Some Reflections on Architecture and Houston
Carlos Jiménez

Houston is a city and a name stubbornly etched in the imagination as that confident, bridging contact between the earth and the moon. It is difficult to forget the definite relief underlying the astronaut’s transmission emitted against the infinitude of space, joining the frontier spirit of the city to that prodigious leap. A similar aura of space is discernible in that vast, open domain, reaching across the Texas Gulf Coast plain, which contributes to Houston’s fearless and intrepid character. The inescapable awareness of unmitigated space pulsates beneath every gesture and every impression given by the expansive metropolis. I vividly remember the pure feeling of awe and fear brought by my first encounter with the city on a sweltering August day in 1977. Never had I seen a city so immense or one so alien to my sensibilities, accustomed to the extreme density of my native city of San José, Costa Rica. In Houston, one is immediately overtaken by the horizon’s imperturbable presence, concealing and revealing an urban destiny of waste and potential.

Through the years, I have observed Houston from the vantage point of one not entirely at ease with the city’s frantic and irresponsible development. Houston emerges as a city caught between short-term greed and the occasional long-term vision (The Menil Museum, Broadacres, and the Museum District come to mind). A work of architecture in Houston operates almost exclusively along magnitudes of greed and intermittently along the margins of vision. Nonetheless, this ever-pressing reality inspires the making of architecture and informs the search for its fundamental generosity. It is through a gradual unfolding of sustainable cultural development that architecture is able to contribute critically to the present and future of the city.

Often while driving around a Houston neighborhood, I find myself simultaneously celebrating and lamenting the incredible ease with which the city forges its path. One could see in the city’s attitude a defiant freedom, launched on a speculative roller coaster whose ride we cannot foresee or for that matter stop. What we are always left with, though, is as much a city framing a lost opportunity as a city asserting an enormous potential. We are left with a city easily surrendered to the short-term visions promoted by facile, immediate solutions.

It is always astonishing to see the amount of waste that goes on in Houston, lately exhibited in the rapid proliferation of mediocre and questionably constructed townhouses. Irreverent to climate, proportion, and durability, these constructions are otherwise invested with thinly applied and suspect historical references. Their life spans already carry their imminent and swift disposability as their primary benefit to the city. But the shortness of their material investment accumulates, fomenting a future disposable environment, oblivious to accountability.

In a city seduced by the vertiginous speed of its making, architecture offers an opportunity to slow down, to consider the positive convictions that design brings to making a better place. Such slowness allows for a delayed appreciation of place and for an opportunity to discover what might be truly unique about this city. Although today we see the city routinely transformed by an inconsequential exploitation of space aided by inflated architectural styles, we know that this flagrant attitude cannot sustain the quality of place for too long. The potential of any site and its eventual dwelling in the city must be harnessed by the instrument of perception that architecture ultimately constructs in time.

These thoughts, among others, are always present when building in Houston. Architecture becomes an opportunity to search for and to reveal visible or hidden potentials inscribed all across the city’s contradictory and endless territory. Such opportunity is seized by a desire to build well to prolong the life of the built artifact within its unique locality in the city. The construction of each work of architecture contributes a reading, a reflection, fulfilling a need to transact a purposeful longevity for the city. Here lies the positive and sustainable contribution that architecture makes in the construction of the city. This vital, elemental contribution can be found in the most obvious attention to the quality or orientation of light, the careful planting of an oak tree (which continues to be the most enlightened architecture anywhere in the city), and the selection of a more durable material.

If architecture is to play a significant role in Houston’s future—to be more than just an agent for notorious and irresponsible consumption—it should start by reinforcing the uniqueness of the city as a place. Architecture sustains as much as it needs to be sustainable: to be well thought out and well constructed. Prolonging an appreciation of place through architecture is not an imposition on a city already too comfortable with its predilection for disposability; it is rather an obligating reality. It is often easy not to see the amazing poetry and beauty that permeate the city, best captured in the constant expressions of nature found practically everywhere we look. But it is precisely in these spaces, in these moments, where we find and discover the incredible beauty of the city. It is in this certainty that a city dreams, awakens, and continues.

Copyright©2000 Carlos Jiménez