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Clockwise from upper left corner: Ford and Colley and Tamminaga, architects, and Philip JoblUOH, 1 949 altered; a modern office and industrial building (Houston Postal. Atrial view oj Gulf Freeway built in the Buffalo Speedway corridor (Houston looking tint from St. Emanuel Street, 1950 Metropolitan Refearch Center, Houston Public (Houston CAamberofCommerce). Welder Hall, Library). Houston grandes dames gathered University of St. Thomas, 19">l), in a modern living room in the Pine Hill section Associates, architects, Bolton and Rarnstone, of River Oaks. Wilion, Morris, Crain and Mi wt iate architects. View of Commons, altered Anderson, architects (Photo by Beadle, courtesy (PbotO by Alexandre Georges). Meyerland House and GardenJ. The Museum o) Modern Company advertisement, 1958 (Houston Art's "Painting Toward Architecture" exhibi- Chamber of Commerce). Project: Montclair tion on display at the Contemporary A rt

It might reasonably be said that Giant was a dmtide-edaed dwmd thai cuti itoih UMUJA.. the myth of Texas in the 1950s: a fascina- tion with size, power, and optimism created through the advent of technolog- Johnson Sweeney. There were instances such shopping centers as Palms Center, ical change. Bigness and a fai t h i n new tech- of private homes, in many cases reflect- the 60-acre Gulfgate, Meyerland Plaza, nologies permeated all facets of urban ing the purist style of Mies van der Rohe and Sharpstown Center followed in the life. Houston's emergence as an indus- and his followers, and occasionally such wake of Victor Gruen and Irving R. trial center of more than regional con- enclaves as Pine Hill in River Oaks (with Klein's unbuilt Montclair Center of 1950, sequence, the founding of the Texas houses by Hugo V. Neuhaus, Edward the first air-conditioned shopping mall Medical Center as a tool of economic Durrell Stone, O'Neil Ford, and Wilson, proposed in the United States. A series of development, and the eventual location Morris, Crain and Anderson) or Briar annexations by Houston also transpired, of the Manned Spacecraft Center outside Hollow (with houses by Ford, Wilson, the largest being in 1956 when incorpor- Houston in the early 1960s symbolized Morris, Crain and Anderson, as well as ated limits were nearly doubled. This the city's commitment to bigness and Bolton and Barnstone). However, mod- policy facilitated private development as entrepreneurial adventurousness. A cul- ernism in the 1950s did not propose a new subdivisions came under the jurisdic- ture of energy consumption became the coherent formal image addressing both tion of city services, thereby relieving symbol of progress and newness, its media ideas of urban fabric and a unity of developers. At the same time, the mid the technologies of petrochemical pro- formal expression between buildings that 1950s also saw the first of separate incor- duction, the evolution and expansion of might evoke a sense of neighborhood porations in what eventually would be- an automobile-based urban form, subur- identity. The freedom of expression in- come city limits: the "villages" of t1 " ban homes, air-conditioning, and a drive- herent in the symbolic use of the modern Memorial area. Here was a clear reat i.->n in, dispersed service network. style failed, in other words, to produce a to the unpredictability of the new energy clear sense of wholeness at the urban patterns: zoned communities maintain- level. This contrasted with previous de- ing a definite environmental character. ^he peedom &fr e&pAeidicm whenenl in the iytnbolic udeol cades, particularly the 1910s and 1920s, Hunters Creek was the first in 1954, in which a combination of Beaux-Arts followed by Hilshire. Spring Valley, classicism and City Beautiful planning Hedwig, Bunker Hill, and Piney Point, them&detn ttule failed ta produce a clea/i ienie o^a concepts had defined distinct zones. The all of which were surrounded by Houston Museum of Fine Arts was one product of annexation in 1957. this, as were Hermann Park and South ujJtoieneM at the unban level. Change also was manifested in social and Main Street, with its rotary intersection The image of a downtown - the central demographic tensions. Legally enforced at the foot of Montrose Boulevard and its business district also changed in this racial desegregation brought with it the tree-lined parkway esplanade. period, for there were few new significant redefinition of neighborhood structure. additions to the skyline. Instead, decen- Houston's middle-class Jewish commu- In contrast, the principle of "function- tralization diffused development, setting nity redistributed itself from Riverside alism" produced no clear formal image the stage for the Houston of the 1970s Terrace to the new Meyerlandarea, con- as the City Beautiful gave way to the City and 1980s. This would become the poly- tributing to the development of the Efficient. Beginning in 1940, Houston nucleated urban network, a series of city's southwest section and, in turn, obtained a Department of City Planning high-density centers spread at intervals opening opportunities for middle-class as an agency of government. Its director, across the landscape, created by distribu blacks who could afford to leave the Ralph Elhfrii. attempted to rationalize tion available through the emerging free- Third, Fourth, and Fifth wards. In the suburban growth, providing standards way system. case of San Felipe Courts, built in 1942 for subdivision development and the in the Fourth Ward as public defense location of schools, neighborhood parks, Architecture itself reflected the diffusion housing, the resident population ex- and bayou parkways. The principal me and spread that gradually became the panded to fill what became Allen Park- dium for channeling growth was the Imageoi today's Houston. Architect. raJ way Village. Both change* reflected the Major Street and Thoroughfare Plan, form responded to postwar changes n. increased presence of a hlack population adopted as public policy in 1942. By the International Stvle: a reduced, ph\ I in the city's landscape. However, reac- 195(1 a pattern of efficient arterial streets ically and visually light vocabulary ol tionary elements mounted a strong sta nd began to appear and. on top of these great transparency whose demat< during this period, particularly evident (literally), the first of Houston's fn ized qualities echoed the elusivt-nt-ss .OIL. :n the COnduCl of the HoiiMnti puhht ways, the Gull Fret-way. begun in 1946 amorphousnessoi tht city developingall school hoatd and the zoning bailies ol and completed in August 1952. Here, around. 1948 and 1962. Suggestion-* ol govern- however, were not tentepts of formal ment intervention and socialistic ten- composition related to a u h lectural During the 1950s, Houston emerged in a dencies took advantage of Cold Wat groupings the axiai boulevards of pre- new form Its optimistic, modern as- tensions in an inherently conservative vious generations but a m-n geometry sumptions lit at the heart of the very :~ political climate. Yet the militante and created bv engineering, whose monu issues that confront the city in the 1980s. extremism of this conservatism were in mental scale, while* rLtltiin.ng the face of Suburbanization as the substance of ur- part the product of rapid growth in an the entirecity, was unrelated to anything banity has raised the question of quality expansive, opportunistic area. existing before. of life. The consumerism and abundant waste of mid 1950s technologies created The freeways were developed with public inflation. The vagaries of modern n'ch funds in support of private vehicles at a tecture's postwar phases of expre. .. time when the Houston Transit Company changes have accentuated the lack ol remained in private hands. Advances in coherence in the visual environment r automobile technology enlarged the the 1980s, we have learned that the number of owners, enfranchising large radical changes and wholehearted as- segments, such as women. Such public sumptions behind those changes that policy mechanisms as Federal Housing made Houston a "modern" city are a Administration subsidies and an inher- double-edged sword - a double-edged ently anti-urban attitude encouraged sword that cuts both ways.e the new scale of suburban subdivisions, ranging to Frank W, Sharp's Sharpstown which surpassed Levittown as the nation's largest subdivision when it opened in 1954. To serve this dispersed city such new types as suburban office buildings also appeared. Those by MacKie and Kamrath for Schlumberger, the Humble Research Center, and Farnsworth and Chambers or by O'Neil Ford and Richard S. Colley for Magcobar and Texas Instru- ments were significant examples. Also 1> Cite Fall 1984 Progressive corporate ,

surelv recognizable and which at present noticed paragraph in Texas Architect is probably must widespread Is that announced that Preston Bolton had which the interpreters of Mies van der formed an architectural practice with Rohe's thought and practice have Howard Barnstone, then teaching at the provided."' It is lair to say that the University of Houston. Burdetn- progenitors oi postmodernism Keeland and William R. Jenkins, who That an avant garde Robert Venluri, Philip Johnson, and began teaching at the University of M mley Tigerman in particular all owe Houston College of Architecture during a great debt to Mies's impact on the 1950s, also started architectural American architecture in the 1990s, practices during this time. Meanwhile which provided a I• >il im the backlash ol Hugo V. Neuhaus, scion ol one I il art journal, the mid "60s and '70s. Because they wen Houston's most influential families, had bored with it. we're now bored with returned from an architectural educa- them tion at Harvard's Bauhaus-oricntcd Graduate School ol Design. In \')\') he II the zeitgelit of the decade that began his own practice with C. Herbert a conservative hioughl us television, Doris Day, and Cowell, while his cousin, J. Victor James Dean was really Shake, Rattle Neuhaus III, teamed with the talented, and van Jet Kobe." as Petef Texas-educated Harwood Taylor in Papademetriou has cleverly suggested, 1955 Before long, these young I (ouston then we might reasonably expect to tmd architects began getting small com- organ of the evidence ol a profound Miesian impact missions. Amidst the more conservative on the domestic environment of a qum- suburban developments and commercial lessentiallv '5<>s city like Houston. The centers ot Houston one could find daring, booming economy and the fortuitous if rare, examples oi the new architecture immigration ol several bright, talented. architectural ind ambitious young architects irom the Houston's first Miesian house, built in east did, ol course, conspire to uive this 1949 1950 for Dominique and |ohn de what is now a distinguished collection Men11 in Briarwood, might have come of houses in the prevailing Miesian " D from the hand oi the German master classical" mode. Hut iust bow "Miesian" himself, had not the clients had profession, and a were these houses' Did they really share reservations about the uncompromising the values ol dvuamu tion and severity oi his work. Instead thev chose OSptCUOUS space" present in so his biographer anil leading apologist, pristine i work ol art as th Itth Philip Johnson, whose (ilass House in House;1 And how pervasive wis -he New Canaan was then under construe magazine for home- influence '>l Houston s POUttg I tion ' However rather than using the : tmestic irchttecfui LII.ISS pavilion model lohnson i hose to this mttortant period n Houston s adapt Mies's brii • court house projects grow, ol the 1930s t" the Mends' three-acre 11. itiston lot. Mies -, construction \ ocab makers and interior Colin RtlWC « is |Uiclf ••> listinc ularv was ombtned with planning between two strains ol what he .ailed notions which Johnson learned at •if in the 1950s. His m • Harvard under Gropius ind Breuer, essays on this subject, written in 1956 neati) • ncapsulatmg the program in wh: teaching at the Umvertity separate wings. In what was to become a decorators all took ut Texas, Illustrated thewori .anotiu.i! solution *II the problem of Houston urch I icts Preston M Boiton the private suburban court house, and Howard Barnstone dongside thai >t lohnson screened the house from the John Johansen, PhlhpJohnson ind I street With bntk walls framing a single Saannen Ao ording to Rowe. rht 'arte opening, asymmetrically placed" notice of this smal Amern.an followe-s i| Mtessuba mil turned 'he house nwatd around ashallon 'Palladian" planning node garden ourts. Will panels ol buck and which smphasized the renter n i glass were mrefully and minimally manner, ind which us,-d Mis letailed, evoking the spirit ol Mies iJ nol elements almost I dressing his classical rigoi itial movement in Mil > own work ttem rning dynamism. revolutti i ii irigin i H the phastztng the The Mend House brought the lashion- Opposite page, left, from top I > bottom. edges •>' the :si in in peripheric spatial progrcssivi MOMA Modem style- Cook House. Frivndueood, /9 5'J, BottOH .ind compositions Moreover, it was to Houston, and its impact on the Ham stone, an hi ted \. vit "it contemporary abstractly conceived, and not hound to younger generation of architects was (Photo by Fnd Wi i i '/. Parade oj Hum,' the rhetoric of Bauhausproblem-solving tremendous Led first byjohnson's HOMO, t925, ftmsVtt A orchttect and "functional" planning. One can stiil intluential collaborator, Hugo Neuhaus, (Photo by Hodrich-Btesjtng). Mewl Hmn marvel at tin- uncompromising integrity who built a sprawling house for his family /'J50. Philip }ohn\on Awoiiatei, an'-; of Mies's work; both the extraordinarily in Rivet < >aks 111 1951, the Miesian creed (''lurtland Nelillaus. u BM HBW an hittt t \ t:,it domestic architecture elegant Farnsworth House and his spread through the University ol gf : '/trance front (Photo by I'mil Hester). domestic protects ot the 1920s and '30s Houston faculty, its most successful Cullman Hall. The Mtiuum of Fine Arts, have an intensity and conciseness of early proponents were Barnstone and Houston, /95H, Lading Mies van der Robe, expression that is truly classical in us Keeland, who by 1955-1956 had architect, Stauh, Rather and Howze. associate philosophy. It is indeed afar cry from the acquired a national reputation through archilctlv view of Street front (Photo by Hed- in a growing work of most of his American followers publication of their modern houses, rich- Blessing). in the 1950s. especially in the Los Angeles-based magazine. Arts and Architecture. Rowe's term "Palladian" was simply a Bolton and Barnstone's Gordon House Opposite page, right, from top to bottom: convenient, if not very succinct, code- (1954). which innovatively used the Cordon House. 1954, Bolton and Barns/one, southwest city word for any plan with a central block or garage and a small entry court to screen unhileits. living room. Knoll Planning Unit, bay framed by dependencies. Such a the main two-story block of the house interior designers (Photo by Fred Wtnchelt). compositional type has a long history in from the street, appeared on the cover of Todd House. il)(il. Anderson Todd, archttat, American domestic architecture, dating Architectural Record's Record Homes vnir of intranet front (Photo by Paul Hester). back to the earliest colonial dog-trot and of 1'JJfi. Shortly before. House and Strakc Hall and Jones Hall, University of St. is significant. center-hall houses. It connoted static Garden featured the Neuhaus residence Thomas. 1<)58, Philip Johnson Assouan >. symmetry, and set Mies apart from in an article that confidently proclaimed architects. Bolton and Barnstone, asstniun young American architects like Bolton "Texas Has Taste."* architects, view of street elevations (Photo hy and Barnstone who were struggling to Frank Lotz Miller). Menil House, floor plan. adapt his strikingly clear (and un- compromising) architectural idiom loan (Continued on page 14) Cite Fall 19H4

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r L 14 Cite Fall 1984 That an avant garde art journal, a cities than anything in the previous 50 introversion and intensely private char- his most influential pupil. Cullman Hall conservative organ of the architectural centuries.'" The achievement of Barn- acter of the court house was a given. at The Museum of Fine Arts and the first profession, and a magazine for home- stone and his contemporaries in Houston Integration of the garage into these rigidly three buildings of Philip Johnson's Univ- makers and interior decorators all took was the reconciliation of an established formal plans was a trick best mastered by ersity ot St. Thomas campus showed notice of this small movement in architectural idiom with the exigencies Barnstone, who really did care about the Houston Miesian architecture at its best. contemporary domestic architecture in a of emerging social patterns and techno- car in ways that J. B. Jackson would have But the taste of High Culture patrons growing southwest city is significant. logical advances. It is remarkable that loved. In his finest houses of this period, was shifting by I960, as were the predilec- Houston's young modernists were thev did precisely what they set out to the Gordon, Moustier (1955), Farfel tions of architects. While Houston was designing houses which addressed the do. (1956), and Cook (1959) houses. Barn to see another decade of "neoclassical" needs of middle-class American families, stone experimented with various versions modernism in its public buildings, it was with their cars and manifold household From New Canaan to Tanglewood and of what Jackson was to call "the family the architecture of Saarinen, Rudolph, machines (including, of course, the air- Back garage," which became a vital part of the and Kahn that lit up the architectural conditioner), their penchant for "out- The characteristics of the typical Houston kitchen-service wing of the house, and schools and the media. door living," and paradoxical demand court house, this hybrid of elements had its own entrance to the "mud room."" for privacy, and, if upscale, their small from chic New Canaan and mundane Though far more concisely ordered and Skidmore, Owings and Merrill, Kenneth collections of modern art and design suburbia, can be seen in a comparison carefully detailed than the better subur- Bentsen, and Wilson, Morris, Crain and (which invariably included two of several houses from the mid 1950s. ban builders' houses in Tanglewood or Anderson employed a spare, corporate Barcelona chairs and a glass coffee Neuhaus and Taylor's Watson House other new subdivisions, these residences modern style in such public buildings as table). Yet the vocabulary of these (1955), Burdette Keeland's Parade of solved similar problems in simitar ways. the Tenneco Building(1963), the South- houses, which could be distinguished Homes House (1955), and Bolton and west Tower (1962), and the Bank of pieces of abstract "design," was self- Barnstone's Blum House in Beaumont That these distinguished experiments in Houston (1966). But it was Anderson consciously Miesian. Low brick walls (1954) all appeared in several magazines residential architecture did not supplant Todd, of Todd Tacket Lacy, who gave facing the street with that ubiquitous of this period, and were seen as exemplary or even seriously compete with traditional Houston its purest taste of Miesian nco- single opening; small, enclosed garden solutions to their particular design prob- (or "organic" modern) houses designed classicism in his own house of 1961 and courts off the main living and sleeping lems. Each wasa relatively self-contained by more conservative architects is not in Fire Station No. 59 of 1968. Todd's areas of the house; the familiar box - the Blum House a three-bay rec- surprising. The fatal flaw in the Miesian work was augmented briefly by the expression of the steel frame; interior tangle of roughly three-to-five propor- court house in any suburban American designs of David Haid, one of Mies's elements like the storage divider or tions (a favorite Miesian plan configura- setting is its introversion, its complete project architects for the museum kitchen counters "floating" in the tion), the Watson House a series of absence of a public face to the street addition, who worked for a time in the continuous space of living-entry-dining- spatial layers defined by walls and courts, (often exacerbated by a hidden front office of Cowell and Neuhaus, producing kitchen-library-den (with those oh-so- and the Parade of Homes House a roughly door). Next to a row of upstanding, several exceptional commercial and carefully placed chairs, tables, and three-to-five brick enclosure eroded by a traditional houses on a street, most of residential projects. In the buildings that consoles) - these elements maintained square entry court. Each is neatly divided these houses were literal affronts, and Todd and Haid produced, the lack of the artistic authenticity, the genre of the according to functional zones - it was still seem so. Of course, the so-called formal and structural discipline, the court house, the connection to Mies. typical for writers and architects of the modern house never caught on with the weak symmetry, and false use of Miesian But ultimately that connection was time to correlate spaces with activities general public, even in the '50s, and was elements that Rowe had seen in much superficial. Houston's modern houses of rather than room names: hence one limited to those forward-thinking clients, work of the 1950s gave way to a truer the 1950s were as close to Tanglewood as might find "eating," "sleeping," "service," like the eccentric Lovellsof Los Angeles, understanding of the principles behind they were to Barcelona. The car, privacy, "living," and"playing" areas designated or the cultivated Menils, whose way of Mies's architecture. more casual patterns of living and At the center of this organization of life was as unique and daring as the entertaining - the things that House hidden symmetries, a large, open living- architecture they supported and the art Howard Barnstone was prophetic when and Garden noticed - were as eating zone might divide two zones of they collected. he wrote in 1963: "New thought always important as the things that Arts and bedrooms, one for parents and one for seems to come from young revolutionaries Architecture noticed. With the zeal of a children, as in the Blum House, orscreen Postscript: Modern Goes Public in the who are followed by a generation of young revolutionary, Howard Barnstone an entire range of bedrooms at the back '60s Madision Avenuers who make cash out could write in 1963: "The new of the site, as in the Watson House plan. In 1958 the decade of Mies in Houston of the thoughts and hopes of the inno- expression, however, should certainly be Relationships between walled courts and was capped by the completion of both a vators . . . Our present giants are market- that of the'car in urban society.' Nobody living spaces could be less forma) than ing contributions made by Mies, Neutra, faces up to it. Yet the car in just 50 years superb building by the master himself those found in these houses, but the and an excellent group of structures by and Kiesler when thty were young."" No of existence has done more to change great new artistic ideas are found in the

Clockwise, from upper left: San Jacinto Meisel). Amon Carter Museum of Western A rt. F.lementary School, Liberty. 7956, Cattdill. Fort Worth, 1961, Philip Johnson Associates, Rmclett, Scott and Associates, architects (Cour- art hitects, Joseph R Pelich, assouatt unhiteit tesy CRS/Caudill Rowlett Scott), Tempi, (Photo by George Cserna). Crossroads Emanu-El Dallas, 1956. Howard R. Meyer Restaurant, Arlington. /957. ()'Neil Fordand and Max M SanJfield. architects, William W RichardS. Colley, architects. A B. Suantartd Wurster, consulting architect (photo by Ulric S. B. Zisman. associate architects Cite Fall 1984 15 corpus of work described above. It might best be seen as an energetic experiment marked by individual works of consider- able distinction, none of which can be classed with Cullinan Halt or the Farns- worth House. Both the triumphant glories and the tragic failures of the Miesian idiom belong finally to the inventor himself. His architectural idiom remains the most coherent, disciplined, refined. and "classic" of any produced during this tumultuous ccnturv.a

Notes / earn a great debt ofgrttitudt to Stephen Post whost rrcb, ncouragtmnt, and help mode this article possible, 1 Preface by Philip Johnson, Introduction by I leury-Russell Hitchcock, Essay by Arthur Drexler, Built in USA. h\ut War Architecture, New York. The Museum of Modern Art, 1952, 15, 20-J7. 2 Colin Rowe, "\eoci.issn.ism ind Modern Art liilecture, [." Tbt Mathematics of the Ideal Villa and Other Essays, Cambridge, MIT Press, 1976, 120-1 JH. 'i VC'itliam Jordv. \mert, an Buddings and Their Architects, vol. 4, Garden City, Doubleday/ Anchor. 1972, 16V 219. ; lames Johnson Sweeney, "Collectors' Home" .-. vol, 147. I April 1466. IB4-I9J. 5 Philip Johnson, .W; Me* York, The Museum ol Modern Art, 1947. 96. : rial Taste: In Texas, An Air- Conditioned Villa," House and Garden, vol. ins, February 1954.50-5 v ' Esther McCoy, "Young Architects in the United States: 1965," Zodl*C 13, 1964, 186. H I.B. Jackson, "The Domestication of the (Opposite, clockwise from upper left: Stu- Wurster, consulting architect I Photo by Ulric Pavilion, Kingstille. 1959. Alan Y. Taniguchi, Garage," The Neceiiity for Ruins and Other Essays, architect York House, Harlingen. !<154. Code, Spnnjjfield, University of Massachu>i.-n-. \dent Union Building, Trinity University, San Meisel). First Church of Christ, Scientist, Vic- Press, 1980, 10J-I I I. \ Antonio. 1951. O'Neil Ford. Barttett Cocke, toria, 1952, Milton A Ryan, architect (Photo Bowman and York, architects (Photo by Ulric 9 McCoy. "Young Architects," 164. land Harrey P. Smith, architects, William W. by Ulric Meisel). Flato Memorial Livestock Meisel).

During the 19 V)s the spirit of the new pervaded earliest architects to use the lift-slab method of inclined toward formal assertiveneis, spatial the architectural scene in Texas, inspiring tht concrete construction, first employed at Trinity. particularity, and symmetrical composition, their . . . Hwlm design of buildings with a fresh sense of purpose But in their public buildings, as well as in their appeal, and ready acceptance, lav in a combina- and direction. By 1950 modern architecture in residential work, wall planes of masonry were tion of constructional economy and "advanced" the U, S, gravitated between two poles, tht dominant visual element. technological prestige. represented by Frank Lloyd Wright and , both of whom The second group boldly displayed its const rac- As early as 1951 Donald Barthelme had acquired Texas followings concentrated largely tivist icons: the insulated, modular, cement employed a thin-shell concrete i anopy at It"- '.' in Houston. It was in the space between these asbestos panel, the steel tally column, and the Columbia. Ford, Colley, and A.B. Swank, Jr., two figures that a distinctive school uf Texas exposed steel bar joist. Doing the most with the collaborating with the Spanish-Mexican engineer modern architecture flourished. Its source, least was exuberantly celebrated. Felix Candeta, designed hyperbolic paraboloid however, was neither the Chicago of Wright nor umbrellas to provide a structural-spatial leit- of Mies, but the California of Richard Neutra What unified these two tendencies was a consist- motivforthe Crossroads Restaurant in Arlington and William Wilson Wurster. ent preference for simple, box-like building (1957) and the Texas Instruments Semiconductor forms, roofed with flat (or perhaps shallowly Building in Richardson (1958). Coltey 's Brasel- Stephen Fox This school of Texas modernism although it pitched) planes. The scale was domestic and non- ton House (1957) in Corpus Christi comprised never was recognized as such - exhibited two monumental. Symmetry was avoided Buildings a whole family of concrete sails, while Alan Y. formally distinct, but by no means antithetical, tended to be long and thin to ensure cross- Taniguchi (b. 1922) of Harlingen created tendencies. Wurster and Neutra might con- ventilation. End-walls were treated as solid instant highway landmarks with the rigorously veniently serve as the eminences grises for planes while windows and doors were integrated conceived, rigidly economical, but visually scin- these dispositions if the influence of Cranbrook, into horizontally aligned panel strips that tilating roof forms of his Flato Memorial Live- especially as manifested in the work ofEliel and spanned the long sides of the building. These stock Pavilion in Kingsville (1959) and his Eero Saarinen, also is taken into account. faced north and south, with the roof plane and House of Mo-Rose Packing Shed in Olmito the end-walls pulled forward on the south side to (I960). O'Neil Ford (1905-1982) of San Antonio and protect openings from the sun and the rain. Howard R. Meyer(b. 1903) of Dal/as were the Where privacy was required, clerestory strips Much more subversive was the erudite formalism foremost proponents of the Wurster contingent. were slotted-in. Interiors were conceived as open that Philip Johnson essayed in designing the Both collaborated with Wurster on important lofts, to be subdivided by nonbearingpartitions tense, spiky Amon Carter Museum of Western commissions: Ford as principal architect for the as requiredprogrammatically. Art in Fort Worth (1961), where symmetry, new campus of Trinity University in San frontality, and history all were engaged. Pro- Antonio (1949-1952, with Jerry Rogers, Bart- When possible, buildings of either disposition phetic also of what Johnson described as a "nen- lett Cocke, Harvey P. Smith, and S. R might be planted out, California style, with historicist" trend, if less aggressive, was Edward Zisman) and Mayer as principal architect for lush, romantic landscaping. This was frequently Durrell Stone's white-and-gold, solar-screened Temple Emanu- El in Dallas (1956, with Max done by the leading modernist landscape architects villa for Josephine Graf in Dallas (1957). At Sandfie/il). RichardS. Colleyf1910-1983) of the day, Marie and A rthur T. Berger of of Corpus Christi and J. Herschel Fisher (b. Dallas, quite engagingly, for instance, in the The Amon Carter Museum symbolized not just I'll 4) of Dallas were also ranking members of house and studio designed for them hy O'Neil a renewal of interest in form per se, hut in the this group. Ford and Scott W. Lyons (1955). issues of monumentally, history, and culture. Johnson deployed formalism polemically to crit- The second contingent worked under tbt dispen- The compatahility of these two tendencies was icize suburbanism, antihistoricism, and the sation nf Neutra, but not tinder bis tutelage. In best demonstrated in the work of a firm organized idolatry of technique. Faced with the bask fact, it was Charles Earn:' Study House wet young instructors at Texas A&M challenge to its values that the Amon Carter of 1949 - Cranbrook translated tu California University ;n 1948, Caudill, Rowlett, Scott Maa urn posed, Texas's modern school dissolved. that summarized the ideals of this group. The and Affiliates. Caudill. Rowlett and \ the victim of an inability to articulate specific • : Columbia Elementary School in 11'" specialized in what was the building type of the themes that could sustain a movement. O'Neil Columbia (1951) by Donald Barthelme (h. 1950S, the suburban public school. Intensity Ford tried, with the revival of his campaign on 1907) of Houston, the First Church of Christ. progremmatii analysis, coupled'withingenuity, behalf of Regionalism in the early 1960s. Wbiti Wilton A. Ryan ltd them to design tchools that were scaled to it was subscribed by small but influential (b. 1904} of San Antonio, ami the house! 1954) their inhabitants, responsive to new direct torn segments of the profession in Dallas. Austin, that John G. York (1914-1980) of Hurt:- in teaching, and made every effort to resist the San Antonio, and Midland, its appeal was designed for his own family were its Texas sun and attract the breeze. CRS transmitted largely sentimental. And its aim to perpetuate monuments, Thomas M Price (h. 1916) of this spirited, small-stale aesthetn to the design the ethos of the '50s - was undercut by its Galveston belonged to this group, as did many of of churches, office buildings, and- remarkably proponents' inability to refrain from trying the buildings produced hy the Austin architects - the Brazos County Courthouse in Bryan their hands at the fashionable new styles they Fehr and Granger. (1956). Purposefully organized tike a school routinely denounced. campus, it was anttmonumental, inviting, and What differentiated these tendencies was the modern. After I960, ingenuity, innovation, and prag- relative emphasis placed upon natural materials, matic experimentation were valued less and less. on the one hand, and' 'new " industrially produced The growing interest in formal exploration, California was eclipsed as a model. Texas archi- building components on the other hand, and the evident in the work of Eero Saarinen and Philip tects followed new trends emanating from Boston, degree to which supporting structure was accorded Johnson hy the middle 1950 s. was absorbed by New York, and Philadelphia. Some did so with conspicuous exposition. the Texas school because it could be sanctioned skill, but most fell into the syndrome that HI structurally determined. Folded plates and Howard Barn stone has detected in the phen- Ford, Meyer, Colley, and Fisher did not fail to vault"i of thin- shell com rele construction super- omenon he calls Out-of Phase: the increasingly articulate their concrete structural ribbing and seded the lally column and the bar foist as the stale repetition of packaged formul„ a floor and roof slabs; Ford and Colley were the tech icons of the late '50s. Although they