Every incorrect preconception I had about Dallas turned out to be true about Houston.  It sprawls further than Phoenix.  It has the most inhumanly-scaled and corporatized downtown I’ve ever seen.  If it had a decent, older part of downtown, either I couldn’t find it, or it was knocked down to build the current crop of hellish corporate headquarters.  I think it is my second least favorite American city, after Phoenix.

Houston is the largest city in the country without zoning, and I was curious to see how this affects the form of the city.  I think it actually isn’t that important.  One of my suspicions about zoning is that it merely codifies current practices.  We have perfected how to build placeless sprawl, and Houston follows these precepts – the conventions are so strong it doesn’t need explicit rules.  I couldn’t tell the difference between the sprawly parts of Houston, Dallas, Washington DC, or Atlanta.  It’s just that Houston has more of it – about 50 miles across in each direction.

The one noticeable difference is that the Edge City centers out there in the sprawl are bigger, and the buildings at their centers are much bigger than anywhere else in the country.  Whereas much commercial development in Edge City is subject to height restrictions, in Houston it is not, and so skyscrapers that would be considered large in downtowns happen out there on the edge.  This is probably a good thing.  Many large metro areas are developing secondary centers now – the Puget Sound region has about eight, Portland has consciously designated Regional Centers.  So if Houston ever begins to redevelop a sense of urbanity in these places, it will have some serious density at those centers, versus the midrise buildings in most of Edge City elsewhere.

This is the Building-Formerly-Known-as-Transco, the biggest.  (I don’t even want to guess what “Senior Living Solutions” entail.)  

There are certainly some nice parts of Houston – we saw some pleasant residential areas, the Menil Collection is a wonderful complex (to be blogged separately), and Rice University is beautiful.  Unfortunately, this is all I can post about Rice.  Houston is a city where you have to drive, and it is really not possible to park anywhere near Rice unless you have a permit or are willing to take out a second mortgage.  So we just drove through it a few times.  I don’t blame them for restricting cars, but I regret not being able to see more of the campus.

Near Rice is another amazing center, the Texas Medical Center, which reportedly has 54 different institutions.  I have seen some pretty big medical districts in other cities, but nothing like this.  It is the hospital as city.  Not being a patient, I don’t know whether having a medical complex organized on city streets in separate buildings increase or decreases the dysfunctionality of wayfinding here – it’s like the O’Hare vs. JFK paradigms.  Maybe it’s better being able to drive from building to building, rather than having to walk down endless hallways.

We took a good look at the downtown, and were appalled.  Granted, we were seeing it on a weekend, when it didn’t have surging crowds of urbanites on the sidewalks, but I get the feeling that still doesn’t happen.  Why would you walk here?  The streets are the most car-oriented, overscaled and boring I have ever seen, and that pattern goes on and on.  Many blocks are given over to corporate headquarters, with desolate plazas and parking garage ramps occupying the periphery.  

There are almost no stores, there is no smaller scale, there is nothing for the pedestrian to do but hurry to the end of the block.  The one exception seems to be Main Street, which has stores, a median with a light rail track (running in the middle of a lagoon) and some attempts at design of the public realm.  

It ain’t great, but it’s as good as it gets.  Unfortunately, we came across this monument there: We can only hope that no one took this seriously, and that this too will someday pass.

We came across what must be the biggest parking garage in the world, blocks-long, ironically juxtaposed with iconic elements from real cities.  

The shiny street of parking garage entries:

And then, in our post-911, corporate paranoia, the car-bomb bollards everywhere.  

These epitomize the Corporate Private City. We came across one park downtown, and it was full of homeless people hanging around.  It is probably the one place in the downtown where they can sit down without being shooed away by guards.

(While not directly related to the terrible downtown, the state of the streets in Houston might be another indicator of the general lack of civic- or commonwealth-mindedness.  Without a doubt, they are the worst maintained streets in America. You really can not ride a bicycle in Houston as the streets are so potholed and rutted as to be impassable;  we didn’t see a worse road until we took the 20-mile dirt road into Chaco Canyon.  Just another way that this is the ultimate city for elevating private, individual interests above common ones.)

Eventually, contemplating the streetscape became just too depressing, so I started looking at the building skins.  I’ve been shooting these curtain wall juxtaposition photos in every city, and Houston abounds in them.  When all else fails, fall back on abstraction.

They also have a cluster of deeply awful cultural institutions.  Why are they so bad here and so good in Dallas?  

Houston’s entry in the Ugliest Postmodern Building in the World Contest.  I think this may win.

And of course, there is the requite Philip Johnson excrescence.  This one may be a little better than the PPG building in Pittsburgh in building design, but it loses a lot of points for how it interacts with the street.  The corporate headquarters as fortress has never been better expressed.  

When they try to address the pedestrian realm, it ends up looking like this.  (The irony of the name must be unintentional.)  I can’t quite place what movie this is from.  When the Earth Stood Still?  Pacific Rim?  Independence Day?  Transformers?

I did find one building which seems to indicate that human beings inhabited this area before 1960.  

Overall, a truly terrible place.  And we were there in February – I can’t imagine what kind of special hell this must be in the summer.

The biggest shock of this whole trip: I liked Texas.

I expected to hate everything in Texas except Austin.  To a northerner, Texas is crazy right-wing politicians and endless sprawl (and beef barbecue, not pork).  After three weeks in Texas, I can report that those preconceptions were proved to be true (except that they do serve some pork ribs), but they obviously don’t cover the whole range of what Texas is like.  You hear about the politics and the sprawl, but you don’t hear about the light and the trees and the qualities of the cities.

I wasn’t looking forward to travelling across Texas, but I regarded it as my duty – it is a big, important and powerful place, and I thought that on this trip we should try to see what the rest of the country is really like, even parts that might make us uncomfortable.  (My whole prior experience of Texas was restricted to DFW, but we knew that very well: once during a long layover, Greta and I had walked every inch of it – about five miles).  So when we got to Dallas and immediately started seeing places that were interesting and beautiful, I was nonplussed but pleased – maybe our time in Texas wouldn’t be a dutiful slog for 1000 miles, maybe we would actually have fun.

We were staying with our friend Kathy in the Lakewood neighborhood, and that was the first surprise – a postwar neighborhood about six miles from downtown, to which it is connected by both a bike corridor and a light rail line. The houses were traditional and unpretentious, and the landscape was beautiful – everywhere there were fabulous trees, which in February gave a wonderful dappled quality to this intensely clear light. We walked along the lake and saw houses that ranged from modest to imposing, but with none of the grandiosity and kitsch that I had expected. (Obviously, this is because we were seeing older, closer-in neighborhoods, not the sprawling horrors of the rumored outer suburbs, such as Plano.)   I didn’t go looking for the bad parts of the Dallas-Ft. Worth megalopolis, but I did see enough of them while driving across the area. ( Most notably, the George W. Bush Library at SMU. beautiful sited above a freeway:)

If the residential neighborhoods were the first surprise, the downtown was the second. Like many American cities, it is surrounded by gigantic highways – elevated, surface, depressed – every way possible. It is also completely cut off from the riverfront. However, within the two grids and four square miles of the downtown, there is a wide range of building types and ages, and evidence that the city is really thinking about urban design (and willing to spend some money on it).

The West End is full of 19th- and early 20th-century brick commercial and government buildings.  Dealey Plaza is here, and the infamous Texas Book Depository.  There is a Sixth Floor Museum, and it struck us as pretty ghoulish.  

But it is an intact, coherent district, full of people and businesses – in much better shape than most such districts in other American cities.

Dallas has had sustained growth throughout the postwar period, which is reflected in the juxtaposition of buildings from different eras.        It’s an entertaining mix, although there are definitely the goofball, Worlds-Fairy buildings too.

And another strong contender for Worst PoMo Building Ever (Gigantic Building subcategory).

But Dallas has more than its share of serious buildings by well-known architects, most of them built fairly recently.  For some reason the culture seems to support this in a way that other cities (such as Houston), don’t.  Some are really good and some fall short, but they all show a commitment to architecture beyond the functional and economically viable.  Seeing so many together in one downtown is very surprising.

There is a Calatrava bridge, which if you’re determined to have a Calatrava, is probably a smarter thing to get than a building.  It’s a beautiful object, it doesn’t have the problems of not fitting into an urban context the way his buildings don’t, and it doesn’t matter if it leaks.  

Still dominating the skyline is Pei’s Fountain Place.  It is a really big glass tower, but it doesn’t seem so, as it isn’t a box.  The seemingly simple prismatic shape is constantly changing as you move around it,  and it works much the same way the Hancock Tower does – sort of there, sort of not-there, hiding anything that gives it scale, meeting the ground well and somehow inconspicuously, abstraction at its best.  

Most of the cool new architecture is clustered in the Arts District, at the north end of downtown.  It begins at the Dallas Museum of Art, and an avenue lined with cultural institutions leads north from there.  The Nasher sculpture museum is on the left, by Renzo Piano.

It’s simple, with a series of repeating structural bays, and typical Piano detailing.  

The Winspear Opera House, by Foster+Partners, is hard to see as a building, and impossible to photograph.  It is basically a full-block shading device, with a relatively small opera house in the middle.  This is a view of the outdoor amphitheater on one side of it.  

The strategy is pretty wonderful – here is this enormously hot city, where people probably won’t venture out of their air-conditioning for much of the year.  This big screen shades huge outdoor areas, with plazas, entries, cafes, sitting areas, etc., and i would think that it keeps people from just driving their cars into the basement parking garage and taking the elevator to the opera. For something so big, it’s pretty self-effacing – the image of the building is the gesture of the big roof, and the opera house reads as a pavilion under it.

Across the way is the Wyly Theatre, by REX / OMA – purportedly by  Joshua Prince-Ramus, with an assist from Koolhaas.  I couldn’t get inside, but the skin is notable.  

It’s intriguing, and from a distance you can’t figure out how they made this shimmering screen wall.  Then you get up close.  

I’d love to know what this cost.  There is one side of it where some building elements are exposed, and you can understand it better as a building.  

In contrast to these buildings, the Booker T. Washington High School, by Allied Works, across the street is an anomaly – it looks like a relatively normal building.  Building volumes and fenestration reveal the uses within.  It’s beautifully detailed and proportioned.  There’s a stepped central courtyard around the which the school wraps, which is good for daylighting and building depth, but I can’t imagine it being occupied often in the Dallas sun – it may need to be under Foster’s roof.  But in the midst of showmanship, it has the virtue of restraint – it’s not a one-liner building.

These buildings have many fine qualities, but it’s hard to see how they make up a city.  It’s the Lincoln Center phenomenon, but on an even bigger scale.  There is no finer grain to the city, just discrete institutions that sit near each other, most of them vying for attention for themselves, or their patrons.  (There are more I haven;t mentioned, such as an execrable Trammel museum of Asian art and a symphony hall that looks strangely dated already.)  They enfront the arts axis, but they all have some seriously weird back sides, where collisions like this happen.  On one side these back up against major arterials and freeways, but the other side forms a strange wall where it’s hard to see city fabric adhering.

I think the best part of this district is the oldest piece, the Dallas Museum of Art.  It has a very good, very big collection, and the building is by Edward Larrabee Barnes. The parti is similar to his Walker Art Center in Minneapolis – a processional through galleries and up major stairs-as-rooms from level to level.  

It has good moments, but it doesn’t work.  The Walker is relatively small;  even if you’re disoriented, you can just give up control and follow the path, and it all comes out right in the end.  The DMA is so much bigger that there are several of these wandering paths, and you get completely lost.  When I lived in New York, I knew every inch of the Met, and could show someone the best way to the bathroom from the medieval armor across the central axis and behind the furniture galleries;  this place had me stymied.  Once you venture above the ground floor it is a labyrinth, and determined as I was to make sense of it, I eventually had to ask directions on how to get out and take an elevator.

So why is the DMA my favorite one of the lot?  The sculpture garden.  It was designed by Dan Kiley, the great modernist landscape architect (something I could sense from the moment I spotted it).  I caught a glimpse of it from a ground floor lobby and was irresistibly drawn outside.  

We sometimes talk about whether a new museum is a good place to view art, or whether it’s something that exists mainly for itself, highlighting the architecture.  The same question could be raised about this garden.  The sculpture and  its placement are fine, but to me the overwhelming point is the landscape and the space itself.  A series of shifting, off-center axes.  Live oak trees filtering the clear Texas light.  Strict rectilinear geometry allowing for diagonal glimpses into adjoining spaces.  A series of wall planes with varied materials and textures around which your path threads.   Light and shadow and color. Open places, secluded places.  Symmetry used to emphasize entry.  

It was so good I could have spent the whole day there, but I had other things to see.

The new Perot science museum by Morphosis is the ideal building for us on this trip – Greta gets to look at science and natural history (which she has already written about), and I get to look at architecture.  Like most Morphosis buildings, it’s deceptively simple and functional.  Ten years ago, Thom Mayne explained how they designed the Eugene courthouse – they arrive at a simple plan, get everyone to buy in on the scheme, and then spend their effort elaborating  and finding the richness within the simple parti.  You can see that here too.  A science museum wants to be a black box for the exhibit designers.  They got that here, and it was then clad in a varied, textured skin which doesn’t try to disguise the essential boxiness of it.  

The skin is lifted up at points to reveal the lobby below, and afford views out into the landscape.

The other major element of the museum is the circulation system, which must draw people in, move them efficiently through the building from floor to floor, and perhaps provide the architects some latitude for spatial and tectonic excitement that they have been denied in the box.  And as many the patrons will be children, allow them some room to play and run and have fun too.

The system starts outside, drawing people up a ramp from the street into a large entry and cafe plaza.  

On the inside, there follows a series of spatial expansions, compressions, shifts, revealed yet inaccessible destinations, etc., which I can’t document in detail, there is just too much going on.  But you never feel lost – there is one predetermined path, and your experience is modulated as you move along it.

The pathway is to get visitors to the top, then have them walk down.  This is accomplished by a series of escalators.  On the outside, you can see the homage to to the primal gerbil tubes of the Pompidou Center, but eschewing the tubularity.  

The skin is cracked at the northeast corner, and the circulation core behind is exposed.  It feels like a canyon inside, and the non-repetitive circulation system provides endless variety of movement and views.  Random photos:            

It is playful, it is intriguing, it draws you in and it doesn’t get you lost.  And it provides a great connection to the city across the freeway, in a way not unlike Piano’s outdoor terraces at the Whitney in New York.  It’s a remarkably clear building, one where every part is fulfilling its intention, and the quality of the architecture enhances one’s enjoyment of the museum.

Beyond the buildings, the attention to urban design in Dallas was notable.  Of course there are giant streets dominated by cars, but somehow as a pedestrian I didn’t feel intimidated.  There was a pedestrian scale to all the downtown streets, crossings were frequent and non-threatening.  The light rail transit corridor is efficient and pleasant through the heart of downtown.  

A welcome new feature is Klyde Warren Park, built over three blocks of the depressed freeway on the west side of downtown, and providing needed connection across.  Designed by James Burnett, it has lots of open spaces, seating, a playground, walkways, food, etc.  

It’s pretty straightforward, not a design tour-de-force like the High Line, but it is incredibly pleasant on a sunny day, and draws lots of users.  There is a restaurant, cafe and performance pavilion by Thomas Phifer, in what I’m coming to recognize as his light and white, Miesian style.  

It’s very elegant and exquisitely detailed (with James Turrell-like knife-edges corners) providing that food-oriented catalyst for a park that William Whyte promoted.

As in many other places on this trip, I wish I’d had more time in Dallas.  It was a good introduction to Texas – it knocked me out of my preconceptions, being so much better than I had expected.   i could have tracked down the sprawling nightmare of the exurbs, but I could have found similar bad parts in any other major city in the country.  To paraphrase Tolstoy, all sprawl is alike, each good city is good in its own way.

One of the reasons that New Orleans is so different from other American cities is that has always been constrained.  Surrounded by Lake Ponchartrain (to the north) and low-lying swamps and marshes in every other direction, the whole metropolitan area encompasses only around 200 square miles, with a population of 1.2 million – approximately half that of Portland’s.  The constraints on New Orleans used to be even more extreme – the originally-settled areas on the ridges (about eight feet high) were only later supplemented by the close-in drained-swamp residential areas in the 19th century, and the more extensive sprawl (such as it is) is all from the postwar era.  So the center of the city feels compact and manageable, while having very imageable, distinct districts.

When the Americans began to move in after the Louisiana Purchase, they mainly left the Vieux Carre alone, and settled upriver, across Canal St.  Canal St. never had a canal, but it was planned for one, and so it is immensely wide.  It is a wonderful contrast to the rest of the city – you emerge from the narrow confines of the French Quarter to the bright, open expanse of Canal.    

The buildings form a continuous wall, there are streetcar tracks up the center, and a double row of palm trees.  Bright lights, traffic, tourist attractions and hotels – it is an entertaining and exciting space, one that says, this is a big city.  Also a tropical city – with its white facades and palm trees, Canal feels very different from the grey avenues of the north.    One of the two streetcar lines runs up Canal, and it is a joy.  The old cars are fabulous, and here as on St. Charles, you ride along experiencing the city as it goes by.  

Canal really comes into its own on Mardi Gras – all the large parades end up here, heading up one side of the neutral ground (median) and back down the other.  The scale of the street works with the large crowds and floats – it reminded me of Broadway in New York with the Thanksgiving parade.      

The end of Canal at the River is the center of tourist / convention madness.  Hotels, convention center, casino, aquarium – all the overscaled and blank buildings are here.  It works pretty well- these fairly standard dreadful buildings are clustered and have a minimal impact on the other neighborhoods.  You can just ignore this part of town if you don’t have to go there.    

The rest of the downtown is blend of good old commercial buildings and standard mid-century towers.  

The more recent towers, spawned by the oil boom, are clustered upriver along Poydras Street.    Overall, there is balance between the old and the newer – there are not many places where the gigantism and banality of recent decades takes over.  Although New Orleans’s first skyscraper, the Plaza Tower, is truly inept.  It is now empty, with asbestos and mold issues, and lawsuits apparently flying in every direction.  It’s so bad it might be worth keeping.  

Poydras St. is also the location of Charles Moore’s Piazza d’Italia. It’s a funny little thing – filling in an open space between a skyscraper and a parking lot.  Moore was obviously trying to construct  a place that could be inhabited, unlike the empty modernist plazas built to satisfy zoning ordinances, but the cards were stacked against him.  If the city fabric grew up densely around it, so that you emerged from a street into the plaza, it might work.  But the towers are pulled back, and one sees the Piazza from the outside as a disconnected object, not just as a surrounding screen from the inside.  The detailing is over-the-top Pomo, and is perhaps our best remnant of the movement spinning out of control.  

The elevated highways that ring the business district have done their damage, as everywhere else. The neighborhood of Treme was decimated, and the Uptown area to the west is cut off by a no-man’s land around the freeway.  

While the central business district has largely wiped out the early 19th century buildings there, some do survive, and the mix of old and new shifts as you move uptown, through the Lower Garden District and Central City areas into the Garden District.  

This side of town is served by the other streetcar line, along St. Charles.  The old cars are in fabulous condition, and a miles-long ride is one of the best ways to see the city.  This area is remarkable.  In some ways it looks more like other American cities, in that styles that were current in the late 19th century are all visible, but they are adapted to New Orleans.  There are a lot of Greek Revival houses, their large porticos well-suited to the climate.         The wealth of the builders is apparent – whereas most of New Orleans’s older dense residential neighborhoods were working class in origin, in uptown there are many areas with large houses and big yards.

In general, as you move out from the city center in any direction, the density decreases, as neighborhoods begin to look more like those in other parts of the country, with detached houses sitting on lots of varying widths.  This happens in places as different as Mid-City,

in 20th century parts of Gentilly

and in the Lower Ninth Ward.  

It’s a commonplace that New Orleans is unlike anywhere else in the US;  this difference is seen most clearly when you’re near the city center – the house types, the block organization, the streetscapes – these are most different in the Vieux Carre, built before it was part of the US, and in the early 19th-century districts, when the local influences were most strong, and a national building culture hadn’t yet asserted itself.  The outskirts of the city are physically much like other old metropolitan areas, with ranch houses and strip centers.  But the New Orleans difference is apparent in another important way, even out in these newer areas:  in the culture of the city and the tenor of social life.  The way people live here is unlike anywhere else, even out on the edge.  They may have a Costco, but that Costco has an excellent liquor selection.