Houston Skyline: Design for Egos
This city’s downtown skyline is an impressive architectural display of styles, shapes, materials and colors, designed with elan by a bevy of the profession’s superstar firms.
There is a sparkling blue-green, reflective-glass tower by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill; a sleek, silver edifice by I.M. Pei & Partners; a soaring red-granite-clad, Flemish-gabeled concoction by Johnson/ Burgee; a playful, white-aluminium-paneled mass by Morris/Aubry, and other highly individualistic, stylized efforts by a list of who’s who in architecture.
What they also display is that a scintillating skyline of superstar-designed skyscrapers do not a city make. Indeed, what they do make is a sorry commentary on the perversion of architecture to serve not people or its host city but corporate and professional egos.
Upon closer inspection in the downtown canyons here, the skyscrapers mock the traditional form of the city, shredding its fabric of public streets and places. The bases of many buildings are simply parking garages, edged by narrow sidewalks, along which two people would have a hard time walking side by side.
The way most people move here from building to building is to use underground tunnels. While convenient, no doubt as our pedways might be, they undermine the critical need in any city, if it is to be a city worthy of note, of convivial public space.
There appears to be no public place in Houston to sit and watch the passing parade of people, or to join it; no place where its soul is bared. The closest any space here gets to that spirit is the privately operated and strictly patrolled Galleria shopping center in the Post Oak area.
There is no Pershing Square, Ocean Front Walk, Hollywood or Whittier boulevard or a Fairfax, Melrose or Broxton avenue. And there are no diverting beaches or mountains, as there are in Los Angeles--just sprawl and sky.
Houston boosters cite the oppressive hot weather here as the reason for the lack of public spaces, but this has not hampered their development in South American cities with similar weather, and in Chicago with worse extremes.
As for the buildings themselves, some of which sit back on private plazas graced with a piece of afterthought sculpture, many do not even look like buildings. Instead, they look rather like exaggerated, modern facades of the type that marked the main streets of frontier towns and were used more or less as billboards.
Worse, the skyscrapers tend to fight one another for attention. Instead of working together to lend the downtown some visual cohesiveness, a feeling of stability and permanance, the structures are oddly scattered, each an island to itself.
Of course, this is not a problem unique to Houston. Few designers in these days of boutique architecture seem to want to design a modest building, something that will reinforce its context, not mock it. Everyone appears to want to do the building that will get a spread in a professional publication, and perhaps an award. Any consideration for the community where it is to be built appears secondary.
However, the practice seems to be most severe in Houston. A factor may be that the city has no zoning. It is a situation that no doubt provides little incentive for developers and their compliant architects to look much beyond the property line and consider larger urban design issues.
In the no-zoning, free-enterprise, every-man-for-himself Texan tradition of Houston, it is every building for itself, and public space and public streets be damned.
Actually, the situation in Los Angeles, which has zoning, does not appear to be that much different. Indeed, in and around select Houston residential areas, local covenants seem to work better, with infringing commercial development, obnoxious signage, heedless street widenings and overbuilding strictly forbidden. Neighborhoods in Los Angeles should be so blessed.
While Houston’s architectural display is permanent, 40 miles south on the Texas coast the historic port city of Galveston has mounted a temporary display that pleads for attention.
To distinguish its fledgling Mardi gras and the state’s sesquicentennial celebration, seven architects of note were invited to design a fantasy arch. The results went on display last week with appropriate fanfare in the downtown landmark district, where they will stand until the end of April.
The designers included Stanley Tigerman, Cesar Pelli, Charles Moore, Eugene Aubry, Michael Graves, Boone Powell and Helmut Jahn, with the results a playful mix of local, vernacular, classical, historical and symbolic themes. Each is stylized and individualistic, as one would expect from such a group.
Conceived with a flair by Dancie Perugini Ware and sponsored by George and Cynthia Mitchell and J.R. McConnell, the project is a reminiscence of 1881, when Galveston, during its halcyon period, erected four triumphal arches for a singing festival.
The hope in this friendly city of 65,000 persons is that the latest arches will call attention to the area’s rich architectural traditions and help spur revitalization efforts. Galveston’s fabric downtown may be worn, but unlike Houston’s, it has a distinct character that has not yet been shredded.
