"Young guns: A new generation of architects is redrawing the Texas Landscape," The Open-Ended City: David Dillon on Texas Architecture (FEATURED)

June 23, 1991

In this take on contemporary Texas architecture, Dillon uses the varied landscape of the Gulf Coast, the Hill Country, and the North Texas prairie to draw connections among Texas architects.

The word “Texas” brims with instant associations: big, brash, rich, expansive, folksy—the adjectives roll on and on. But no comparable associations surface for “Texas architecture.” Some people may think of the compact limestone buildings of the Hill Country. Galveston calls to mind white clapboard cottages with high front porches, shuttered against the sea. The Valley is a province of adobe and bleached wood. Yet no single architectural image fits the entire state, the way it does in Virginia or Vermont.

Texas is bigger than those places, and scale is obviously one reason for its architectural diversity. The Piney Woods are to the Big Bend as Sweden is to Bahrain. Nor is there any longer a common architectural culture that serves as a unifying factor. Twenty years ago, O’Neil Ford and William Caudill presided over Texas design like Old Testament prophets, haranguing their colleagues about scale and materials and regional design imperatives—although, it should be noted, without achieving consensus.

Within a few decades, Texas has gone from a predominantly rural state to one of the most urban regions of the country. Three of the ten largest cities in America are here. The courthouse square has given way to the shopping mall, and connections to the past have become more tenuous. Texas architects now work anywhere in the country, even outside the country. For many of them, common ground has come to mean membership in the same professional organizations or subscriptions to the same design magazines.

Younger Texas architects—those thirty- to forty-something—are taking a broad range of design approaches, from pristine modernism to rugged, industrial-strength urbanism and poetic evocations of historic Texas architecture. There is no dominant style or widespread concern for orthodoxy, a condition that is generation vigorous work by small firms.

KEEPING THE PEACE
Houston architect Carlos Jiménez works in a clean, spare studio, attached to his equally spare house with an intense blue facade and an almost monastic interior. He is a private person who prefers to work intensely on a few projects rather than turn over control to someone else. Calm and repose are themes and goals of his work—whether in a house or an industrial building. “I try to create contemplative spaces,” he says. “I’m never happier than when I am sitting quietly in my house reading, or just looking out the window. If that is important to me, it may be important to others as well.” Born in Costa Rica in 1959, Mr. Jiménez arrived in Houston in the late 1970s and stayed on, receiving an architecture degree from the University of Houston in 1981. Where others are fascinated by the city’s paradoxes and wild juxtapositions of scale and mood, Mr. Jiménez is most intrigued by its lushness and its rich, filtered light. “When you have no mountains or ocean, and a lousy climate, you celebrate trees and light,” he says candidly. The Beauchamp house in Houston, for example, is close to freeways and only ten minutes from downtown, yet it has the qualities of a sanctuary. Behind an intense blue wall—another homage to Luis Barragán and Ricardo Legorreta—the house opens up on three sides to embrace Buffalo Bayou. Mr. Jiménez describes it as “an exercise in how to bring light into a house,” which could stand as a description of most of his projects.

The workshop for the Houston Fine Arts Press has many of the qualities of his residential work: simple geometric forms, inexpensive materials, and planes of primary color. From the street, it looks as serene as a chapel.

REASON AND ROMANCE
The work of David Lake and Ted Flato in San Antonia is as solid and foursquare as Carlos Jiménez’s is private and ethereal. Both architects worked for Mr. Ford in the 1970s and early 1980s and absorbed their mentor’s devotion to history, natural materials, and painstaking craftsmanship. They consistently borrow the forms of Texas vernacular buildings, abstract them, and then enrich them with meticulous modern detailing.

Mr. Lake describes himself as the romantic of the firm and his partner as the rationalist. “I prefer eccentricity, and he doesn’t,” he says matter-of-factly. “My approach is to try to get a simple, straight-forward design, then pull back and enrich it,” replies Mr. Flato. “I have a great fear of doing something trendy that I won’t like after ten years.” Partners since 1985, they have produced an impressive body of work that includes houses, banks, and museum additions, mostly in Texas and New Mexico. The Frost Bank in Fair Oaks, Texas, near San Antonio, is a dense, craftsmanly building that with its thick limestone walls, deep windows, and silo-like roof recalls Texas pioneer architecture.

The firm’s ranch houses in South Texas are unequivocally romantic evocations of earlier prototypes, combining simple materials and at times almost skeletal forms with sensitivity to the harsh realities of Texas weather and topography. “People go out into the country to be close to nature,” says Mr. Lake, “so doing ranch houses is a great way to learn how to handle climate.” But the Carraro house in Buda, between Austin and San Marcos, is the best recent example of their design intentions. The steel frame was salvaged from an abandoned cement plant in San Antonio. Out of it, the architects made three pavilions. The largest contains a small stone house with kitchen and living room, surrounded by a screened porch the size of the flight cage at the Dallas Zoo. The second pavilion, covered in corrugated metal, contains a study and master bedroom, while the third serves as a garage. The completed house is part Texas farm, part pristine modern abstraction—in short, a perfect marriage of reason and romance.

STARTING OVER
It is harder to classify the work of Dallas architect Gary Cunningham, mainly because he has made such an effort not to repeat himself. “For some architects, maintaining a stylistic thread in their work is very important,” he explains. “I like to start over every time. I couldn’t handle consistency. These days, we spend a lot of time avoiding architecture and trying instead to get the clients to talk in philosophical terms about what’s important to them.” The result is a remarkably diverse collection of projects that typically cuts against the grain of prevailing fashion. Mr. Cunningham’s early office buildings were plain brick boxes, self-effacing, yet painstakingly detailed. He referred to them as “stupid,” but in the context of the hyperkinetic, style-of-the-month ‘80s, they come across as highly intelligent. Several early houses were taut, abstract compositions of flat, intersecting planes of brick and stone that pay discreet homage to the German modernist master Mies van der Rohe. In North Dallas, this is not the way to get standing ovations. And in the “Power House” in Highland Park, completed two years ago, Mr. Cunningham pushed his tough, “take that” aesthetic to new levels of sophistication. In an abandoned 1920s electrical substation, he created a dazzling contemporary residence using steel, glass, and industrial staircases, even reinstalling the substation’s original traveling crane and chain fall. It is an aggressive, pit bull kind of design that grabs your attention and won’t let go. It is also, without question, the most provocative new house in Dallas maybe in the Southwest.

As if to confirm his reputation as an architectural chameleon, Mr. Cunningham is designing a chapel for Cistercian monks at the University of Dallas, commemorating centuries of scholarship with traditional liturgical forms and walls made of 6,000-pound blocks of limestone.

WIDE-OPEN SPACES
After lengthy apprenticeships, made even longer by the recession, these architects are beginning to receive more prestigious public commissions. Mr. Jiménez is designing the new classroom and office building for the Houston Museum of Fine Arts. Mr. Cunningham is completing a new theater and conference center for Addison.

Lake/Flato recently finished the temporary exhibition gallery for the San Antonio Museum of Art. In enumerating the plusses of working in Texas, many young architects mention openness, not simply geographical but psychological. Even in bad times, they insist, Texas is more tolerant of invention—and artistic independence—than the coast. The pressure of fashion, which classifies architects as either with it or out of it, is not as intense here as in New York or Los Angeles. “Nobody is looking over your shoulder here,” says Houston architect Albert Pope. “You have the freedom to work without having to live up to other people’s expectations about what is serious architecture.” The attrition rate among Texas architects over the last five years has been high. Many were forced to move to keep working, and many have not returned. The fallout from that is still unclear.

More encouraging is that some of those who stayed are producing accomplished, at times exhilarating, architecture, as good as anything being done elsewhere. Even if times are still tough, the future of Texas architecture looks bright.