4 Cite Spring 1987

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Publicizes Top: Batfall-McFariana H O U H , 198S, Hod olio Planning & Problem Solving Machado, architect, south •lavallon. Abov: Waal alevallon, Badell-MeFarlan* Houaa. I -I). Jones & Associates Right: Slta plan, Badall-McFarlana Houaa Solicits Actual Field Service Facade Maintenance Company WORKS1 Preservation Products Rodolfo Machado's arrival at Rice University this year as the first Harry K. Weatherguard Preservation and Albert K. Smith Visiting Professor of Products, Inc. Architecture had been preceded by three 6^^^" unbuilt designs by Machado and his Advertising, associate Jorge Silvetti for projects in Public Relations, Texas, Architectural and urban design Graphics... schemes by the Boston-based firm of The third project, a large house near the works Machado and Silvetti Associates have Palestine, Texas, takes off on the grand been honored with numerous awards, style of a southern plantation house with exhibitions, and publications and their its long, narrow plan for ventilation and a work has figured prominently in the KF.V11MU * AMtlWA ' Ommn Anwica. Inc. 2990 Richmond. Suite 525 high, shading veranda porch. Machado OH. Mm l.,.|li!,ik I Houitoll TX 77092 , Texas 77098 postmodern preoccupation with the calls this project "a house in the country" <711>Me-2!01 523-6613 semantic dimension of architecture and rather than "a country house" to avoid WBI the debate over historicism versus inappropriate associations with now- invention. mythical 19th-century country manor living (the clients are daily commuters). The work of Machado-Silvetti deals most The house nonetheless evokes a manor- often with ethnocentric themes and esque scale and presence. The apparent urban typologies where an assured sense size, however, is neatly broken down into of the classical mechanics of architectural a set of smaller and distinct parts, setting form-making is used to pursue up a kind of dialectical relationship metaphorical intentions. Even at the between manor house and cottage ("We residential scale there is an intense all have our cottage moments and our For fine contemporary interest in urban issues of publicness, palace moments") such as Gaston privatencss, and gathering, and their Bachelard writes about in The Poetics of Italian Furniture architectural representation through Space. Lighting/Accessories courts, gates, gardens, and towers. The designs are rigorously conceived in plan, The plan employs an L-shaped parti Executive/Residential usually employing strong, geometric which forms around a central motor court partis, evocative both of classical and organizes the activities of the house Now representing Q I S A BELItH architecture as welt as an almost into three distinct pans. The largest and primordial sense of place-making. most prominent of these, the formal house, faces onto the axis from entry gate Two of their Texas projects are urban of the motor court and contains the public design schemes. Machado's individual rooms on the first level and the family entry to the Houston Sesquicentennial sleeping quarters above, A "domestic Park Competition (1985) organized the house" forms the east leg of the plan with irregular site along Buffalo Bayou into a den, kitchen, service entrance, and five public squares by extending the axes caretaker's quarters. The crossing of of the surrounding city grid. Each of the these two legs is marked by a lantern over squares seized upon opportunities in the the kitchen service island and a taller site and context to create a series of observation tower over the stairs, giving a thematic parks. A major figurative vertical punctuation to the horizontal, element of the scheme was a 150-foot- gabled profile of the building. high "conslructivist tower" in "Houston Plaza" on the corner of Bagby and The rooms of the formal house are linked Franklin, serving as a Houston symbol by a two-story loggia on the north side and a platform from which to view the which extends out to the west, abutting downtown skyline. with the third domain of the house, a summer pavillion with a ping-pong room, A second project, in Dallas, done with an sauna, swimming pool, and outdoor urban design consortium, undertook the kitchen. A small ceramics studio is redevelopment of Deep Ellum, an older detached from the house and positioned section of that city adjacent to the central on the irregular edge of a formal orchard business district. This project, which is that occupies the fourth corner of the extensively described in Lotus 50, rectangular site plan. attempted to unify the district by proposing a master plan in which a set of The site concept uses geometries coordinated typological buildings figuratively to create symbolic conditions IMTERIMATIOIMAi. (townhouse, tower, loft, courtyard, and of order in the wooded site. The motor market buildings) were used to establish court and elliptical lawn arc idealized 20 Greenway Plaza a distinct identity for the mixed-use figures; the third element, the grid- Houston, Texas 77046 district - one which restored the potential planted orchard is disrupted and eroded Innova for urban street life by providing a on the west side allowing the, rectangular 713/623-6484 contrasting scale and architectural plan to soften and unwind on the fourth character from the isolated, self- corner. The service entrance through the contained towers in the downtown. domestic house along the side is • • <•

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segregated from the formal entrance reminiscent of the widow's-walk towers which occurs along an axis from the gate, found in captain's houses in seaside across the motor courl to the entrance locations. hall, and a view out to one of the two obelisks marking the generating centers With all of its architectural mnemonics of the elliptical lawn. and double entendres, the Palestine house McLean seems to lack some of the metaphorical The house is a veritable catalogue of intensity of earlier Machado-Silvetti historical allusions and attributions. The houses. Instead, this house exhibits a real entry hall is a direct quotation from concern for livibility and domestic order. Boscobel, an early 19th-century In an essay for the 1980 Biennale, Federalist house in Putnam County, New Machado-Silvetti described an interest in York, known to the clients and the their work as "a searching for an architects. The general shape and architecture which effects its own colonnaded veranda porch of the formal clarification by resorting to principles house recalls southern plantation houses that are beyond style." Though this house of the late 18th century, here interpreted seems to deal in a kind of calculus of in brick with a generous masonry cornice styles, the principle lies in a well- (the subsidiary wings are painted wood). thought-out plan and a concept of The overall site plan and formal symbolic place-making based on the arrangement of the house and landscape representation of the several domains of are sympatric with the English country domestic life. houses of Philip Webb and Edwin Lutyens. And the observation tower is Bruce C. Webb On Making History in Reverse

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L.D. Systems Professional Sound and Lighting Systems design and installation to accommodate your architectural or interior design plans. If it is at all possible to entertain a Treatises by Filaretc, Scrlio. and Our work complements the ghostly apparition of Ledoux's "Maison Letarouilly provided the students with a integrity of yours. d'Educalion" alongside a Texas freeway, basic interpretative strategy, enabling then to behold within this startling vision them in turn to unravel, on piece ai a a glimpse of the growing and groaning time, the nearly 500-year-old puzzle. shadow of Bramante's Tempietto under From drum to dome, the dissected pieces construction should not come as a were laced back together into u sandwich surprise. Fashioned to celebrate the structure of horizontal cardboard cut-outs completion of the College of and open layers of space. This procedure Architecture's new facility on the was the manifestation of an "implicit" University of Houston campus, this spatial program derived from an project, undertaken as a class assignment operation of three-dimensional section- for the sophomore history of architecture making. As a sort of architectural Please call Alison at (713) 695-9400 I survey course, managed to metamorphose vivisection to expose the poetic to request a brochure outlining our services. the school into a bustling construction "innards" of the work, il was meant to site, complete with masons and guide the initiated into, through, and 467 W. 38th St.. Houston, TX 77018 engineers, carpenters and craftsmen. beyond the mysteries of the Tempietto's professional sound and lighting services, sales, rentals These were the unlikely missionaries essentia] beauty. who came together to trace the profile of new classical dimensions. During construction the rising drum was the genesis of a fin-like world that more Directed by Benjamin Nicholson, and aptly described the workings of an engine GRAUBART RUDY coordinated by master mason Silvano than it did the classical dimensions of a Rosenthal Baccarat Alessi Sole, with faculty consultants Christine Renaissance structure. "Our work is Cinciripini and Mark Schneider, 120 divorced from the moment in which students worked some 30 thousand hours Bramante conceived of his Tempietto so throughout the 1986 fall semester to that we have wanted to express honestly GRAUBART RUDY assemble with clockwork precision a this dislocation in time." The desire to re- Kosta Bocta Buccellatl Orrefors truckload of lumber, five van-loads of produce the Tempietto, not as a ghosting cardboard, six thousand screws, several of an old artifact but as a Dew messenger boxes of glue sticks, 20 pounds of nails, engaged in a discourse with • ula>, is the GRAUBART RUDY and one hundred dollars worth of 3-inch fundamental premise of the work. Its bolts, into a modern transformation of procedural ethic of section making not Royal Copenhagen Dorothy Hafner one of the Italian Renaissance's gravest only reveals an attempt at documenting tributes to antiquity. As much a scholarly the physical characteristics of the document of historical conjecture as an building, but also optimistically realigns GRAUBART RUDY exercise in building "restoration," the itself with a five-century slice through Chrlstofle Ceorg Jensen Oggettl College of Architecture's Tempietto was western civilization. It embodies a quick to assert itself as a polemical recursive conception of time and space construction. A combination of hands-on which is capable of yielding GRAUBART RUDY research, home-spun ingenuity, and extraordinary wealth by viewing history team-work coordination described the in reverse. Fine China, crystal and Flatware impetus for this authentic effort of River Oaks Center • 1985 w. Cray • Houston, Texas 77019 • 5211197 architectural re-production. Christopher Genik Cite Spring 1987 7

The New W Market Square THE BLACK

Top: M o d a l , 1986, Jam«» Surlm. sculptor. L»tt: Aerial vlaw of Market Squara

DiverseWorks, the artist-run downtown Malou Flato, an Austin artist who also arts organization, has initiated a project has completed other public-art projects, to turn a downtown eyesore into a useful will construct eight quarter-circle wedge- and aesthetically relevant park. Market shaped benches covered in ceramic tile. Square was to have been the site of the The artist will paint ceramic glazes over first capitol of the State of Texas. In the the tile, and each separate bench will bicentennial year it was transformed into portray some aspect of the markets thai a landscaped park - a transformation that formerly surrounded the square: flowers, proved less than successful. The park is trinkets, vegetables, and hats. The neither well-used by citizens, nor a focal benches will be placed on the four sides point for the surrounding 11-block area of the park, close to the surrounding designated by the National Register of sidewalk, as convenient resting places to Historic Places in 1983. eat lunch, watch pedestrians, or enjoy an outdoor performance. Their tile surfaces, Since 1982, the cool and colorful, are reminiscent of Association (DHA) has been studying town squares or plazas in Mexico. proposals for the transformation of the site into a more appropriate park. In Houston-based sculptor James Surls will 1985, DHA and the Parks Department fabricate a 20-foot-high work for the LABRADOR endorsed a proposal from DiverseWorks center of the square. As illustrated by his that called for site-specific art works to model, the work will have a steel stem be chosen and incorporated into a new topped by a cluster of organically shaped scheme. Following procedures slim wooden petals. The sculpture - one recommended by the National of Surls's largest to date - is reminiscent An Authentic English Pub Endowment for the Arts in selecting of a (lower. Its height will direct the Good Food- Good Spirits artists to execute works of art in public viewer's eye up to the city's skyline, places, a consultant was retained and a moving from the street level of the panel chosen. Walter Hopps. director of historic square to Houston's 4100 Montrose Boulevard the Mcnil Collection, was named contemporary buildings. Open 7 Oa)* a Week consultant and, in addition to the author, the panel consisted of William A. Paul Hester, a Houston photographer, will Camfield, professor of art history at Rice contribute both historic and University, and Al Nodel, director of the contemporary images to the park. Gallery of Otis/Parsons School of Turner's and Holtis's sidewalks will be Your own unique Ideas In windows and doors. Design. Los Angeles. lined by rough-finished concrete walls of Imagination takes shape. a height which varies from 8 to 24 The DiverseWorks panel chose five artists inches. The photographic images baked to submit proposals for art: Malou Flato, onto industrial tile will be installed on the Paul Hester, James Surls, and sides and tops of these walls. collaborators Doug Hollis and Richard s Turner. Both DiverseWorks staff and the Some images will be culled by Hester panel were committed to choosing from his research in the files of the experienced artists who would respect the and will picture historic importance of the site and would shops that existed around Market Square encourage and promote increased public through the years. Contemporary images use of Market Square for casual strolling, of the area, taken by Hester, will be resting, and informal music and dance included as well. Each tile will be a performances. contact print, as both old and new photographs have been taken by an -L What came to be the guiding idea for the 8-by-10-inch view camera. The historical m project - that the park would be a work of photographs chosen by Hester are small art in itself rather than a space to install "moments in time" and will reinforce the art - came about as the DHA deferred to fragments in the sidewalk and lively r^ the DiverseWorks concept and images glazed on the tile benches. DiverseWorks assumed organizational and financial supervision. The DHA has The park will be planted with grass and remained an enthusiastic partner. shaded by trees which, for security reasons, are placed so that a clear view of The artists were charged with working the park from the sidewalk is possible. together to develop an overall scheme. In early meetings it was decided that Hollis In early December, 1986. the artists and Turner (California artists who presented their plan to the panel of individually and as collaborators have jurors, the Parks Department of the City been responsible for a number of public- of Houston, and the Municipal Arts art projects) would develop the site plan. Council, the body charged with In their concept, a simple, almost approving all public art within the city. routine, plan, consisting of diagonal The concept was endorsed and site walks sloping slightly down to a central preparation began. Project costs are square, would be elaborated by grafting approximately $500,000 - a modest sum the works of art directly onto the for a work of art the size of a city block. architectural elements of the plan rather DiverseWorks has begun fund-raising than treating them as separate objects in efforts. Pella Custom Windows—a delicate blend of craftsmen the park. Turner and Hollis would turn and computer. We are fast, accurate and fanatical about surfaces of the walks and central square The new Market Square Park is quality. Pella delivers on time and at the right into an objet tmuve mosaic: in scheduled for completion in August 1988. price. Pella is your quality alternative. recognition of the historic focus of the Its quiet presence will do much to Windows and doors as you like them. park and perhaps the wholesale transform the downtown historic district demolition of historic buildings in the As only we build them. At Pella, of course. into a more focused and people-oriented Pella Windows & Doors, Inc., 4300 Campbell Road surrounding blocks, they will collect part of our city. debris from demolished buildings - floor Houston, Texas 77041, 713-895-7150 tile, marble, sections of brick - and set Marti Mayo them in the concrete as the sidewalk is poured.