The 10 Best Buildings in Texas
An architectural tour.
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The cycloid vaults were also integral to the natural-lighting scheme; they could be slotted to admit light into the galleries even in the interior of the building. The problem was diffusing the harsh Texas sun; after considerable study, this was accomplished with narrow, finely perforated aluminum reflectors that ran the length of the slots, allowing some light to sprinkle softly into the galleries. The rest was reflected over the surface of the vaults, washing them with an ethereal, slippery silver glow, a transmutation of light into form that hushes even the most casual visitors.
Kahn, who rarely credited his collaborators, confided to his daughter that when he sketched the Kimbell design, “another hand was doing the drawing.” In a local television interview, he elaborated that his mind was “full of Roman greatness,” acknowledging his debt to the ancient Romans’ use of the barrel vault for utilitarian structures like warehouses. Whatever the source of his inspiration, Kahn, who believed that “architecture must have the religion of light,” found a home for his wandering faith in his Fort Worth museum. Today the Kimbell, that modestly scaled, bare-concrete Taj Mahal of natural light, is widely regarded as not only the summit of Texas architecture but also one of the world’s most nearly perfect buildings.
8) Pennzoil Place
HOUSTON, 1976 *PHILIP JOHNSON AND JOHN BURGEE
Philip Johnson’s love affair with Texas began in 1948, when he came to Houston to build a house for aspiring art collectors Jean and Dominique de Menil. Johnson’s reputation rested on his connections with modern masters like International style icon Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and on a glass house he was building for himself in Connecticut.
Johnson did not take to Houston immediately: “I couldn’t understand how anyone lived there,” he recalled years later. But the city’s architectural community simply went gaga over the patrician, opinionated East Coast aesthete and his rarified theories. By the seventies, Johnson had completed half a dozen major projects in Texas and had long since discovered the allure of Houston’s wheeler-dealer milieu: “I found out those people weren’t afraid to try anything!” The risk taker behind Pennzoil Place was developer Gerald D. Hines, who was hatching an entirely new strategy for leasing office space, using brand-name architects to sell high-rise buildings in the same way a bankable star could fill a movie theater. Hines’s client, Pennzoil CEO J. Hugh Liedtke, wanted a new corporate headquarters that didn’t look like a cigar box, but his space requirements weren’t enough to fill up a downtown high-rise. So Hines brought in another major tenant, the Zapata Corporation, and told Johnson to come up with a design that expressed the split personality of the project.
Johnson proposed two 36-story trapezoidal towers separated only by a ten-foot-wide slit where their angled faces abutted, creating a breathtakingly intimate pas de deux between the two massive structures. When the model was shown to Liedtke (whom Johnson, himself well over sixty years old when he designed Pennzoil Place, later described as a “cranky old individual”), the oilman loved the slit but was just furious about the flat cigar-box tops. The lobby that connected the twin towers was a pyramidal shape with a steeply pitched triangular roof, and Johnson, famously quick on his feet, plucked this piece from the base of the model and put it on top, as if he were playing with blocks. “That’s it,” said the suddenly mollified Liedtke.
And that was the genesis of the most celebrated roofline in decades, two sheer trapezoidal tops angled at a 45-degree pitch. Pennzoil Place wasn’t technically postmodern—it now looks more like the precursor of the shape-shifting, minimalist-sculpture forms in vogue today. But it broke the box, and over the next decade Johnson’s art deco Transco Tower and Gothic RepublicBank Center, both borrowing unabashedly from history, gave Houston the planet’s first postmodern skyline. In his seventh decade, the former pied piper of the International style became the world’s most incendiary architect, leader of the revolution against the modernist ancien régime he had himself established.
9) Menil Collection
HOUSTON, 1987 * RENZO PIANO
Louis Kahn was the first choice to design the museum that would be home to Jean and Dominique de Menil’s world-renowned art collection. But both Jean and Kahn died before the project could begin, and Dominique hired Piano, a Genoese architect who to all appearances could not have been less suited to her design. Piano had only one major project under his belt, the Centre Pompidou, a hulking exoskeleton of exposed girders, multicolored ducting, and wraparound escalators dropped in the middle of Paris, where it was greeted with shrieking outrage. De Menil wanted her museum to slip almost undetected into the surrounding neighborhood, an enclave of unprepossessing twenties clapboard homes—most of which she owned and had painted the trademark Menil gray—on the periphery of the University of St. Thomas. The ground floor of this “village museum” would be a series of galleries where relatively few works would be displayed at a time, because de Menil felt that “most museums are overloaded with works that compete for the viewer’s eye.”
Piano seemed determined to play against type. His low-profile, boxy design was part International style, with a rectilinear framework of steel girders painted white, and part Gulf Coast vernacular: gray-stained cypress siding and dark pine flooring in the galleries, along with shaded porches and a dogtrot-like central hall running entirely through the building. The marquee feature, however, was the roof. The de Menils had hired Kahn to repeat his magic with natural light, and the same was expected from Piano. But where Kahn had hung reflectors beneath his vault slots almost like lighting fixtures, Piano used his reflectors as the actual roof of the entire building. Three hundred wavelike, ferro-cement louvers were hung from iron trusses, shading the museum galleries and porches like giant venetian blinds. The louvers were positioned so that some weak northern light came directly into the galleries, but the strongest sunlight was reflected from the top of one leaf to the bottom of the next. The effect was an even more naturalistic lighting scheme than Kahn’s. “People will be able to feel the day changing, the clouds coming over,” said Piano when he presented the idea.
“Bland,” “monastic,” “determinedly unspectacular” were some of the terms critics applied to the building. But actual users quickly found it one of the world’s most blissfully sublime marriages of art and architecture. And although Piano himself described the Menil as “totally introverted,” it became the template for the rest of his career, as he continued to build site-sensitive, tasteful museums all over the world, employing increasingly sophisticated high-tech schemes to manage natural light. Perhaps even more important, at the height of postmodern enthusiasm and excess, the Menil Collection pointed the way toward a new generation of modernist buildings that could be both innovative and neighborly. Little more than a decade and a few miles from Pennzoil Place, this is where modernism began its comeback.
10) World Birding Center
MISSION, 2004 * LAKE/FLATO ARCHITECTS
Texas has produced at least two great buildings in this decade: Renzo Piano’s Nasher Sculpture Center, in Dallas, and Japanese architect Tadao Ando’s Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth. But sustainability is rapidly becoming to this century what functionalism was to the last. If modern buildings were “machines for living,” the best designs of this century will be machines that use far less energy and fewer resources.
Before railroads and air-conditioning, sustainability was a necessary virtue for Texas builders. David Lake and Ted Flato are heirs to that regional tradition; both worked at O’Neil Ford’s San Antonio office before starting their own firm in 1984. Lake/Flato is nationally recognized for adapting the Texas vernacular—limestone walls, sheet-metal roofs, the functional geometry of barns and water tanks—to clean-lined houses that are unmistakably modern yet seem to grow out of the land.
The World Birding Center is an ambitious ecotourism project started by Texas Parks and Wildlife, a series of nine bird-watching sites extending 120 miles along the Lower Rio Grande Valley. The headquarters and visitors center is a complex of three buildings clustered around a courtyard, a practical layout on South Texas farms and ranches for centuries. The arched, corrugated-steel roofs are self-supporting, using less steel than the usual trussed-metal roof; the utilitarian, Quonset hut—like design was based on local farm buildings, but it echoes classical models in much the same fashion as Kahn’s barrel-vaulted Kimbell Museum. The arches also shade walkways that function both as bird-watching venues and outdoor hallways, allowing the buildings to get by with less interior space. Among the sustainable features are eighteen rainwater-collecting tanks, while locally produced clay bricks and recycled cypress planking reprise traditional building materials.
The World Birding Center completes a circle for Texas architecture, proving that looking back doesn’t preclude moving forward with creative panache. And there’s a lesson in this two-and-a-half-century round-trip for a culture still struggling to escape its self-invented stereotypes: Only when we embrace the future in all its complexity can we authentically revive our past.
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