Upward Nobility
In architecture as in everything, it’s style that counts.
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Italian Villa Style
Sometimes called Texas Italianate, this unlikely mode can be understood as a kind of counterpart to Texas Stone Vernacular, since it was spawned in the hardscrabble Italian countryside. Simply described, it has a square tower, very off-center, usually a verandah or loggia, and grouped doors and windows. Expensive versions had hoodmolds over the windows. It is not unusual to find bay windows, or balconies with balustrades. The eaves may project quite a bit and are often supported by brackets. Wall surfaces are usually smooth rather than rusticated. The style was much ballyhooed in the 1840s and 1850s as at once picturesque and practical.
Richardson Romanesque
This style is the distinctive product of Henry Hobson Richardson (1838-1886), noted for his use of the Roman round arch. Weight and massiveness, plus broad roofs, arches, and lintels constructed of a different stone than the walls, all suggest links with the past, as if a complicated — yet sensible — way of building had been lost. The gloomy appearance of Richardsonian Romanesque overshadows a rich, civilized punch. In Texas many courthouses and commercial buildings adopted this style, making Richardson, not Frank Llloyd Wright or Louis Sullivan, the best-represented member of the Big Three of American architects. Richardson’s work was widely imitated and his death was said not only to have ended rivalry but also to have abolished envy.
Georgian
This popular brick colonialism — seen mostly in churches, schools, and ladies’ club buildings — derives from James Gibbs’ Saint Martin in the Fields Church in London, built 1722-1726. SMU’s Perkins Chapel is a fair, if diminutive, example of Georgian Revival, modestly handled. Unhappily, the rest of the SMU campus is a kinky conglomerate of architectural mistakes, a lesson about why it’s not smart to plug Georgian detail into twentieth-century buildings. Usually of red brick with white trim, this style can be spotted by its upper-story railings or balustrades, overall symmetry, fanlights above the doorways, and classical cornices. In secular buildings, rectangular, double-hung window sashes predominate.
Chateauesque
Galveston’s well-known Bishop’s Palace or Gresham House (1888-1892) was designed by Nicholas Clayton, a genius unsung except in architectural circles. During his prolific career he gave Texas a priceless collection of grandiose structures, many of them in Galveston. The Chateauesque or Francis I style is a tricky mixing of Renaissance and Gothic elements — a happy, asymmetrical collage of high gables, turrets with candle-snuffer roofs, wall dormers, basket-handle arches, and fanciful chimneys. Usually reserved for the Vanderbilts, real Texas Chateauesque is a rare type, yet the Adolphus Hotel in Dallas is a first-rate example of this pinnacle of the mansion style.
Neo-Classical Revival
Simpler than Beaux-Arts Classicism, generally larger and more elaborate than nineteenth-century Greek Revival, the Neo-Classical was a proud attempt to design American buildings without having to look back and bow to anyone across the Atlantic. New York’s celebrated Pennsylvania Station has been wiped out, but the country, including Texas, has many early twentieth-century banks, libraries, and post offices which are carefully wrought and impressive, even though often small. Preservationists are frequently biased in favor of them, but earlier public buildings may have more architectural interest.
Sullivanesque
The magnificent early skyscrapers of Louis H. Sullivan (1856-1924) satisfied the classical demand that a work of art should have a beginning, a middle, and an end. He fabricated unique building ornaments, fusing the naturalistic and the abstract, yet as a whole his architecture is simple and clear-cut, the buildings topped with flat roofs and boldly projecting, good-looking cornices. El Paso’s superb Mills Building, by Henry and Gustav Trost, is basically a Sullivanesque structure. In 1910, when the Mills was completed, Texas could claim the world’s tallest reinforced concrete building. Architects today try to make skyscrapers interesting, even habitable, but they have somehow lost the Sullivan Touch.
Spanish Colonial Revival
Easily confused with the Mission Style (essentially a California phenomenon of the 1890s and not overabundant in Texas), Spanish Colonial Revival became a real craze in the Southwest in the Twenties. Hallmarks are plastered walls of various textures, low-pitched red tile roofs, elaborately carved or cast ornaments around doors and windows, grilles over windows, and cool arbored patios. The style seldom exceeds two stories. A reproduction of the front elevation of the Alamo, seen in one-story commercial buildings and occasionally in service stations, has been dubbed the Alamo Variant by architectural historians.
Bungaloid
The word bungalow comes from an English corruption of the Hindustani word meaning “of Bengal” and was used to describe a low dwelling, usually temporary, surrounded by a verandah. In America the bungalow style denotes a simple one-story frame house often with two broad gables facing the street. One of the gables frequently covers a porch. Brick or stone chimneys and matching columns or pedestals at the entrance are common features. Its heyday in Texas (1910-1930) resulted in part from the easy availability of $5 working drawings, which could be ordered from Los Angeles.
Modernistic Style
Common but hardly commonplace, this strictly American invention sometimes seems to represent the worst and the most uncomfortable of the recent past. It arose from feelings about style and ornament expressed in the Exposition des Arts Decoratifs held in Paris in 1925. Long ignored or remodeled, it is now beginning to be cherished for its period charm and historically unprecedented detail. Ornaments — frets, chevrons, zigzags, fluting, reeding, polychrome effects given by glazed tile and gold leaf — all stress the vertical. Geometric curves are thrown in also. Modernistic buildings are an exercise in free style applied to new building requirements (such as setbacks on skyscrapers). The “modernity” is achieved largely by decorative means. Tall Modernistic buildings, like Houston’s Gulf Oil Building, look like telescopes set on end, or as if they had been whittled out of ice from the top down.
International Style
This pervasive style is a result of total lack of ornament and the desire to express pure volume. It is the Box as art, a skin-and-bones approach using the cantilevered beam and uniform, monotonous wall surfaces. Roofs are flat and windows a seeming continuation of walls. Mies van der Rohe and Le Corbusier were perhaps the most famous practitioners of the International Style, which started in Europe in the Twenties. In Germany it originally developed as an improvement of industrial design and as a contribution to cleaner, safer working conditions. That is what it should have remained. Instead it has infiltrated all aspects of life: cartonlike office buildings, mobile homes, federal housing projects, beer coolers, radios, gas stoves, McDonald’s, even water beds. It is a clinical, rather than an emotional, solution to shelter, so widespread we may never be adequately rid of its influence.
New Formalism
The most prevalent style of the Sixties, it uses expensive-looking materials to redo old forms. The buildings are blockish, symmetrical, and flat on top. The arch is a ruling motif. The exterior ornamental grille is the most offensive aspect of the style. Architects Philip Johnson and Edward Stone have proliferated the mode in Texas. The former has gone cubist (and bananas) with Houston’s new Pennzoil Plaza, which compromises aesthetic sensibilities; the latter is responsible for Austin’s Westgate Tower, which encroaches upon the breathing space of the State Capitol grounds. The Lyndon B. Johnson Library is modified New Formalism, a kind of Egyptian shoebox or a piece of Neo-Classical nonsense by Gordon Bunshaft, based on his Rare Book Library at Yale. Always trying for a temple impression and seldom people-scaled, the New Formalism typifies two things which are wrong with Texas architecture: a yen for powerstruck individualism and the mystical.
Wrightian
Frank Lloyd Wright (1867-1959), whom many regard as the only American architect of first rank, was a cross between Walt Disney, Sam Houston, Michelangelo, and God. It is unfortunate that the best examples of his style are not in Texas. His style was horizontal and roof-oriented, with the interior form often echoed in the outside ornament and overall appearance. Smoothness and wholeness predominate. Playing with every geometric form, Wright personalized them, making up, among other things, the Prairie Style. He always promoted artistry, innovation, and intelligence with his work.
Neo-Expressionism
Expressionism is supposed to have had its start in Germany in 1910, but not much else happened until the Fifties, when a few churches and terminals started looking like Silly Putty. Stretching a point, Longhorn Caverns could be called Neo-Expressionistic. A freehander, the style is a little nuts, but flexible, stressing continuity, sweeping curves, convex-concave surfaces, leaning columns, movement, and outlandish sculptural effect. Often the structures are of sprayed plastic or concrete over metal frames. Not to be confused with the hippie-built conglomerate style or geodesic domes, honest Neo-Expressionism may have lost some if its “ooze” by now, but its appeal strikes deep in the hearts of those who disdain the Box.
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