The Architects
Welcome to Houston, the cutting edge of architecture. The local boys are turning a gentlemen’s profession into a business, the stylish out-of-towners are creating a new aesthetic, and neither group is filled with admiration for the other.
They worked, they fought, they dreamed, they loved . . . and when they were done, there stood Houston.
The first one of them to arrive was Philip, back in 1949. With a little hindsight, any Houston architect could recognize that that was when this business of out-of-town architects’ getting all the good jobs had begun. Philip is Philip Johnson, the New York architect, and one of the many annoying things about him, from the point of view of the Houston architects, was that everybody seemed to call him Philip, even people who barely knew him. It was never Johnson or even Mr. Johnson, and somehow his being so widely known a Philip was part and parcel of the way the chic New York architects did business. They were chummy, but not in a comfortable, lunch-with-your-banker way. Philip had lunch with people like the editor of Progressive Architecture and the architecture critic of the New York Times, and then they would write up his new building and quote his pronouncements on the latest architectural style. Nobody ever quoted the Houston architects’ pronouncements on anything; on the other hand, nobody ever asked Philip how often his buildings came in on time and on budget, which the Houston architects felt was very seldom.
The point about Philip’s arrival in Houston is that back then nobody suspected that big things were afoot. He had come to town to design a house for Mr. and Mrs. John de Menil of the schlumberger oil well services empire, and as Philip himself says, Houston then was not Houston, and for all he cared it could have been a job in Dubuque. By the same token, Philip Johnson then was not yet really Philip, either. He was six years out of architecture school and he had done very little work. Even the famous all-glass house in Connecticut that he designed for himself was not yet completed. Also, he could pick and choose his jobs because he was rich, having inherited a large block of Alcoa stock from his father. He had been the curator of architecture at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in the thirties, and in 1940, at the age of 34, he had enrolled in the architecture school at Harvard. The de Menils were art patrons, and through a sculptor named Mary Callery, they met Philip and hired him as their architect.
The de Menils’ lot was on San Felipe Street in River Oaks, in the middle of a sea of lovingly ersatz Spanish mission homes, French château homes, Italian palazzo homes, and English Tudor homes of the sort that the leading architects of the day were happy to provide for their clients. Philip, however, would build in only one style, the boxy, functional, German-born International Style of Walter Gropius (his dean at Harvard) and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe (his mentor), and so the de Menil house was designed to be a one-story brick rectangular box with no ornamentation. In the International Style, the decorative was frowned upon.
When it was finished, the house was the first International Style building in Houston, and it marked the beginning of a warm friendship between Philip Johnson and the de Menils. In 1956 Philip began to design the campus of the University of St. Thomas, in the Montrose section of Houston, where the de Menils were the leading benefactors. The campus was, of course, a series of brick rectangular boxes with no ornamentation, connected by open-air passageways made of steel wide-flange girders. It was the second International Style endeavor in Houston.
The de Menil house and the University of St. Thomas have turned out to be enormously important, for two reasons. First, they established a pattern that would in a few years, to everyone's utter surprise, spread to downtown Houston: the coming to dominance of the International Style, with out-of-town architects as its bearers. The second reason was Philip Johnson himself. After the International Style became established downtown—not by him—he returned to Houston to sow the seeds of its destruction with a series of buildings designed in the seventies. These buildings elevated Houston to its current exalted status as (maybe) the architectural capital of the United States, the place where the styles are set.
Nowadays, the way downtown Dallas and New Orleans and even the newest parts of San Francisco and Denver and, yes, New York look is derived from Houston. So the palace intrigues surrounding the building of downtown Houston quite possibly are responsible for the way your office building looks and for the mental picture you have of your town. Also, Houston has given birth to several huge, globe-trotting architectural firms that, while not pioneers in determining how buildings look, are trying to change the way the profession is practiced. They put up an impressive number of buildings, and if you live in Austin or Galveston or Abilene or McAllen, one of them dominates the skyline that you see every day on the way to work—again, a way in which the action in Houston plays out across the state and the world.
But back in 1949, the arrival of Philip Johnson in Houston occasioned a bit of cackling by the local architects. Philip never learned how to do mechanical drawings, and he was not strong on the practical details of his new profession. For instance, he was unaware that houses in Houston needed air conditioning, so he didn’t design any for the de Menil home; even when he was prevailed upon to add it, he insisted that the grilles and blowers and ducts be as unnoticeable as possible.
While the leading architects of Houston were sensible men who knew that aesthetics had to be balanced against cost, Philip felt that an architect was an artist and therefore above compromise. To supervise the construction of the de Menil house, Philip brought in Hugo V. Neuhaus, Jr., a young Houston architect who had gone to Harvard with him and who was also very much of the world in which Philip traveled, in that his father had founded the investment firm of Underwood, Neuhaus & Company and his mother had been a Rice. One day during construction, the contractor approached Neuhaus to say that Philip had designed a six-piece doorjamb for a closet in the de Menils’ dressing room that would have to be specially built at great expense. Bearing in mind that nobody was going to see the doorjamb anyway, the contractor had figured out a way to build it in only three pieces and have it look exactly the same. It seemed like a good idea to Neuhaus, and he gave the contractor the green light.
As Neuhaus tells the story, when Philip found out about that, he was very upset. The arguments about cost and time—which must have been made gently, because Neuhaus is a gentle man—cut no ice with Philip, and relations between the two men were never the same again. After that, all of the many small amendments and repairs to the de Menil house were done by Howard Barnstone, another young follower of the International Style, rather than Neuhaus. When it came time for a local architect to perform a similar function at the University of St. Thomas, Barnstone was chosen. Again, Philip was less than completely practical. He did not realize, for instance, that there had to be a space between the outer and inner layers of bricks in the wall to trap moisture, and he had put the two layers flush against each other. Consequently, moisture often seeped into the buildings. The steel wide-flange girders at St. Thomas, while quite functional in appearance—the appearance of function was a shining goal of the International Style—in fact rusted whenever it rained and so required elaborate maintenance.
No matter; Philip was bringing the International Style to Houston, and to the small, loyal band of Miesians in town, that was what was important. Hugo Neuhaus was so devoted to Mies that he once sent the designs for a West Texas office building to Mies for his blessing before letting the client see them. Donald Barthelme, another Miesian in Houston, named one of his sons Peter Rohe Barthelme. When Mies himself was brought to Houston in 1954 to design an austere addition to the Museum of Fine Arts (completed in 1958) that was festooned with functional-appearing steel girders, they were in near-ecstasy. But their works and opinions had about as much effect on downtown Houston as the machinations of the poets in town had on the contents of the Houston Chronicle.
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