Generic Architecture and Abstract Beauty in Downtown Houston

 

 

1.

 

A well-known German filmmaker once said that the beauty of downtown Houston is that every building there is like a haiku, a free verse that needs not refer to the past but rather strives to become an expression of the architectural possibilities of its day. Despite the beauty of the metaphor, this optimistic interpretation of the architectural genesis of the American city is likely to be rejected by those who blame this very individualism for its glaring lack of public space.

Be as it may, when looking at this specific part of the city, we can identify a complex set of heterogeneous factors at work that have resulted in an exceptional urban character. The combination of a small typical block of square proportions and the ever-growing economies of scale of real estate speculation has resulted in a complicated fit between the scale of the towers and that of the street pattern. The taller buildings, many of them featuring large figural footprints, tend to sit alone in blocks that remain under-defined and prevent the formation of urban facades.

This configuration produces some interesting effects when looking across the grain of the street grid on a diagonal, as the normative facades of the office buildings collapse into one another, formalizing a solid wall of differently punctured volumes. This massive effect is enhanced by the fact that reinforced concrete construction is prevalent in this region, producing a visual impression of confinement, distinct from the sleek curtain wall reflections that define other city centers. In their ordinariness and in their blank quality, the concrete facades of the office towers approach those of generic garage buildings — the other dominant building type in downtown Houston.

These mute parking boxes, with their lack of human content, become simultaneously solids and voids in the fabric of the city. The leveling-down of architecture to infrastructure which happens in these structures echoes the general emptiness of the city and emanates a siren song of undecipherable allure. Their disjointed entrances — in their lack of articulation with both the building and the city — become mysterious portals into other worlds where we imagine everything is possible. Similarly, the tops of these buildings are some of the most haunting spaces in downtown, deserted plazas suspended halfway through the elevations of the office towers.

 

2.

 

The car is indeed the single most pervasive image of the city and the most decisive factor of its urban configuration. In fact, what we know today as downtown Houston was formalized in the mid-twentieth century when a section of the city including its historic center and a series of adjacent areas was encircled by the construction of a ring of interstate highways. After population and commerce deserted downtown and moved to the suburbs during the 1970s and 80s, the zone became an office park for the oil and gas industry, surrounded by a few solitary institutions and an oceanic expanse of surface parking.

With virtually no housing on site, the workforce of downtown Houston arrives everyday en masse, in the early morning, by car. The social pecking order is then made apparent, as the top executives park in the few basement levels of the towers, while middle management leaves its cars in garage boxes across the street, and the lower ranks are forced to drive to parking lots farther away and walk their way to the towers. The social stigma of walking in this city is further exacerbated by the fact that a system of tunnels runs under the business district, absorbing the white-collar workers of the energy industry underground and leaving the sun-beaten sidewalks for the homeless and the occasional disoriented tourist.

This evacuation of public space, through the insertion of a parallel and privately controlled circulation network is one of the main features of this urban configuration. Downtown Houston’s emptiness, its lack of planning and its generic materiality are generally believed to produce a lack of urbanity. We argue, however, that this situation — where architectural default meets urban state of exception and where the relationship between human and car is inverted — is highly specific can produce a unique urban identity.

As the re-densification of the center becomes a trend in American cities, with a new generation of young professionals moving back in, the conditions that once gave rise to the current urban form of downtown Houston slowly start to shift. Housing estates start to sprout in and around downtown and timid efforts are made to create a public transportation network. It then becomes interesting to examine the current situation closely and to seriously consider if somewhere deep in this dreaded environment lies the seed for the new phase in the life of the city — the skeleton for a new model of inhabitation.

 

3.

 

Regardless of our feelings, the destruction of the scarce historic fabric of Houston arrived at a point of no return decades ago. Vacant buildings are quickly demolished and removed in a city where preservation and history are dirty words, obstacles to progress and the free market. Unlike in other places, in Houston there is no nostalgia — no golden past that can provide certainties for today. To the contrary, what we find here is an uncharted present, full of blank spots and conflicts, ridden with a certain poverty of experience, but wild and complex enough to be reconceptualized and exploited in the creation of a new order.

Downtown Houston is an incomplete landscape: this is what makes it so exciting, what positions it at the verge of transformation. This urban condition should be engaged through an involved empiricism, leaving aside our previous assumptions about cities and buildings, or even their inhabitants. Here, realism and abstraction become valuable tools to approach a difficult subject matter on its own terms, to capitalize on the conflicts produced by the unresolved collisions of infrastructures, scales, types and materials in downtown Houston. A conversation with the existing city, in order to interrogate its potential for evolution.

Because of  the city’s own insistence on perpetuating normative conditions without the guidance of zoning, the relevance of the interplay between architectural form and urban configuration is foregrounded. The interrogation of existing typologies (the office tower, the parking garage, the tunnel and the urban open space) in their schematic quality becomes the point of departure to understand the basic DNA of this place. This biased approach - looking at the problem through its specifics - does not intend to simply reinstate what is in place. It rather seeks to test the limits of our capacity to reconcile an understanding of architecture as both abstract ideas and concrete objects.

 

4.

 

In California in the early 1960s, Ed Ruscha developed a whole aesthetic enterprise based on the observation of gas stations and parking lots. A few years later, in 1966, Dan Graham saw in the systematic repetition of speculative tract housing in New Jersey the inner logic of a conceptual project and decided to jumpstart his career by rendering it explicit. A year later and also in New Jersey, Robert Smithson used his photographic camera to monumentalize fragments of the postindustrial landscape of his native Passaic. Also in 1967, in California, Lewis Baltz started a series of photographs in which the blank elevations of small warehouse constructions were put forward as prototypes for a new built environment and a new society.

All of these artists derived their practices from the reconsideration of undesired or repressed urban phenomena. In different degrees and to different ends, all of them identified such artifacts as representative of not only a new aesthetic, but also a new social configuration brought forward by modernity. By assigning an aesthetic value to these places and objects they were also legitimizing a set of experiences and emerging ways of life; they were simultaneously rendering visible the inner workings of our modes of production and consumption and challenging our understanding of which is the core and which the periphery of our cultural landscape.

All of these episodes from the 1960s, somehow still present today, are examples of how empirical observation, in its most biased and partisan incarnation, can propel a challenge to the cultural status quo. Considering an exploration of downtown Houston in light of these references may help clarify what is at stake. The aim here is not to glorify or romanticize a series of arbitrary phenomena as the outcome of the car and corporate culture, but rather to deepen our understanding of the city and arrive at the level of empathy that is necessary to work with an urban or architectural matter in a constructive fashion. A certain emotional involvement with physical reality is necessary for architects to do their job.

No nostalgia for the past, no do-goodism, no respect for the market either. Just the possibility to combine the type of soft knowledge and detached logic employed by conceptual art with the pragmatism and rigor of architecture and planning in order to reformulate the found conditions of Downtown Houston in envisioning a new city. Architecture should be both realistic and radical.