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Barbecue and the sublime

Peter: I first learned about barbecue from reading a Calvin Trillin article in the New Yorker. Trillin is one of the best food writers ever, and having grown up in Kansas City, he extolled the primacy of Arthur Bryant’s, with which I fully agree. (One of the readers of this blog from KC characterized our search for barbecue on this trip as, So you’re looking for the second best barbecue place in the country?) Trillin also used to write “American Stories” in the New Yorker, which were frequently about crime. For me, the best Trillin articles were the ones which combined food and crime, such as one I vaguely remember about a convicted felon who made the best fried chicken.

On this trip, I have been writing about architecture, while Greta blogs about food. We do overlap in our interests sometimes – I always care about the food, and every once in a while, we see a building that Greta admits is kind of interesting. But we have never before written a blog post together which combined architecture and food; we’ve mainly been eating in cheap places with good food, and the architecture has not been noticeable. And with barbecue, there is a fundamental rule on the inverse relationship between the quality of the barbecue and the establishment: the grubbier the joint, the better the barbecue. (A corollary states that the quality of the barbecue is also related to the number of smiling pigs that can found around the place, but that’s another post.) We have driven past many a barbecue joint, given it the once-over, and decided it just looked too nice. The architecture is just a sign for the food, with no
significance beyond that.

As an architect, I’d sometimes wondered about this. Eating good barbecue is a sublime experience, and wouldn’t it be possible to eat barbecue in a place which was also sublime, without necessarily being too fancy (or even bourgeois)? It seemed unlikely that this ideal existed, and then we got to Lockhart, Texas. Even in Texas, Lockhart is legendary. It is home to three or four superb barbecue places, and we had been advised to go there by any number of foodies and food reviews. The big problem with eating barbecue in Lockhart is deciding where to eat. (Some people have decided they have to try it all, but on this trip we have learned the dangers of overindulging while trying to stay on the move.) There’s Kreuz Market, Smitty’s Market, Black’s Barbecue, and Chisholm Trail. It all sounded great, so we decided to just roll into town and see what happened.

Driving into Lockhart from Austin on Route 130, we passed the Kreuz Market on the outskirts. It looked like a new building, and even though we knew it was great, we just couldn’t overcome our predilections. So we drove to the center of town, near the spectacular Caldwell County Courthouse, and while looking around the square, we noticed the smell of barbecue in the air. Everywhere. Following our noses, we came to this yard of stacked wood,

and around the corner was Smitty’s Market.

It was a little confusing, with the storefront on the left just selling meat and sausages, but then we found the double doors that led in to the barbecue joint. We stepped from the bright Texas midday sun into a long, dark corridor, with a few locals in the distance.

At the end of the hall, there was the glow of a wood fire on the floor,

and around the corner was another room, with more fires, and men tending the pits.

The dim light filtered through the smoke that filled the room. The fires were laid right on the floor, with most of the smoke being drawn into hoods that led to the pits, but some rising to the roof high above.

Two guys tended the pits and chopped the meat, while a woman took orders and sold the barbecue. The menu on the wall was confusing – we were there for brisket, and were surprised to see pork ribs in Texas, but what was a cold ring or a hot ring? We asked the guys in front of us, and they said it was the sausage – you could get it from the pit (hot), or you could get it uncooked to take home (cold).

As we waited in line, the ambience of the space had its effect upon us. The room was a sanctuary of barbecue, a dim world of fire and smoke and meat, where people carried on the primal cooking rituals of their ancestors. It was barbecue as essence, and the elemental qualities of the architecture – space, darkness, fire, smoke, aroma, masonry, steel – induced a feeling of reverence; the people in line were fairly quiet, and there were a few old guys just sitting along the walls. It reminded me of a medieval church, where the sensory experience takes you out of the normal world, and allows you to contemplate the sublime.

You order, pay cash, and get your meat wrapped up in butcher paper – no credit cards, plastic trays or styrofoam boxes here. Then you take your food through the doors into the separate dining room, where you can buy sides and drinks – the purity of the barbecue pit is unsullied by potato salad or sodas. Passing through those doors was like moving from the sacred to the profane. The dining room was the day-to-day world, with bright fluorescent lights, an ATM, televisions and crummy metal chairs. But even though you had been rudely ejected into the harsh light of modern banality, you carried with you a small package that contained the essence of that other, deeper world.

Greta: They did try to keep the modern world from entirely polluting the bbq, by banning forks. You could get a spoon for coleslaw and potato salad, but nothing was supposed to get between you and the meat.

And oh what meat. Why would anyone get cold rings, when they could order them hot and smoky? Why would anyone want side dishes, when there were ribs to gorge on? For that matter, why would you devote an inch of stomach space to anything other than the brisket?

That isn’t to say the sausage and and ribs weren’t good. The sausage crumbled in your mouth once the skin was broken, exposing you to all the wonderful flavors within. The ribs rivaled BBQ Exchange’s in terms of rub, and Slap Ya Momma’s in texture.

But this is beef country, and no one has ever made brisket that could compare to this. The fat gave it an almost buttery flavor that at first I couldn’t tell whether was from the beef or the bread I was eating it on. It was somehow chewy and soft at once, which allowed you to savor it longer, like bbq taffy. I’ve learned that describing the taste of beef is nigh on impossible, but it suffices to say that this was fabulous. To cover this wonder with sauce with be worse than gilding a lily, it would be a travesty of the highest order. Not even Arthur Bryant’s sauce could improve this, and I mean that in a good way.

The small sadness I felt while eating this came from knowing unless I return someday to Texas, I will never have it again. The vegan Eugenian population could never support a truly fabulous bbq restaurant unless they also had bbq tofu, which belongs sorely in the domain of the profane. Plus, with modern building codes and air quality regulations, another building will never be built with the same potential for greatness. There has never been a better reason to move to Texas than to gorge like a starving wolf at Smitty’s.

Roberto Cipriano

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This is a big country, with a lot of people, who live lives that are quite different from one another’s. We live in Eugene – a weird yet relatively homogeneous place – so another theme of this trip has been to get out there and let Greta see a wider range of possible lives. We’ve been in towns full of rich people, neighborhoods and whole regions full of poor people, very white places, very diverse places, native American reservations, small Southern towns, endless sprawl, and cabins in the woods. In these places, we’ve met or visited people who have constructed very different lives for themselves – big city professionals, farmers on the plains, corporate employees, retirees in RVs, academics, musicians, tech entrepreneurs, artists, park rangers, writers, craftspeople. It’s been fascinating to see the variety of lives that people have arrived at, and Greta certainly has a lot of new models to consider as she moves ahead with her life. But if I had to select an alternative life for myself from all the people we’ve visited, I might go with Roberto’s. I probably appreciated it in that there are similarities in interests and occupations to my own life, but he seems to have put a wide variety of avocations together in a very integrated and satisfying way.

Roberto was an architecture student at the UO about 20 years ago. He was in my second year studio (both his second year in school and my second year teaching). Even at this early age he was clearly different from his classmates – he was somewhat older, had lived in different places around the country, and had already developed atypical interests – such as his expertise in magic and his running a magic store. I had some of the same problem with Roberto that I’ve had throughout my life with many other classmates and students – there were just too many interesting topics to discuss with him, and it was hard to limit the discussion to architecture.

I lost touch with Roberto after his graduation (as I did with most students in the pre-Facebook era), but we later reconnected, and I’ve followed his exploits with interest. He ended up in New York, where he lived in a loft in Brooklyn (back when one might still be able to do this without a hedge fund manager’s income), and he worked in Deborah Berke’s office for many years, where he became friends with Chris Harnish. (It’s rare when you hear uniformly good things about an architectural office from separate sources, and it’s good to know that the quality of the firm matches up to the quality of the built work.)

Throughout this time Roberto continued to develop his other interests – he is a serious bicyclist, musician, and craftsman of all types – mechanic, builder, instrument-maker. He went off to southeast Asia for a year, working to build a health clinic in a rural area. At this point he had some doubts about staying in the architecture profession, as years of experience tend to make one aware of its shortcomings, and he spent some time taking care of the prerequisites for applying to medical school. But through a complex series of events and circumstances, he didn’t make this radical shift, and instead changed his focus within the field.

Roberto moved back to Texas, where he had previously lived, and settled in Austin. He has worked for and on a number of endeavors – architectural practice, construction, modular production, and musical instrument fabrication. He is currently working in the design/build mode, on his own while we were visiting, but now seemingly with a larger enterprise (according to recent FB posts).

The example of his work that we experienced most thoroughly was his own house, which is located in an older neighborhood south of the river in Austin. It is high-quality new construction, yet somehow it fits into this funky context just fine – with no pretensions, no screaming architectural indulgences, and a thoughtful use of vernacular materials.

It is even a vernacular type – a dogtrot house, with an screened porch between the enclosed spaces – living and eating one one side, bedroom and bathroom on the other. The porch is perfect for this environment, with shaded, ventilated living space in the summer. (And privacy enhanced by the subtle layering from the street side.) This passive feature, plus the extensive PV array on the roof make this house extremely energy-efficient.

The interiors shows off his craftsman’s sensibility, with a smart combination of off-the-shelf items (including exposed gang-nail roof trusses), and hand-crafted details (such as the pantry door and hardware).

There is a second building in the backyard – a capacious shop building, which is on axis, and so defines both the extent of the visual space of the dogtrot, and the outdoor terrace area. In this era of willful, extravagant, often-meaningless exuberant shapes, it is a joy to see a simple, elegant building, one which works with ideas of symmetry vs. asymmetry, rhythm, axes, facades with a skillful interplay of materials, and complex spaces made wth simple forms. Overall, there is a tremendous sense of architectural order, and staying here was a pleasure – everything just felt right.

Even more fun than being ensconced in Roberto’s physical environment was being welcomed into his life. We picked up the conversation from 20 years ago, and sat around for hours talking about architecture, practice, building, New York, bicycling, and the meaning of life. For two people who have lived very different lives in different places, our ideas were in remarkable consonance.

We also got to spend time with Roberto’s amazing companion, Carolyn Cohagan. She has had a long career all over the world as a writer, performer, comic, and producer in theater and film. More recently, Carolyn returned to her hometown of Austin, and has just published her second novel, Time Zero , which is receiving great reviews everywhere. The book takes on the issues of fundamentalism and women rights in a dystopian New York of the future. (One brilliant innovation is that every dogmatic restriction portrayed in the story is actually in place somewhere in the world today, and is footnoted.) Hearing from Roberto that Greta was a writer, Carolyn sent her a pre-publication pdf so she could read it while we were on the road. Greta posted a review on goodreads; I’m pleased to see that Greta’s growing obsession with food on this trip has not rendered her incapable of writing thoughtfully about other subjects. We both really enjoyed hanging out with Carolyn, and I think she will be a big influence on Greta’s life. Throughout this trip Greta has been fortunate to to spend time and talk with a number of writers – Bill McGowan, Glen and Michelle, Garrison Keillor – but Carolyn’s trajectory is one that Greta can probably imagine for herself. Plus Greta just thought she was one of the coolest people she’s ever met.

Roberto also took us by the studio run by his friend Joseph Kincannon, a stonevcarver. Joseph came from New England, and had spent years working on the recommenced construction of St. John the Divine in New York, during some of the same years I was walking past it every day on my way to Columbia. It was fascinating to talk to him and see them at work with both hand and power tools, perhaps the most extraordinary craftsmanship we’ve seen on this trip. Joseph and I reminisced about the good old bad old days in New York in the 80s, and both recalled the peacocks at the cathedral, Philippe Petit’s tightrope walk across Amsterdam, and the parties thrown by the somewhat wild daughter of the dean of the cathedral.

Austin didn’t strike us as the most beautiful city in Texas, but through hanging around with Roberto and his friends, we came to see what is unique there – the people and the culture. I felt about it the way I do about Eugene – it isn’t the physical attributes of the place that make it attractive, it is the quality of life there. It seems to be full of interesting and fun people, art and music and the enjoyment of life. San Antonio is gorgeous, but I’d choose to live in Austin.

Throughout this trip, Greta has been taking care of her missing-pet jones by hanging out with the pets of our friends along the way. There have been some pretty great dogs (Jeti, Ace, Harry and Monty come to mind), but Roberto’s dog Woody takes first prize (although Carolyn’s dog was pretty cool too). Woody has a lovely disposition – fun and exuberant without being annoying, happy to sit with Greta on the couch while she was reading, and damn cute. The people and the food and the culture in Austin were great, but In Greta’s view, Woody might be enough of a reason to live there.

Austin

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We had heard two things about Austin before we got there – it is the cool, hip place in Texas, and the traffic is terrible. After being surprised by Dallas, and horrified by Houston, we were prepared to love Austin. So we were again surprised, finding it to be basically a good, big, fairly typical American city for its size, but one that didn’t wow us in its physical attributes. On the other hand, clearly it is the place in Texas where you’d want to live. The people are interesting, and the neighborhoods, restaurants and ambience are cool. There are just a few parts of it you have to avoid, such as everything connected to the state government, and the UT campus.

Compared to Houston, the downtown is a wonder. It is a good mix of early 20th century commercial buildings, stores, new offices, yuppie towers, nightlife districts, etc. There are people on the streets, even on the weekend. They didn’t demolish their city, and it is big and varied enough to accommodate changing needs and cultures. It just didn’t strike us as very interesting physically – no especially beautiful buildings, or urban spaces, just good, solid, 20th-century, American gridded city fabric. It reminded me of Raleigh, or Buffalo (but without Buffalo’s great architecture). Greta and I have gotten pretty blasé about typical American downtowns, and we can usually knock them off in a couple of hours. So we did that in Austin and moved on to look at the more atypical parts.

The state capitol is probably what we should have expected. Very, very big compared to other state capitols, highly derivative, and not especially interesting. It looms over the town on its hill, reminding Austinites of the power of all the crazy people in Texas.

The interior has some points. Again, it is all very big , beaux-arts rational, and impersonal, with long hallways and a really big dome

where the high points of Texas politics are immortalized.

The legislative chambers match the rest of the building in their size and mediocrity,

but are worth visiting to see these two paintings, which depict the battles of the Alamo and San Jacinto. Painted by Henry Arthur McArdle, they are truly two of the biggest, and most ghastly (in both subject matter and aesthetics) paintings in the world.

I considered trying to count the number of dead or soon-to-be-dead bodies in them, but we didn’t have the time. McArdle is the Hieronymus Bosch of Texas, without the talent or subtlety. I have never seen such a detailed depiction of mayhem and gore, and you start to understand the Texas mentality when you see these depictions of its foundational mythology.

Being a giant state, Texas has a giant state government, which spawned a vast district of banal bureaucratic boxes, typical of most state capitals. It doesn’t have the fascination of the disaster of Albany, and it makes one yearn for the wisdom of Annapolis, where they kept their beautiful capitol and pushed the bureaucracies out to the edge of the city.

The capitol grounds are a weird agglomeration of formal landscape and a plethora of monuments. A really stupid one to the Children of Texas – you can imagine the degree of political pandering which brought such a piece of kitsch into existence.

But my favorite was this – a monument to a removed monument. Again, political pandering to the forefront, unwilling to offend a minor constituency (the Austin Lawyers Wives’ Club) in the tiniest way. It’s clear that the physical environment barely registers with these people – they are politicians, and all other realms are just instrumental in their service to politics.

The University of Texas campus was also a huge disappointment. It sits further uphill from the capitol, along a not-quite-straight axis.

It is huge, with around 50,000 students, and the central campus is pretty dense by American standards. The buildings are again big and banal, and the open spaces are devoid of charm. The Main building (the famous tower from which one of our first mass shootings was perpetrated in 1966) is dreadful. Designed by Paul Cret, who has a good reputation (which may be derived from his having employed Louis Kahn), it is an eclectic pastiche,that brings Moscow University to mind. It is the worst thing on this campus, so in balance, this may be the best:

But they point out the common problem of the campus – everything is in the same mostly Neo-Renaissancey, a little Missiony, ponderous, style. Just as the Capitol is meant to manifest the Power of Texas, the campus is meant show that this is a Serious Institution of Higher Education; take that, all you snooty East Coast schools, we have a bigger endowment. It was oppressive and devoid of life.

So what did we like in Austin? The neighborhoods. Austin is a really weird place – you have the presence of a truly regressive state government. You have a big grandiose university. And somehow a hipster and yuppie community has sprouted here (probably grounded historically in the student population), which is known for its music, food, nightlife, progressive politics, etc. Austinites must have signed a mutual nonaggression pact, otherwise I don’t know how they can all co-exist in this place.

We cruised through what was obviously the old, expensive neighborhood on the hill to the west side of downtown. Mostly stately and restrained, but with some nice little apartments mixed in.

Roberto’s neighborhood on the south side of the river was really fun. Very casual and funky, with some places bizarre even by Eugene standards. We liked the anarchic quality, which extended to houses with vast armies of unconfined dogs roaming the streets.

We also checked out the East Side, which is another funky place in the process of gentrifying. This is the part of Austin with the Portland vibe – street carts, bikes, old houses, Bernie Sanders headquarters, expensive new infill, etc. I went to Birds hipster barbershop, where I got my choice of canned beer with the haircut. (I appreciated this, as I had missed getting my hair cut in New Orleans at the bar in the Marigny which offered a haircut with a shot for $10 on Monday nights.)

These two new buildings will enter my curriculum as providing the clearest illustration of the differences between Ducks and Decorated Sheds.

Austin is a city about which we were wildly ambivalent. There is the part of the city which is a product of the power of the state, which is big, pretentious and boring, designed mainly to awe. There is the downtown, which is solid and good, but nothing to write home about. There is the sprawl (which we almost completely avoided), which is probably like the sprawl everywhere else, and which must account for Austin’s bad rep on traffic. (We found it to be like Portland here too – if you go out to the periphery, the traffic is hell, but if you stay in the core of the city, it’s fine, as everyone takes Über.)

Then there are the people, the food, the music, the lifestyle. This was all very familiar to us, feeling much like Portland or a big-city Eugene. I ended up thinking about Austin much the same way I do about Eugene – it’s not the most exciting place to visit, but I’d like to live there.

Valentina’s BBQ Tacos

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We have recently discovered that Velvet Taco is (gasp) a chain, albeit a small one. This picture was taken in Fort Worth, Texas. Apparently, it has locations in Texas and Chicago, nowhere else. This does not negate its deliciousness, but does make it ineligible for the title of best stand-alone tacos on this trip. That spot was swooped up a week later by Valentina’s Barbeque tacos. You can’t get more Tex Mex than that, and you can’t go better than Valentinas. An unassuming shack in a convenience store parking lot is not the place most people think of when they think about Austin bbq. But unlike Franklin’s, the wait here is ten minutes, and you can get chips and queso to hold you over until then.

And how to even describe the tacos. The sausage taco was fabulous, and that’s from someone who isn’t even a big fan of sausage. This was the best sausage I’ve ever had. It was quite solid, almost hotdog-like, but better, because it was barbeque. Flavorful, without being too spicy. The taco had this, and guacamole. What could be better?

The other tacos, for one. Pulled pork, and chicken, and brisket. I’ve learned that Texas does actually have good pork, although most places don’t have good brisket. This is probably because beef is harder to cook, which may be the reason we had such great meals in Texas.

When my dad put up on Facebook that we had gotten bbq tacos in Austin, a friend of a friend, who was also from Eugene, immediately asked if we had gone to Valentina’s. When the times published their 36 Hours in Austin article, Valentina’s was on the list. The people from Nerdist, a popular youtube channel, even included it in one of their videos. So if you don’t trust my word, trust everyone else. Go to Valentina’s if you’re in Austin. It is definitely worth the drive.

Oh, and don’t miss Lick ice cream on your way back to town. It’s a lot like Red Wagon creamery here in Eugene in its specialization in local and odd flavors. I had the lime and cilantro, which was fabulous. The perfect mix between bitter and sweet, with that little kick of parsley flavor that makes it so unique blending right it. But don’t worry if you aren’t adventurous, they have normal flavors like chocolate too.

Texas engineering cousins

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Yes, that really is a category in our family. For some reason, three of Greta’s cousins have gone into engineering and ended up in Texas, and we got to visit them all.

Our first stop was in Houston, where Joe Ballard is an engineering major at Rice. Joe grew up in Manhattan, Kansas, where Linda and four of her sisters went to Kansas State. Her youngest sister Becky married Steve Ballard, a local boy, and they stayed in Manhattan and raised their three kids. (We missed seeing Joe’s big sister Audrey in Chicago as she had to prepare for a meeting and couldn’t come out to play.)

Joe was a serious football player in high school, but missed his senior year due to a knee injury. So with a year of eligibility, he went to prep school in Connecticut for a year, then matriculated at Rice. He’s been playing mostly on special teams (I hope that is the right term, says the blogger who watches 0.5 football games per year), and is in his junior year as a mechanical engineering major.

Joe lives with three of his teammates, and when I asked his advice on where we should stay in Houston, he said we should just park in their driveway. I loved the idea, and figured this would probably be the most unusual accommodations Greta would experience on the whole trip.

We arrived at Joe’s and were having a beer to celebrate Greta’s having navigated us through Houston Friday rush hour traffic on her own, when cousin Sam Adams showed up. Sam grew up in Indianapolis, the older son of Dawn and Bill (previously profiled here). Sam went to a Spanish immersion school, and continued his language focus with French, eventually studying abroad in France, and ending up being practically adopted into a French family, whom his family stills sees often. Sam arrived at Rice a year before Joe, and is a chemical engineering major.

Greta and I went out for tacos with the cousins, then came back to Joe’s where we hung out with the roommates. I guess my expectations for a houseful of football players had been shaped by being at the UO for so long, but these guys didn’t meet those preconceptions at all. First, although large, they were still within one standard deviation of normal-sized human beings. Second, they were all very smart and engaging, and as charming as we had come to expect Southerners to be. We had a great time talking and drinking beer – which was the third surprise, as all of them had no more than one, as they had practice at 6:00 the next morning. (Sam had a bit more, being the non-teammate who could sleep in.) They are pictured below with Greta as the five-foot scale figure: Sam on the left, Joe next to him, then Cole and Nick. Not pictured is Robby (who gave us excellent advice on camping in the Chisos Basin at Big Bend), and Cole’s lovely girlfriend Maddy.

While the college boys didn’t meet expectations, their house did. A combination of second-hand furniture and beer brand décor, it showed one major innovation since my days of living in such a household – there were screens everywhere. The living room had two big TVs, in case you needed to watch two games at one time, or watch one game while playing video games on the other. Despite this change, it felt just like all the roommate guy apartments I’d ever lived in, and gave Greta some idea of what environments lay in her future.

We had Vietnamese food with the cousins the next night and really enjoyed ourselves. My first memories of Sam and Joe are as part of a pack of five little boy cousins, running through large family parties wreaking havoc. And even as they’ve grown up, I’ve tended to still think of them that way, as that pack became high school boys and retreated to the nearest basement man-cave, only to emerge for feedings. So spending two evenings with them without any other family around was enlightening. They have both turned onto thoughtful, smart and entertaining young men. Joe still has a year left in school, and so is not planning too far ahead now. Sam is graduating this spring, and is planning on joining the Navy, training to be a submariner. After basic training and OCS he’ll send a year in submarine training in Charleston (Greta told him about the good restaurants.) I spend a lot of my normal life with college students, and being with Joe and Sam reminded me of everything I like about them – their energy, enthusiasm, insights, humor, idealism. It was fun for us both seeing these guys, and seeing the young men they’ve turned into.

We moved on to Houston, where we saw Ben Robinson. Ben’s mom is Linda’s sister Paula, whom we had visited in St. Petersburg (profiled here). Ben grew up outside Dallas and in Louisville, but the family roots in Kansas were strong, and he returned to Kansas State for both his undergraduate and masters’ degrees. During those years Ben saw a lot of the world – his mom was living in Shanghai, and Ben would visit her there for extended periods, or else they would meet up in some other cool place.

Ben moved to Houston, where he now has another one of those jobs I can’t understand. As far as I can tell, his engineering company makes products used by other engineering companies, both hardware and software. Ben is involved in developing and marketing those things.

We went over to Ben’s apartment (which showed he had definitely moved beyond the frat-boy collegiate decor), and met his roommate, a veterinarian from Oregon City. We asked how he could stand the Houston weather after growing up in Oregon, and he said he had moved to Houston partly because of the weather; we’ve never gotten that response before.

Ben is enjoying the young professional life in Austin, and gave us some insight into what that is all about, placing it squarely on the Portland-Brooklyn axis of hipness. (Ben intermittently sports a man-bun these days.) One gets old and forgets that there are just good places to Iive as a young person, surrounded by lots of peers and lots of things to do.

I didn’t get a picture of Ben, nor do I have a lot of conversation to recall. While we were at his apartment, I started to feel really sick, so I just went back to the trailer and crashed while Ben took Greta out to dinner at his favorite joint. She said they had a good time, talking about our trip and other cousinly things. We have to thank Ben for providing this opportunity for Greta, which led to her feeling very mature, sitting in a hip restaurant with her cousin, without any of the parental generation in sight.

The Menil Collection

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The architectural high point of Houston is definitely the Menil Collection. After seeing so many Renzo Piano museums on this trip, it was instructive to visit his first in this country, from the mid 1980s. The overwhelming impression is that of simplicity and clarity, which sometimes has gotten obscured in his more recent buildings by all the fancy parts.

I still remember being fascinated by this building when it was first published. In a decade when major public works were either the last gasps of expressive late modernism, or the equally histrionic statements of Postmodernism in the ascendant, Piano designed a simple grey and white box. The architect who, along with his then-partner Richard Rogers, had provoked the whole architectural world with the Pompidou, was now working in an almost classical mode, reminiscent of Mies and Kahn. Museums want to be simple boxes with carefully-designed lighting, and Piano did this literally – a grey box with white colonnades all around.

What most impressed me then and now is how this large building fits into a residential neighborhood of small bungalows. The museum had been buying up those bungalows for a while, and then plunked this museum down in the middle of them, on a full-block site. They still own all the houses across the streets surrounding the museum, and they have been remodelled to house functions such as offices, the bookstore and a new cafe. They are all painted the same shade of grey, and the landscaping of lawn and trees reinforces the residential scale. I always go back to Howard Davis’s response when a student asked him how much a building had to resemble its surroundings in order to fit in, and Howard said “about 30%”. A funny answer, which I think may be true (Howard now swears he said 50%). The Menil resembles its context in color, material (wood siding), simple flat walls, individual windows instead of curtain walls, steel channel detailing which refers to wood trim, porches, and a lawn. Somehow this keeps the building from overwhelming everything around it. I like it that he made a building that feels monumental yet accessible, a temple with a colonnade that also reads as a big wood-framed house.

The colonnades surrounding the building show Piano’s first design for complex shading / daylighting devices. They are beautiful as objects, and they work very well at bouncing and modulating the light.

One could argue that this refined design isn’t necessary on the exterior – you just need a sunshade. But this roof is carried into the interior, where it daylights the circulation spaces and many of the galleries. The use of them on the exterior is a way to tie the building together, and state the key move of the building where all can see it. (And without them, it would just be big box.) They also create a gracious walkway around the building, a very pleasant place to stroll. The scale is intentionally deceptive – using wood cladding and a white porch makes one think the building is residential in scale, but the bays are actually very wide, and the columns are over two stories tall. Piano reinvents the colossal order.

People were using the grounds as a park – reading in the grass, letting little kids play – another way in which the building is an amenity in the neighborhood.

So the big problem with this post is that you can’t take pictures inside the museum. Too bad, as it is worth looking at. The plan is absurdly simple – a cross axis for entry in the middle of the two long sides, and a longitudinal hallway down the center which ends in a big window in a recess at each end.

The galleries are to either side of the hallway, and are emphatically separated from it – no open plan here. it succeeds because of the light – the indirect light from the monitors above, and the big windows at the ends. The galleries themselves can be rearranged within this modular system, and the daylighting tuned to meet the needs of the current exhibit. The most interesting spaces architecturally were the galleries around an internal courtyard, which was very similar to Kahn’s Kimbell. A few bays of the grid are simply left open, the light comes down from above into a planted court, and the galleries around it have glazed walls. (These galleries house sculpture and other works which can tolerate these light levels.) Amusingly, this courtyard isn’t in the middle of the building, but is directly behind one of the exterior walls – you have to look hard on the exterior to see any indication of it.

As at the Kimbell, the quality of the collection is a distraction from the architecture. It is a wide-ranging and excellent museum in many ways, but the Surrealist collection is astonishing. After walking through it all, I was having a hard time remembering any Surrealist masterpieces that weren’t here. Our favorite part was the room where they showed objects of tribal and folk art with had influenced the Surrealists. In any other museum, this work would be displayed in a scholarly manner, arranged according to place and time of origin and annotated with long, detailed labels. But the Surrealists didn’t really care about all that, they just thought these were really cool things that they found visually and conceptually appealing. So they are all mixed up in the gallery, with wildly varied objects juxtaposed and crammed together. It is fun, and it helps you understand their artistic processes.

The Menil has a few other buildings – a lovely, small Piano building housing a permanent installation of Cy Twombly paintings, and one with a Dan Flavin installation. It has also spun off two other buildings in the district – one that used to house Byzantine frescoes (long story), and the Rothko Chapel (a building which I found to be as uninteresting as the Rothkos; I’m a philistine). I think this little bit of Houston is better than all the rest of Houston put together.

The other great thing about visiting the Menil Collection was seeing my old friend and classmate Sheryl Kolasinski, who is the deputy director and COO. Sheryl majored in art history at Brown, and then we attended grad school at Columbia together, where we formed the Ivy League art history cabal. She worked as an architect for a while, then joined the NYC government, where she eventually ended up as head of design and construction for all the city’s cultural institutions. She moved on to the Smithsonian for about 20 years, where she was deputy director for operations, and oversaw $1.5 billion in construction. She didn’t come out and say it, but I have to guess she got a little burnt out by the size of the operation (overseeing 1900 employees) and the range of issues she had to deal with, which was getting pretty far away from architecture. So she moved to a much smaller institution, where she can have a really direct effect upon its future, Sheryl is in charge of implementing the Menil’s masterplan, the next phase of which is a 30,000 sf drawing center for works on paper.

We had a great, short visit, catching up on the past 30 years or so, and talking about all the different directions in which an architectural career can veer. I’ve always thought that architects tend to have a breadth of vision and a skill set that’s often way out of proportion to the scale of projects they are called upon to administer, and it was wonderful to see how Sheryl’s talents have been recognized and appreciated, allowing her to accomplish a lot in an important context. And from now on, when someone says something snide about what you can do with an art history degree, I’ll just say that you could do something like manage the Smithsonian.

Houston

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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.

Kathy Armstrong

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On this trip we’ve been visiting a lot of my family and friends, but not so many of Linda’s. It’s not that we don’t like them, it’s that most of them live in the big middle of the country that we’ve been circumnavigating. But in Dallas we finally found a friend of Linda’s who’s moved out towards the periphery.

Kathy Armstrong was an interior design major at Kansas State with Linda, and they’ve been friends ever since. Before last year I had only met Kathy at our wedding, so we obviously didn’t know each other well. Kathy and I became Facebook friends several years ago – I think she decided to do this once she realized Linda never posts anything upon FB, and if she wanted any news from our family, she’d have to rely on me. We’ve had this online conversation since then, and it is remarkable how you can get to know someone that way – I quickly learned that Kathy has a great sense of humor and a sense of the absurd, although I sometimes think that now she mainly wants to be my friend so she can read the comments from my friend Dan.

Last summer Kathy came to visit us on Whidbey Island, and we had a blast. We didn’t do anything extraordinary, just walking around town, cooking and drinking and talking. Kathy has this ability to really enjoy the ordinary occurrences of life, and in thoughtful way – a meal isn’t just enjoyed, but it is thought about and planned and discussed. I realized during her visit how much she brings a designer’s sensibility to everything. I tell my students that designers may work intuitively, but then we always have to slip into analytical mode, to understand what is going on that made a design turn out the way it did. Kathy is that way with almost everything – not just looking at buildings. Although she is not what I’d consider a semi-pro cocktail drinker, we had great discussions of the nuances of drinks that I was proposing.

Greta and I got to Dallas after a long drive from Louisiana, and Kathy had a wonderful dinner waiting for us. But most importantly, we got to meet Monty and Harry, Kathy’s beloved Scottie and Westie. I must admit I was a little nervous about meeting them – I had seen their exploits on FB, and I was worried that they might fall into the category of amusing yet crazed house dogs who spend lots of time alone, and who therefore drive all possible sources of engagement and amusement crazy. But they were not at all like this – they were very chill, happy to see us and hang out, with really charming personalities. Greta has been relying on our friends to provide intermittent substitute pet experiences on this trip, and Harry and Monty fit the bill perfectly, lying around with her while she was reading. We did watch the Westminster dog show on TV with them one night, pulling for the terriers.

We also got to spend time with Kathy’s boyfriend Greg, and with his son Harry. Greg is also an architect, and his perspective reinforced the good things I’ve heard about graduates from Arkansas. Greg has returned from years working in China, and he and Kathy met when he began working at her firm. Kathy and Greg suggested several of their favorite restaurants, and we spent several evenings talking over drinks and meals. To Greta’s dismay, the conversation often drifted into professional matters, and I was struck by their insights and wisdom into the profession. I most often find myself in professional conversations with people in my profession – academics – and we talk about our world, which is very different from the world of professional practice. So spending time with two people who each have over 30 years experience in very varied careers was enlightening. I still retain enough knowledge of that world to understand it, but I was struck by how much they had experienced, knew and understood about it.

One day Greta and took the light rail from downtown to Kathy’s office, which was in an interesting mixed-use node of redeveloped industrial buildings and new construction. She works for Leo Daly, a multi-city interiors firm, where she specializes in hospitality projects, once of the few building types about which I know absolutely nothing. Their office is really appealing, on the top floor of a remodelled building. Kathy runs projects all over the country and internationally, and travels pretty frequently for site visits and project meetings. We talked about how she had consciously chosen this type of career, and how she had gotten to see a lot of the world, meet a lot of people, and have a wide range of experiences in different places. I vaguely remember having a life somewhat like this, before I settled into relative isolation in Eugene, and we enjoyed comparing and contrasting our lives. Part of the agenda for this trip has been for Greta to see the different ways people live, and I was glad that she got to see Kathy’s life, and understand how that path can be enjoyable and fulfilling.

Kathy is not from Texas, being most recently from St. Louis, so she was able to provide the non-native’s perspective on her new home – appreciative of all that is good about the area, but without the native Texan’s starry-eyed chauvinism. This was invaluable, and she really helped orient us to what was to be a very different cultural experience in the coming weeks. We had a great time hanging out with her and Greg and the dogs, and it was really good to spend time with a friend who made us feel at home in a strange new land.

Dallas

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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.

Perot Museum of Science

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I wasn’t expecting much from the Perot Museum in Dallas, TX. It was described to me as a highly interactive science museum, so I was thinking it would aimed mostly towards, and dumbed down for, little kids. To a certain degree it was, but there was a lot for children of all ages to explore and learn.And when I say a lot, I mean three full floors plus a mezzanine level and traveling exhibits in the basement. The exhibit when I was there was about bioluminescence, which persists in being both one of my favorite words and one of my favorite things in biology. Mostly I learned about the habits of fireflies. Did you know that female fireflies have learned the flash patterns that attract males of different species, and when the guys come down looking to mate, the girls eat them? And that male fireflies sometimes band together and sync up their flash patterns to become a great pulsing bush that’s impossible to miss?The fossils on the top floor were great. Texas is prime bone-hunting country, and a good number of their dinosaurs are natives to the state. Nanuqsaurus, meaning “polar bear lizard”, is a clear exception. The mosasaurs however, were not. P1070399 Most of the animals in the exhibit showing how these giant water monsters evolved were found in the Southwestern United States, which was once covered by an inland sea. It was called the Western Interior Seaway, which provides backing to Keyes’s Law. “Anyone with the authority to name anything by definition lacks the creativity to call it something cool.”

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This law was disproved only minutes later, by Gomez’s Hamburger in the Space Hall. This hall didn’t have any real stuff, that’s all at the Smithsonian, but it did have a lot of cool graphics explaining stuff in space and physics. Any kid who went to school after 1990 has seen the video about orders of magnitude where it zooms in or out through our universe. This exhibit had a different version of that running, but you could control it with a dial, and this one had cool things on it, like Gomez’s Hamburger.

The third floor housed the geological and weather science. There was a platform that simulated an earthquake, proving that we’re all doomed if the megaquake hits the northwest. Like the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago, they had an artificial tornado. It was a bit smaller, but the exhibit did a better job explaining how they form.

Behind this was the mineral hall. Scientists are often thought of as calculating and analytical, but I bet that all mineralogists are swayed by how cool rocks can look. P1070438 P1070447 P1070464

And this being Texas, they had a big exhibit on oil and how it’s procured. But to my surprise, it also talked about the dangers and problems with fracking and oil in general, and explained a little about alternative energy sources.

Downstairs from that was the life and biology exhibits. This had a good deal of taxidermy, with a card by each animal stating a cool adaptation it has, or something about how it evolved. Like other small museums we’ve been to, its dioramas featured the landscapes and wildlife native to the region.

The really interactive exhibits for kids were behind that, mostly about robotics and the human body. The coolest thing was this rod that was laced with LEDs and programed to show a picture when it spun. Look up “You won’t believe your eyes”-Smarter Every Day 142 for more information on how it works.

I think that if you already knew everything that was in the museum, it could feel a bit trivial. But with the level of science education most kids get in school, it think there’s stuff to be learned from it up through high school. So if you’re a kid interested in science in the vicinity of Dallas, you should come here. And if you’re like me and have to read every sign, come early.