and Bruce Webb, eds, Ephemeral City:

‘Cite’ Looks at Houston (Austin, University of Texas

Press, 2003), pp.193–210.

11. Howard Barnstone, The Architecture of John F. Staub:

Houston and the South (Austin, University of Texas

Press, 1979), pp. 52–53.

12. Barnstone, op. cit., pp. 216–219; see also Stephen

Fox, The Country Houses of John F. Staub (College

Station, Texas A & M University Press, 2007), pp.

290–295; ‘Contemporary Classic’, River Oaks Maga-

zine, 5 (March, 1940), pp. 12–15; ‘Houses with Two

Bedrooms: House Fronts on Garden’, Architectural

Record, 87 (May, 1940), pp. 60–61.

13. From the mid-1930s through to the early 1950s,

buildings in Houston advertised their air-conditioned

status with either fixed glazing (such as panels of

glass block) or no windows at all. See the Pittsburgh

Plate Glass Company advertisement ‘Design for

Light and Beauty with PC Glass Blocks’, Pencil

Points, 19 (December, 1938), p. 27, illustrating the

centrally air-conditioned Medical Center Building in

Houston. The history of air-conditioning in Houston

has yet to be researched. As early as 1924, Houston’s

largest central hotel, the Rice Hotel, installed an air-

cooling system that involved passing air over frozen

coils then through ice water; ‘Patrons Praise Cooling

System at Rice Hotel’, Houston Post (1st June,

1924). The booklet, ‘Houston National Bank’, pub-

lished to mark the opening of the bank’s imposing

new neoclassical headquarters in central Houston in

1928, noted: ‘The building is provided with a

heating and cooling system.’ The Humble Building,

headquarters of the Humble Oil & Refining

Company, seems to have been the first Houston

building to be equipped with a modern central

air-conditioning system incorporating humidity

control in the early 1930s. See the Freon advertise-

ment, ‘ “Freon” Air-Conditioning Was Installed in

This Building After It Was Built’, Architectural

Record, 77 (May, 1935), p. 1. From the mid-1930s

until the mid-1950s, the Houston Chamber of

Commerce’s monthly magazine, Houston, published

an annual air-conditioning number.

14. In the 1950s and 1960s Houston and other Texan cities

were featured in illustrated articles in nationally circu-

lated magazines that focused, directly or indirectly,

on modern architecture. Examples include: ‘The Cool

Contents of Summer’, House and Garden, 118 (July,

1960), pp. 48–53; Russell Lynes, ‘Everything’s Up to

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http://www.census.gov/population/www/documentation/twps0027/twps0027.html



http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate_of_Houston

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate_of_Houston

Date in Texas. . .But Me’, Harper’s Magazine, 222 (May,

1961), pp. 38–42; ‘Building: The New Face of Texas’,

Fortune, 64 (October, 1961), pp. 128–135.

On St Rose of Lima School, see ‘Parochial School

Attains a Fine Warmth and Scale Through Careful

Adjustments’, Architectural Forum, 92 (June, 1950),

pp. 102–105; ‘St Rose of Lima’, Liturgical Arts, 20

(November, 1951), pp. 14–15; Hitchcock, op. cit.,

‘Introduction’, Ten Years of Houston Architecture,

unpaginated.

15. Stephen James, ‘Donald Barthelme: Architecture and

the Road to La Mancha’, Arris: Journal of the South-

east Chapter of the Society of Architectural Historians,

16 (2005), pp. 56–68 and Ben Koush, Donald

Barthelme: A Modernism Suitable for Everyday Use,

1939–1945 (Houston, Houston Mod, 2005). Gordon

Wittenberg addressed post-war architectural research

into passive natural ventilation and illumination at the

Texas Engineering Experiment Station under the direc-

tion of the architect William W. Caudill: Wittenberg,

‘Design for Climate: Adaptations to Meet the Texas

Extremes’, Texas Architect, 31 (September-October,

1981), p. 43. Caudill’s firm, Caudill Rowlett Scott,

along with Barthelme, Cocke, Bowman & York of Har-

lingen, Texas, and the ad-hoc partnership of O’Neil

Ford of San Antonio and Richard S. Colley of Corpus

Christi, were the Texan architectural firms most ident-

ified in the early 1950s with producing modern edu-

cational buildings that responded imaginatively to

climatic extremes. See ‘Three Approaches for Three

Texas Towns’, Architectural Record, 116 (November,

1954), pp. 195–201; ‘The Architect and His Commu-

nity—Cocke, Bowman & York: Harlingen, Texas’, Pro-

gressive Architecture, 36 (June, 1955), pp. 102–115;

‘Design Techniques 1953: Educational Buildings’, Pro-

gressive Architecture, 34 (January, 1953), p. 82.

16. ‘Department Store, Houston, Texas’, Progressive Archi-

tecture, 29 (July, 1948), pp.49–59; Bruce C. Webb,

‘The Incredible Shrinking Store: Foley’s Downtown’,

Cite 23: The Architecture and Design Review of

Houston (Autumn, 1989), pp. 10–11; Steven

R. Strom, ‘Modernism for the Masses: Foley’s Depart-

ment Store Gave Average Houstonians a Window on

the Wider Postwar World’, Cite 62: The Architecture

and Design Review of Houston (Autumn, 2004),

pp. 30–33.

17. Lisa Germany, Harwell Hamilton Harris (Austin, Univer-

sity of Texas Press, 1991), pp. 119–120. Kenneth

Frampton notes the importance of this speech in his

foreword to Germany’s book, p. xii.

18. Harwell Hamilton Harris, ‘Regionalism and Nationalism

in Architecture’, in Architectural Regionalism, op. cit.,

p. 64.

19. Colin Rowe, ‘Neo-“Classicism” and Modern Architec-

ture I’, in Rowe, The Mathematics of the Ideal Villa and

Other Essays (Cambridge, Mass., The MIT Press, 1976),

p. 131.

20. Mary Kraft, ‘Good Housekeeping’s 10 Best Small

Houses for 1954’, Good Housekeeping (January,

1954), pp. 63–66; Ben Koush, ‘Houston Lives the

Life: Modern Houses in the Suburbs, 1952–1962’

(MArch thesis, Rice University, 2002), pp. 141–143;

Gwendolyn Wright, USA: Modern Architectures in

History (London, Reaktion Books, 2008), p. 174.

21. ‘Art Collection and Home of the John de Menils in

Houston’s River Oaks’, Interiors, 123 (November,

1963), pp. 84–91; James Johnson Sweeney, ‘Collec-

tors’ House’, Vogue, 147 (1st April, 1966), pp. 184–

193; Frank D. Welch, Philip Johnson and Texas

(Austin, University of Texas Press, 2000), pp. 45–51;

Bruce C. Webb, ‘Living Modern in Mid-Century

Houston: Conserving the Menil House’, Journal of

Architectural Education, 62 (September, 2008),

pp. 11–19; Martin Filler, ‘The Real Menil’, Antiques,

174 (September, 2008), pp. 78–85.

22. Sweeney, ‘Collectors’ House’, op. cit., pp. 190, 199.

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23. These were the photographs illustrating the article

published in Interiors magazine six years later. In the

same issue of Interiors there was also an article on

Bolton & Barnstone’s Owsley House that remarked

on the hallucinatory experience of living in a glass

house in Houston: ‘Like everything else in Houston,

the house is totally air-conditioned, and the floor-to-

ceiling windows throughout the house provide a

kind of shimmering, green-gold hazy background.’

‘Steel and Glass House on Buffalo Bayou’, Interiors,

123 (November, 1963), p. 72.

24. Mark A. Hewitt, ‘Neoclassicism and Modern Architec-

ture, Houston Style, or The Domestication of Mies’,

Cite: The Architecture and Design Review of

Houston (Autumn, 1984), pp. 12–15. On the archi-

tects who pursued Miesian discipline, see Ben

Koush, Booming Houston and the Modern House:

Residential Architecture of Neuhaus & Taylor

(Houston, Houston Mod, 2006); Ben Koush, Hugo

V. Neuhaus, Jr.: Residential Architecture, 1948–

1966 (Houston, Houston Mod, 2007; Jason

A. Smith, High Style in the Suburbs: The Early

Modern Houses of William R. Jenkins, 1951–1958

(Houston, Houston Mod, 2009).

25. Examples of these night views are Bolton & Barnstone’s

Rosenthal House: ‘Houses on Difficult Sites: An Almost

Triangular Lot with Wide End to Street’, Architectural

Record, 116 (October, 1954), pp. 170–171; Neuhaus

& Taylor’s Frame House: ‘Background Lighting—

Instant Magic’, House and Garden, 120 (September,

1960), pp. 120-121; Johnson’s Menil House:

Sweeney, ‘Collectors’ House’, op. cit., pp. 184–185.

26. Lisa Heschong in Thermal Delight in Architecture

(Cambridge, Mass., The MIT Press, 1979), p. 20, uses

Houston as a humorous example of what she describes

as an engineered steady-state thermal environment: ‘It

is not at all uncommon in Houston or Los Angeles to

drive an air-conditioned car to an air-conditioned

office to work until it is time to go to dinner in an

air-conditioned restaurant before seeing a movie in

an air-conditioned theater. Of course there is the

brief inconvenience of a blast of hot air between the

car and the office.’

27. Raymond Arsenault observes that: ‘The so-called “air-

conditioning revolution”, then, was actually an evol-

ution—a long, slow, uneven process stretching over

seven decades. The air conditioner came to the

South in a series of waves, and only with the wave

of the 1950s was the region truly engulfed.’

Arsenault, ‘The End of the Long Hot Summer: The

Air Conditioner and Southern Culture’, The Journal

of Southern History, 50 (November, 1984), p. 613.

In Texas, it was the installation of central air-con-

ditioning in public elementary schools, which did

not become universal until the 1970s, that marked

the culmination of what Arsenault calls the ‘air-con-

ditioning revolution’.

28. On the University of St Thomas see ‘The University of St

Thomas’, Architectural Record, 122 (August, 1957),

pp. 138, 142–143; ‘First Units in the Fabric of a

Closed Campus’, Architectural Record, 126 (September,

1959), pp. 180–182; Welch, Philip Johnson and Texas,

op. cit., pp. 61–65; and Michelangelo Sabatino, ‘Crack-

ing the Egg: The Transformation of the University of St

Thomas Campus’, Cite 73: The Architecture and Design

Review of Houston (Winter, 2008), pp. 10–17.

29. On the Rice complex, see ‘Architecture 1959—First

Honor Awards: Laboratory Buildings for Rice Institute,

Houston, Designed by George Pierce-Abel B. Pierce,

Architects, Houston’, Texas Architect, 9 (November,

1959), p. 11. See also Stephen Fox, Houston—Archi-

tectural Guide (second edition; Houston, the American

Institute of Architects, Houston Chapter and the

Herring Press, 1999), p. 110.

30. ‘New Thinking on Sunshading and Floor Planning

by Architects of Houston’s Newest Office Building’,

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Architectural Forum, 99 (September, 1953), pp. 112–

113. In the case of the Melrose Building a limiting

condition is that it occupies only two corner plots

rather than an entire city block, as do the 1960s’

office buildings. Thus two of its sides were windowless

party walls and were treated architecturally like a

1920s’ skyscraper, with an inset light court into

which conventional sash windows faced.

31. ‘The Medical Towers’, Progressive Architecture, 38

(June, 1957), pp. 192–195; Kevin Alter, ‘SOM in

Houston’, Cite 40: The Architecture and Design

Review of Houston (Winter, 1997-1998), pp. 35–36.

32. ‘Financial Institution by Greacen and Brogniez,

Architects’, Arts and Architecture, 77 (August, 1960),

pp. 18–19.

33. ‘Museum Annex, Mies van der Rohe, Architect’, Arts

and Architecture, 76 (August, 1959), pp. 10–11;

‘Renovation by Devouring: Houston’s Classic

Museum is Enlarged by a New “Wing” of Considerably

Different Classic Cast’, Architectural Forum, 112

(January, 1960), pp. 128–129; Donnelley Erdman

and Peter C. Papademetriou, The Museums of Fine

Arts, Houston: Fifty Years of Growth, 1922–1972,

Architecture at Rice, 28 (Houston, School of Architec-

ture, Rice University, 1972); The Museum of Fine Arts,

Houston: An Architectural History, 1924–1986, Bulle-

tin of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, ed., Celeste

Marie Adams, 15 (1–2, 1992), pp. 64–97.

34. On the installations of Sweeney and MacAgy, see

James Johnson Sweeney, ‘Le Cullinan Hall de Mies

van der Rohe a Houston’, L’Oeil, 99 (March, 1963),

pp. 38–43; Dore Ashton, ‘Sweeney Revisited’, Studio

International 845, 166 (September, 1963), pp. 110–

113; ‘Two Ways of Looking at Art in Houston: I. The

Museum of Fine Arts; II. The Gallery of Fine Arts, Uni-

versity of St Thomas’, Interiors, 123 (November, 1963),

pp. 92–98; Lynn M. Herbert, ‘Seeing Was Believing:

Installations of Jermayne Mac Agy and James

Johnson Sweeney’, Cite 40: The Architecture and

Design Review of Houston (Winter, 1997-1998),

pp. 30–33.

35. Esther McCoy, ‘Young Architects in the United States:

1963’, Zodiac, 13 (1964), p. 167. Although Barnstone

adamantly rejected regionalism, he ‘regionalised’some

of the houses Bolton & Barnstone produced. The all-

glass Owsley House, published in Zodiac, was sur-

rounded by steel-framed double galleries, which

shade the glass walls; Esther McCoy likened it to a Mis-

sissippi River steamboat, p. 186. The firm’s Lindsay

House, a U-plan courtyard house, possessed both a

full-width rear screened porch and a street-facing

courtyard shielded by a decorative solar screen fabri-

cated of cast iron. ‘Record Houses of 1959: Garden

Affords Private Views’, Architectural Record, 125

(Mid-May, 1959), pp. 80–83.

36. Of the regime of Mies in Houston, Henry-Russell Hitch-

cock, in his 1959 Houston exhibition catalogue, wrote:

‘But, long before Mies worked in Houston, his influ-

ence was the strongest there and this is symptomatic

of the period nationally and even internationally.’

Two other critics drew attention to Mies’s impact on

the modern architecture of Houston. Reyner Banham

in his posthumously published review of Renzo

Piano’s Menil Collection museum asserted: ‘Locally

the echoes are of Mies van der Rohe, which may

sound strange, but one should remember that next

to Chicago itself, Houston must be the most Miesian

city in North America.’: Banham, ‘In the Neighborhood

of Art’, Art in America, 75 (June, 1987), p. 126. In

1988 Colin Rowe observed that during his time at

the University of Texas in the mid-1950s: ‘The so-

called International Style was an assault on American

values, the cult of Mies van der Rohe, very prevalent

down in Houston, was part of the same insidious

plot. . ..’: Rowe, ‘Texas and Mrs. Harris’, in As I Was

Saying: Recollections and Miscellaneous Essays,

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Volume 1: Texas—Pre-Texas—Cambridge, ed., Alex

Caragonne (Cambridge, Mass., The MIT Press, 1996),

p. 29.

37. ‘Tripartite Scheme for Bank, Office Building, and

Garage’, Architectural Record, 129 (April, 1961),

pp. 155–164; The Architecture of Skidmore, Owings

& Merrill, 1950–1962, Introduction by Henry-Russell

Hitchcock, text by Ernst Danz, translation by Ernst

van Haagen and Antje Pehnt (New York, Praeger Pub-

lishers, 1963), pp. 152–157; Carol Herselle Krinsky,

Gordon Bunshaft of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill

(New York and Cambridge, Architectural History Foun-

dation and The MIT Press, 1988), pp. 70–72; and Alter,

‘SOM in Houston’, op. cit., p. 36.

38. ‘In Texas The Glass Box Goes 3-D’, Architectural

Forum, 119 (September, 1963), pp. 124–131; Skid-

more, Owings & Merrill, The Architecture of Skidmore,

Owings & Merrill, 1963–1973, Introduction by Arthur

Drexler, text by Axel Menges (New York, Architectural

Book Publishing Company, 1974), pp. 124–127; Alter,

‘SOM in Houston’, op. cit., p. 36.

39. ‘In Texas The Glass Box Goes 3-D’, op. cit., p. 125.

40. C. Rowe, ‘Chicago Frame’, in Rowe, The Mathematics

of the Ideal Villa and Other Essays, op. cit., p. 89.

41. ‘Office Building by Welton Becket & Associates, Archi-

tects’, Arts and Architecture, 76 (November, 1959),

pp. 30–31; ‘Design Against Sun and Glare’, Architec-

tural Record, 136 (October, 1963), pp. 173–178;

William Dudley Hunt, Jr, Total Design: Architecture of

Welton Becket and Associates (New York, McGraw-

Hill Book Co., 1972), pp. 164–217.

42. On the American General Building, see Ben Koush,

‘The Modern Mr. Jones: A Legendary Houston Archi-

tect Shares His Tall Building Portfolio’, Cite 72: The

Architecture and Design Review of Houston

(Autumn, 2007), pp. 30–35 and Gerald Moorhead,

‘Highrise in the Right Place’, Texas Architect, 48 (July-

August, 1998), pp. 46–47. On the Harris County

Family Law Center, see ‘Harris County Family Law

Center’, Texas Architect, 21 (June, 1971), pp. 3–6.

43. ‘Textured Concrete and Air Ducts Mesh Like a Chinese

Puzzle’, Engineering News-Record, 173 (22nd October,

1964), pp. 30–32.

44. Peter C. Papademetriou and Peter G. Rowe, ‘The Pope

and the Judge’, Architectural Design, 40 (July, 1980),

pp. 345–349.

45. On One Shell Plaza, see Jonathan King and William

T. Cannady, ‘One Shell Plaza, Tallest Building West of

the Mississippi’, Architectural Design, 42 (January,

1972), pp. 22–23; ‘Supershell’, Architectural Forum,

136 (April, 1972), pp. 26–29; Skidmore, Owings &

Merrill, The Architecture of Skidmore, Owings &

Merrill, 1963–1973, pp. 174–177; Bruce Graham,

Bruce Graham of SOM, Introduction by Stanley Tiger-

man (New York, Rizzoli International Publications,

1989), pp. 52–55; Kevin Alter, ‘SOM in Houston’,

op. cit., p. 36; ‘Thirty-five Years of One Shell Plaza:

Interview with Joseph Colaco by William F. Stern and

Christof Spieler’, Cite 67: The Architecture and

Design Review of Houston (Summer, 2006), pp. 24–

27; Nicholas Adams, Skidmore, Owings & Merrill:

SOM Since 1936 (Milan, Electa, 2007), pp. 248–251.

46. On Shell Woodcreek, see ‘Engineered Daylighting for

an Energy Company in Houston’, Architectural

Record, 166 (Mid-August, 1979), pp. 102–105. On

the Conoco Building, see: Kevin Roche, Kevin Roche,

Introduction by Francesco Dal Co (Milan, Electra Edi-

trice, 1985), pp. 230–231; Nory Miller, ‘Kevin Roche,

John Dinkeloo & Associates: Conoco Inc., Petroleum

Headquarters, Houston, Texas; Designed: 1979; Com-

pleted 1985’, GA Documents, 14 (December, 1985),

pp. 48–61; Carleton Knight III, ‘Serene Pavilions Tra-

versing a Lake’, Architecture, 75 (December, 1986),

pp. 56–61; ‘Conoco, Inc., Petroleum Headquarters,

Houston, Texas, 1979–1984’, A + U Extra Edition, 8

(August, 1987), pp. 160–167; William F. Stern,

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‘Floating City’, Cite: The Architecture and Design

Review of Houston (Autumn, 1989), pp. 12–13.

On Pennzoil Place, see: Paul Goldberger, ‘Form and

Procession’, Architectural Forum, 138 (January-Febru-

ary 1973), pp. 37–39; Paul Goldberger, ‘High Design

at a Profit’, New York Times Magazine (14th November,

1976), pp. 76–79; William Marlin, ‘Pennzoil Place’,

Architectural Record, 160 (November, 1976),

pp. 101–110; Ada Louise Huxtable, Kicked a Building

Lately? (New York, Quadrangle/New York Times Book

Co., 1976), pp. 67–71; ‘Pennzoil Place, Houston’,

Journal of the American Institute of Architects, 66

(May, 1977), pp. 48–49; ‘Project Pennzoil’, Interior

Design, 48 (June, 1977), pp. 134–145; Peter Papade-

metriou, ‘Is “Wow!” Enough?’, Progressive Architec-

ture, 58 (August, 1977), pp. 66–72; Philip Johnson,

Johnson/Burgee: Architecture, text by Nory Miller,

photographs by Richard Payne (New York, Random

House, 1979), pp. 44–51; Paul Goldberger, The Sky-

scraper (New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 1982), pp. 124–

126; Frank D. Welch, Philip Johnson and Texas, op.

cit., pp. 165–177; Richard Payne, The Architecture

of Philip Johnson, essay by Hilary Lewis (Boston, Bul-

finch Press, 2002), pp. 174–179.

47. Architectural guidebooks to New Orleans, Dallas and

Miami published between 1959 and 1963 reflect the

regionalist orientation of modern architects in those

three cities during this period. See Samuel Wilson, Jr,

A Guide to Architecture of New Orleans—1699 to

1959 (New York, Reinhold Publishing Corporation,

1959); The Prairie’s Yield: Forces Shaping Dallas Archi-

tecture From 1840 to 1962, prepared by a Committee

of the Dallas Chapter of the American Institute of

Architects (New York, Reinhold Publishing Corpor-

ation, 1962); A Guide to the Architecture of Miami,

prepared by a Committee of the Florida South

Chapter of the American Institute of Architects

(New York, Reinhold Publishing Corporation, 1963).

Although Houston’s first architectural guidebook

reflects a very different perspective, the buildings it

illustrates from the 1960s indicate how strong this

modern regionalist point of view had recently been

in Houston. See Houston: An Architectural Guide,

ed., Peter C. Papademetriou (Houston, Houston

Chapter, American Institute of Architects, 1972).

48. James Johnson Sweeney, ‘Foreword’ to Howard Barn-

stone, The Galveston That Was, photographs by Henri

Cartier-Bresson and Ezra Stoller (Houston, Rice Univer-

sity Press and The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston,

1993; first published 1966), unpaginated.

49. Rowe, ‘Neo-“Classicism” and Modern Architecture I’,

op. cit., p. 132: ‘In the United States, regionalism, by

attempting to set up the spirit of the province as a

check to the spirit of the age, provided one character-

istically American solution. But this form of architec-

tural states’ rights could scarcely exist without the

complement of a central authority; and, as a version

of this central authority, the present neo-“Classical”

[i.e. Miesian] mutations must appear to any dispassio-

nate observer to be no less typically American.’

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