Home Heat Money God
A Conversation about Modern Architecture in Texas with Ben Koush and Kathryn E. O'Rourke
Home, heat, money, God… Words that so closely define our understanding of Texas. These themes form the first four chapters and the title of a new book, Home Heat Money God: Texas and Modern Architecture. Architect Ben Koush’s photographs shape the backbone of the thematic partial survey, which is fleshed out with narration by architectural historian Kathryn O’Rourke. Their work visually and textually lays out the story of Texas’s development into a major world player, and how local and national architects and developers used architecture to telegraph ideas and visions of the state.
“Relentless ambition, a forward-looking attitude, and a strong sense of place combined to make Texans particularly receptive to modern architecture’s implication of newness, its future-oriented image, and its capacity to reinterpret historical forms in novel ways… As the state grew in importance in national and international arenas, modern buildings were used repeatedly as signs and symbols of cosmopolitanism and of Texan readiness to take a starring role in any number of dramas.” - Kathryn O’Rourke, Home Heat Money God
I was first introduced to Ben Koush’s photographs several years ago when a friend (possibly
?) reposted an image of his on Instagram. Following decades of photographing and recording midcentury buildings in Texas, Koush began more seriously posting his photos and research on Instagram during the pandemic. With most of my knowledge of Texas coming from the television show Dallas and the news, Ben’s photos provide an entrée into a different awareness of the state—of cities and small towns, of neighborhoods and open highways, the worlds that locals and transients and tourists live and pass through. As someone constantly on the lookout for interesting buildings around me, his Instagram has that same sense of discovery and excitement of engaging with the built environment around us.
From his Instagram arose the opportunity to do this book, which was published in May by the University of Texas Press. Kathryn E. O’Rourke, a professor of art history at Trinity University in San Antonio, uses his images to spool out the story of midcentury Texas across the themes of home, heat, money, God, government, care, sports and leisure, “on the road,” knowledge and power, precious objects (fine art museums), hearts and minds, and contact zones, with an introduction foregrounded in history and mythology and a conclusion discussing preservation and reuse.
Due to the “sheer size of the state,” O’Rourke says that “Texas necessarily exists in the mind as both present and past, fact and myth, its meaning repeatedly remade in words, buildings, landscapes, and images.” Reading Home Heat Money God I came away with a much greater understanding of Texas, its complexities and desires, as well as a genuine interest in visiting the many diverse locations they catalog. It’s a truly beautiful book—gorgeously printed, filled with stunning images of interesting buildings—with a fascinating text that provides deeper knowledge of the social and cultural forces shaping architecture there from the 1930s to the 1980s.
I spoke with Ben and Kathryn in early June about the genesis of this project, the themes and buildings included, Texas myth and reality, politics, and much more. You can order Home Heat Money God wherever books are sold—I highly recommend it for all architecture lovers and those interested in social history. Also, please follow Ben on Instagram; he posts a seemingly endless wealth of intriguing edifices, in Texas and abroad.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Laura McLaws Helms: Thank you both for joining me today to talk about the book. I loved it. I was wondering, how did this project originate? It sounded like from the introduction, it started with Ben’s photos. Is that correct?
Ben Koush: Yes, yes. It started when I moved to Texas to go to graduate school at Rice to get a master's degree in architecture, and I started learning about architecture in Houston. I made a connection with a historian named Stephen Fox, and he set me on this path to doing a lot of research about modern architecture in Texas in particular. And so, I started noticing all these buildings all around and the more I looked, the more I saw. I was a process of learning to see, to understand what you're looking at and to make sense of it and to put a name to a building or figure out if there was an architect involved or it was published or something like that.
Maybe about 10 years ago I started being very thorough about taking lots of pictures and trying to document things because so many buildings were being taken down and the modern buildings now are 50, 60, 70 years old so they're at the point when they're not considered fashionable and they're thought to be a lot of times too small or rundown or it's too expensive to do maintenance on them. So, the easier thing to do is to knock them down.
To drum up interest in preservation—I'm very interested in preservation—I started putting them on Instagram just so I could share them, have a public place for people to see the things that I've been collecting. And then, during the pandemic, I had free time and things were quiet, and so I was trying to find stuff to do and I was like, “I'm going to look at these more closely.” And I had such a backlog, I was continuing to post and people were saying, "Well, is there going to do a book? What are you putting it out here for?" And I was like, "Well, maybe that's a good goal to have."
And I was like, “First I got to see what I have.” I started being diligent to put them in folders and organizing by city and making a spreadsheet to have the names of the architects and the addresses and stuff. And I realized I had so many, I was like, "Oh, yeah, I definitely need to do something." I got an introduction to the people at UT Press from an author that I know in Houston who had just written a book about the history of architecture in Houston, just a general overview, not specifically modern, and talking to the director, Robert Evans. And he was very enthusiastic about it, and I showed him some of the pictures and he said, "These are great. I love it. But I don't want the text to be Instagram captions. I want it to be something more thorough and better than that."
Okay, that's fine, I get it. And I knew Kathryn because I was on the State Board of Review for the Texas Historic Commission for six years with her. We would go around the state and have meetings in different locations three times a year, and we review the National Register nominations and say if we thought they were complete enough to approve them and send them onto the Parks Department in Washington to be entered into the National Register. I recognized a fellow enthusiast of modern architecture.
So, I said, "Kathryn, would you consider working on this?" And I wasn't even sure if she was going to say yes, she’s so busy doing all of her academic things, but she was very enthusiastic about it and agreed right away to participate. We put all the images I had edited and collected in a big Dropbox thing, and then she just went through it and created a narrative to organize everything in a more thoughtful way.
Kathryn O'Rourke: It was a super interesting process for me. Exactly as Ben said, I was brought into it after a version of the idea had already been conceived. I'm an architectural historian by training. I teach in college, and this is a very different kind of project than anything I have ever done and ever thought I would do. And when we first had this conversation with our editor, it was really deep COVID and it was on Zoom and nobody was going anywhere. I was in the middle of this much larger book project that involves international research, and I'm still working on that now, but it was that moment where everything had ground to a halt in terms of travel and being able to go to archives and all these things. I thought, well, this is something I can do at home with little chunks of time and all the ways that the pandemic affected our lives then.
I was also intrigued by it because I grew up in Houston. I have taught for 15 years at Community University in San Antonio. So, I've had these different experiences in Texas and, as Ben said, being on this board. But I was also drawn to it because in that period of the deepest part of the pandemic, I was in conversations with architectural historians all over the country through Zoom about what was happening, of course, in the world and the country. And it was such a difficult time in so many ways. And part of what we were talking about was how architectural history might need to change, how it was an opportunity and really an urgent opportunity to think about new kinds of narratives and writing architectural history in new ways that addressed broader audiences and brought in stories that maybe had not been told.
Part of those discussions also involved the different ways that academic architectural historians talk about architecture than architects do. Ben is trained as an architect. And so, it was like this thing sort of landed as I was in all these conversations. And we were also in the midst of a lot of intense stuff here in urban planning in San Antonio and a lot of complicated politics in Texas, as I guess is always the case. But I thought this is an opportunity to really test some of these ideas that I had been thinking about in other contexts. And I was of course thrilled by the chance to shape a narrative, and I want to trust that it's only a narrative of modern architecture in Texas because there was no book that did what we have done here. And so, I thought, "Well, let's just do it."
These photographs are very beautiful, as you've seen, and I've always loved architectural photography. One of the interesting parts of the project to me was thinking about the relationship between text and image, between the ways that the stories we tell as historians interact with or are drawn from the images of buildings. And as many of us are aware, part of what often draws people to architecture first or at least early on, are these very seductive, beautiful photographs of buildings. And so, I thought, this is also a really interesting time, interesting opportunity to see how those issues are at play. And so, I jumped into it and thought, this is a very different kind of project, but it's kind of a curatorial one in that Ben supplies all of these amazing works, and I can pick only a few and use those to tell this narrative. So that's what happened.
Laura: It must've been hard to make the decision which images to include, right?
Kathryn: Right. The organization and the structure of this book I think are so important and it's absolutely key to what the book is. And very quickly I decided that I did not want it to be chronological. I didn't just want to go through the decades. I didn't want it to focus too closely on issues of versions of modernism or stylistic questions in architecture. And I also did not want it to be a guidebook, which it very easily could have been just because the geography is so vast and the regions of Texas are so distinct. And so, again, thinking a little bit like a curator, that's how I came up with the idea of the themes. There are these 12 themes that structure the book as chapters, and that's where Home, Heat, Money, God comes from as a title. Those are the titles of the first four chapters.
I loved [the themes] as a way of being able to bring buildings together that we might not think of together and also bring places together that we would not put together. Because one of the goals here is to—inspired by our time on the state board—go through the experiment of what does it mean to see Houston with Gladewater, to put these very different kinds of places. What does Canyon way out in the Panhandle look like next to Dallas? And see what happens if we really try to work across the geography of the state.
And I also liked the themes because I thought they would be a way of getting at aspects of the state that are distinctive and being able to talk about history and different histories, social histories, especially in Texas that I wanted to bring forward. And again, a lot of architectural historians I think approach what they do through social history these days, but I thought that would be a provocative, and hopefully it points a fun way of doing this.
Laura: I thought that the themes were a really wonderful way of structuring it versus the chronological or stylistic or geographical. As an outsider, “Home, Heat, Money, God” to me is what I understand of Texas, what I've learned about Texas from the media. To have it broken down and really dissected through the buildings, and then plus the other eight chapters, I found it really illuminated and brought the state to life to me in a way, because I've only visited very briefly. Did you almost immediately come up with those themes?
Kathryn: Home, Heat, Money, God seemed instantly suggestive to me in part because everybody's worried about home. No matter who you are, no matter where you are, that's not unique to Texas. And yet there is a kind of, I think, mythology that is over articulated here about being home in Texas and all this sort of myth about “I got here as fast as I could” that outsiders say and these kinds of things.
And then, heat is so obvious and it's kind of a joke, but it's also not a joke, because we are living this climate crisis that manifests in... Actually, when we started working on the book, we had just gone through that horrible statewide power outage that lasted, what, four or five days. And that was cold, that wasn't heat, but everybody knew that if that happens in July instead of February, that it's a different deal altogether. And just daily life here for so much of the year is about being hot or sweaty or fighting it. Architecture in mid-century, what we see and what Ben documents really beautifully in these photographs, is the way in which architects are responding to heat through the new technologies of air conditioning and solar screening and all that. So that was very suggestive.
Again, money, all buildings require money. So, in a way that was a universal theme, but of course Texas is also so strongly associated with this boom in the oil industry and glitz and glamour associated with Dallas, for example.
And then of course, religion playing this outsized role in politics here. So those came very quickly.
The others, I mean it was a back and forth on getting different images and different buildings in, but I wanted to again suggest that there are such a broad range of forces that shape architecture and the built environment. And so, they come in also with different tones. We have a whole chapter that's on museums and that just focuses on really four museums, really three mostly, designed by internationally famous architects. And that is a serious chapter insofar as it's about art and about this high architecture and this Texan ambition to be world-class, and particularly as it manifested in Houston and Dallas. On the other hand, that's contrasted with the chapters on sports and leisure or “on the road” that deal with travel and stadia and these kinds of things.
And I put those in part to get as many building types into the book because Ben just photographs everything, which is so great, but also because I felt like this was a text that needed to balance the seriousness that comes with Mies van der Rohe and Philip Johnson and Kahn, for example, in the museums, with some humor, with some lightness, because this is a place that is so fascinating and so rich and also so weird and so crazy at points. And we have the really extraordinary modern vernacular here along with these really outstanding works of high architecture. So that was part of the negotiation with the themes there.
Laura: One of the things that I loved about the book and also your Instagram, Ben, is that there are a lot of the buildings that you drive by and you're like, "That's really interesting," it's a mid-century building that you're like, "I wonder if anyone did that, or it's just a really cool random dental office or whatever." So, I could see that passion, that interest in these buildings that aren't usually the ones that are covered in a survey, like I really love that optometrist's office. And I was wondering, did you discover every one of these buildings? Did people send you places to go? How did you find all of these places so far apart?
Ben: It’s a huge web of different ways of finding out things. There's not any one secret source, but in Houston, I am really lucky that I'm connected with Stephen Fox, who's an architecture historian at Rice, who hasn't limited his research to just Houston, but he is like an encyclopedia of architecture in Texas and really everywhere. But he shared a lot of his research with me. He's worked on some of the Buildings of Texas books put out by the Society of Architectural Historians that are guidebooks to the entire state. He's written the Houston Architectural Guide. There've been three or four editions of it, and for the last 50 years he has just been a juggernaut in writing and researching about architecture in Texas. So, he's been super helpful.
I co-founded a preservation group for modern architecture called HoustonMod in 2003 that proceeded the Docomomo things that came to Texas later. And we started focusing on modern architecture because at the time, the Greater Houston Preservation Alliance, which was the main preservation group in Houston, didn't really care for anything after 1945. So, we started looking at post-1945 and 1930s buildings. There were some early modern ones in Houston. And so, we started doing our research. I wrote a couple books for them that were published by the organization about architecture, architects in Houston.
And I've just been doing a lot of research for myself over the years. When I was at Rice doing my thesis on some 1950s modern houses, I spent months in the basement of the library scanning through the microfilms and just looking to see if there was something interesting. Going to the Sunday section when they had the real estate section and just looking for that every week, because those newspapers were just such an amazing resource—so many things were included then as they didn't have internet and they didn't have anything else, so people would just send a drawing to the real estate editor and he would more than likely publish it.
It is cool to see all these architects doing all these things, from houses to schools to skyscrapers, all being recorded there. And then, since they've been digitized, it's been so much easier because now you can just type in and everything's scanned and just do a word search and find things that usually take weeks to find, find them in literally five minutes.
And there is another person at Rice who just strangely enough works in The Shepherd School of Music who's a big modern architecture enthusiast. He's also in HoustonMod. He's been a really good resource also because he'll go through mechanic's liens and deed records—he's really, really good at it. And I say, "I found this building at such and such address, do you think you could find anything about it?" And usually within a day or two, he's dug up all sorts of amazing information.
The other aspect of this also is that I've been looking at these buildings so long that for 25 years, that I've started to be able to see really quickly if it looks like an architect designed it. I focus on building design by architects unless there's just some really outrageous vernacular building—but as an architect who's spent a lot of time and effort to become an architect, I want to support the work of other architects. And I do think that the work that they do is superior.
And after a while you can start to tell, and there's different kind of sections of Texas where different kinds of architects were doing work, and you find out there's these little forgotten dynasties of architects that were training other architects and going to certain schools and the teachers at the schools churning out certain types of architects. And then, you can start to recognize the work just by visual clues that way.
But a lot of it is just learning to see and just spending lots and lots of time looking at the building. And it's like birdwatching. For me, I see a building out in the wild and I was like, "Oh, what is this building?" And then, you find out and you go down this path of discovery, and it's so rewarding in its way. You get these little aha moments all the time. And then, it's nice to be able to share them on Instagram, some of the highlights. But people always ask me, it's not any one thing, it's just spending a lot of the time and enjoying it. And there's nothing that makes up for that kind of time to master something to figure out how to understand what you're looking at.
Kathryn: And I think one of the goals early on was to create a book that would help people learn to see, to do exactly what Ben is describing. And I mean, obviously there's no replacement for the deep research on many years of study that he and architectural historians do with this sort of thing. But to help people who might be interested, I mean, as you described, you might not be an expert, but you think, “Hey, is that worth looking at?” And the idea of the book is in part to help people say, "Yes, that is worth looking at." And maybe if you look at that, then you'll start to see something else. So, to open their eyes in a hopefully gentle way. And then, I think the book can be read at many, many levels. It can be used in many ways, I hope that of course, there's the look at the pictures thing and then go out and maybe become a little, do a self-guided travel thing, but then also if you're more interested in some of the deeper history to get into that. So, these kind of layers.
Ben: Part of the thing for me about the book is it's not just that architecture exists in big cities. When I moved to Texas, I thought the only architecture was in New York or Paris or something. And it's like, “Houston, oh, there's buildings here, but that's not architecture.” And then, you realize it's everywhere and you learn to understand how to see it. And so, going on the State Board of Review, we'd go to these places like really small towns. The State Historic Preservation officer had this weird obsession with going to the most obscure places. And you'd drive around 5 minutes, you'd find 10 great buildings if you're willing to look at them and understand. They may be messed up or something or whatever, but it was that they're spread out everywhere.
When I first moved to Houston, I saw this book called The Galveston That Was (1965). It was a book of photography about Victorian buildings in Galveston. And they had Ezra Stoller, who's a really famous architecture photographer from New York, come down and he took pictures, really stunning images of these Victorian buildings in Galveston. And then Henri Cartier-Bresson, another super famous photographer who did more street photography, they paired up and made this document about Galveston and it jumped started a whole preservation movement there that didn't exist before. The book was a catalyst for that. I don't know if our book's going to do that, but I would hope that it would encourage people in other places to take a look and see what they have and start to do an assessment and understand that what they have is important and shouldn't just be let to be lost.
And another aspect, it's nice that you're interviewing us as being in Texas sometimes you don't think about the outside world. And a lot of times, the outside world doesn't seem to think very much about Texas either. So, trying to make something that would make people that aren't in Texas look at it and see what is good here… I sometimes feel some bitterness about how people misconstrue things in Texas. And there's lots of bad stuff here. I'm not going to say that there's not, but there's also lots of good things, and it's just like everywhere there's good and bad, but sometimes people in Texas do a really good job of making it seem like a crummy place, and I'm trying to do something with Kathryn to helpfully reverse that in a little way.
Kathryn: One of the things that I came to appreciate in the course of writing the book is how the story of Texas, well, in many ways there's a kind of singularity to it, and certainly I think the book plays on the mythology of Texan exceptionalism, the notion that this is somehow someplace that's so different. It's also not, and it also is in the period that we cover in the book from the 1930s into the 1980s. It is this era in US history when Texas ascends to really be nationally and internationally important, largely because of the oil industry, but also because of Lyndon Johnson and because of the importance of Texas in national politics.
And so, from an academic standpoint, I think we really can't tell the history of modernism in the United States without looking at this place. This is a huge part of the story of this country in the 20th century. And particularly if you think about a kind of Sunbelt story of the enormous growth of these cities in the southwest at mid-century.
And similarly, this thing about the small towns and the big cities in Texas. I mean, I'm probably way too optimistic about this, but there's a part of me that loves the thought that people in places, very different kinds of places, but [will] maybe go and travel and see these other little towns. If you're from a big city and likewise, maybe open your eyes to some of the great stuff that are in the big, wild, crazy cities. We need to do that more. I mean, we need to make all these kinds of connections both internally and also nationally, I think, for many reasons.
Laura: I know it's not a guidebook, but if you were to recommend a place to visit to someone who said they wanted to go to Texas, where would you say to go?
Ben: That's a hard question to answer because you could say, "Well, what's your interest?" You want to see super cool art? Go to Marfa. I'm very partial to Houston, so I think it has the best architecture. It has a lot. There are some really wonderful things here. And people come to Houston. I always say, "Go to The Menil Collection and go to the University of St. Thomas and look around those neighborhoods, the broad acres around Rice University." That is such a really great concentration of wonderful buildings there. If someone likes Louis Khan, go to Fort Worth, see the Kimbell Museum, that's amazing. And the Amon Carter is right across from it. And then Tadao Ando has the Contemporary Art Museum also right around there.
So, there's so many different ways to approach that question that it's almost hard to make one answer. Just an example of our struggle with trying to make a singular definition of Texas is the cover of the book—we purposely didn't put a photograph on it because we couldn't figure out a way to distill all of the content of the book into one image, and we felt it would privilege one thing over all of these other things and a big part of the story is the multiple lines of the narrative, and that there isn't any one strand that's dominant. And so, that's definitely a factor in the difficulty to answering your question like that.
Kathryn: We did put at the back of the book a list of all the buildings with addresses so that if people want to try to use it as this pseudo-guidebook, at least that's there.
Just maybe for contrast, I'm partial to South Texas. It comes from living in San Antonio now for 15 years. I think, and especially the border regions; Laredo is a really special city for many reasons. And historically, going back to the 18th century and some of these towns in south Texas like Harlingen and McAllen, places that I think probably many people who are visiting or from other parts of the country might not get to. And you could have a wonderful trip that maybe starts in San Antonio and goes south to the border to see, again, many, many layers of history and also understand, I think, a lot about how architects responded to landscape and climate conditions in really interesting and innovative ways, and particularly in San Antonio, prioritization of craft and materiality. That's very beautiful and I think is very engaging. It's a more subtle architecture than the great glitzy buildings in Houston and Dallas, but one that's I think quite enduring and profound when you can spend some time with it.
Ben: Or you could do some tour of a certain architect's work like what Kathryn's talking about, like go to see O'Neil Ford buildings. And he, to me, is like an Alvar Aalto type character, but a little more rustic. We went to Finland and we did [a tour of Aalto buildings] a couple years ago. We got in a car and drove all over the place, and those buildings were very far apart. I was shocked when I realized where some of them were, but it was such a rich experience. And something like that might be really cool because a lot of the O'Neil Ford like some of the churches and the Trinity University in some places, they are pretty publicly accessible. Houses not so much, they're tricky sometimes, as you can only see there from the street, but you would get a really amazing tour of the state if you did something like that. Also, because there are some really, really outstanding architects that worked in Texas that are not really well-known outside of the state. I would be intrigued to do something like that.
Laura: I really enjoyed learning more about some of those architects that aren't as well known outside of Texas, like John Chase and O'Neil Ford. I obviously love seeing the buildings by the internationally renowned architects, like Johnson or Rudolph, but it's much more interesting to find the ones that are Texan and specialize in having a real understanding of the landscape and the climate, and I think have a totally different approach to how they solve the problems of climate.
Ben: Some of them got real inventive like Richard Colley, working in south Texas but mostly around Corpus Christi—we included some of his buildings—he would just have all these spatial layers to make climate control in houses that didn't have air conditioning. I haven't really ever seen anything so sophisticated as some of those houses what he was doing, and we were lucky to be able to go to some of them that were still pretty intact.
They've done a good job of knocking stuff down, especially in Corpus. But part of that I think is also the bad effects of capitalism because what struck us or struck me was going to these towns and every town had an architect, a modern architect that did all the buildings for all the businessmen. So, you are a lawyer, you're a doctor, you're an insurance agent, you would go to the architect and get a really great little modern building up until maybe the 1970s or so. And then, these towns—to use Corpus Christi [as an example]—used to have HEB, which is a big grocery store, and they had Whataburger, which is a famous Texas fast food company restaurant chain, and they had their own smaller oil companies, and they lost HEB and Whataburger—they relocated to San Antonio because it's a bigger city, and the oil companies got bought by a bigger company. So now, Exxon owns all of them, and they took all the white-collar workers and stuff to Houston and Dallas and wherever. And then, they left, and they have the blue-collar workers there, but those people aren't the ones that were commissioning the really great little buildings that I was focusing on.
And that kind of speaks to the elitism of modern architecture too, but you see the loss, how evenly distributed it used to be and now it's getting more concentrated. And even Houston and Dallas are half the time in the service of New York, and they bring fancy people from out of state to do stuff and don't always cultivate local talent in ways that I wish some of the institutions here would.
The Museum of Fine Arts, for example, they had a really great museum school building by a Houston architect that's a very early postmodern building from the 1970s that they tore down to make a parking garage. I think if it had been an out-of-town architect, they might've considered saving it more thoroughly than they did. They had Stephen Holl put up a half-hearted building that someone in his office worked on a little bit, and I don't think he even saw until it was done. Sometimes it would be good to be a little bit more resilient and encourage a local architectural ecosystem to be able to do prestige buildings again in the way that they used to.
To me, a real high point is about the 1970s. That's when Houston was almost like Dubai or something, and everyone was envious. It was like New York, they were like, “Drop dead, it's bankrupt. Houston's where the future is going to be.” And then, of course, it all fell apart. It didn't last very long, but it was good while it was going, I think.
Kathryn: Well, and in San Antonio in the '60s too, that was just a real high. There's a lot of money flowing through state at that point. And again, the sort of, I think political energy, interestingly in a progressive way, of course, it was the '60s and Johnson and everything. That's a moment when there's this real efflorescence of innovative thinking about locality and climate and landscape that's completely different than what happens, what Ben's describing happening in Houston. And Richard Colley was part of that world. He worked with Ford.
Laura: You've mentioned demolition a few times. I think of Texas as always being about bigger and better and newer. Do you think that there's more demolition of older buildings in Texas than in other places because of that?
Ben: You look at the Rust Belt, they did a real good job of tearing stuff down. Like Detroit and St. Louis. When I lived in St. Louis, downtown had buildings, but then there was a swath of about five miles before you got to the Clayton, which is due west of Washington University and it's a nice neighborhood. It was just grass. It was crazy. There's nothing like that in Texas except maybe Port Arthur, which is like baby Detroit. But I think that's a difficult question because it just happens everywhere. I was just looking at Danny Lyons had this book called The Destruction of Lower Manhattan that he published in 1969. It's heartbreaking to see all of those cast-iron buildings being destroyed to make a freeway interchange or whatever they were doing.
Or New York City with the destruction of Penn Station in 1965—that was horrendous. It started the National Preservation Movement because it was such an egregious thing to have done. And now, New York, you can't hardly demolish anything. And California has also gone that way. So maybe Texas will figure out some way to start to emulate that more directly in the future. But a lot of it has to do with the way the economy works and local preservation ordinances and things and just a kind of a culture, but there's wins and losses. There's all sorts of compromise.
In Houston, the Astrodome, these preservation groups got it listed as specific types of historic designation. And so, now because the county owns it can't be demolished, but the county also refuses to do any maintenance, so it just sits there. But it is a weird Pyrrhic victory because the building is right there, but then no one does anything with it. We have pictures of it on our book, and you can see the state it's in. They almost didn't want to let me in there because they're embarrassed about what they've done.
Kathryn: I will say, it is the case though that the benefit of the law is very much on the side of property owners in Texas. And that's maybe more extreme, I don't know, but it seems like it's perhaps more pronounced than in other states. And so, it's quite easy to tear down buildings here. On the other side of it though, and this is part of what Ben and I worked with for a long time, there are state and federal tax credits for rehabilitation of historic buildings, and that really is making a difference. Apparently, there are more nominations than ever of historic buildings, and particularly as these modern buildings become historic as they hit the 50-year mark by the preservation standards, I think there's reason to be hopeful that more of these will be rehabilitated and reused. We've seen some great examples of that already. The POST Houston is a great example of this. This was a federal post office, big giant building that has been converted to a really interesting mixed-use space and there's gorgeous staircase in the middle of it and this rooftop garden farm.
I think we hoped that, if you actually read the book, that you come out a preservationist at least quietly on the end to say that, "Hey, this is stuff worth holding onto,” not just because they're great buildings, and often many of them were built really much higher construction quality than what is typical certainly in most developer driven projects today, but also, of course, because they are so much part of the fabric of our history here.
Laura: Did you always want to end the book with the chapter on preservation and reuse?
Kathryn: Yeah, that emerged at some point that I felt like that was an appropriate way of going out. Again, in part because it's something that's important to both of us, but also because historic preservation was part of the story of modern architecture. We don't often highlight that. But it's interesting when you look at architects, photographs, or drawings, they're always looking at historic buildings, and they may not be explicitly preservationists, but history is completely baked into modern architecture on many, many levels. One of the most important early proponents of conservation in Texas was in fact O'Neil Ford here in San Antonio. And a whole part of his practice that developed in mid-century was dedicated to preservation.
So that was one of the reasons, but it also seemed like an opportune moment to talk or reflect at least a little bit about the meanings and uses of history. What happens when you just let this stuff go? Those are stories that are less likely to be told. And again, at this moment where I think a lot of us are thinking about the past in new and more complicated ways that we want to hold on to as much as possible to figure out to excavate these pasts.
And the other imperative, of course, has to do with climate. The greenest building is the one that already exists, and that's part of why adaptive reuse is so very, very important. We didn't put an image of this in the book, but there was a cover of Texas Architect Magazine in the 1970s that was a detail of a demolition, and you see this brick wall coming down and the cover title was, “It Could Have Been Recycled.” And so, here already, almost 50 years ago, that issue of reuse from an environmental standpoint was clearly in architectural discourse in Texas. And I feel like that's something we all need to be thinking about. And architecture of course has such a central role in carbon emissions and embodied carbon and all these things that people talk about all over the place now.
Laura: Do you both have a favorite building you included?
Ben: That's tough. When people ask what's my favorite building, I always say The Menil Collection Building by Renzo Piano. I just love that building. I love all that it represents. And architecturally, I think it's a wonderful building. And the art collection's amazing, and the Menil family that started it got their money from oil, but they were so progressive and did so many things to help further civil rights and other things like that. So, to me, that's a really wonderful building and the story behind it is amazing.
Kathryn: I don't have a good answer to this except to say that what I love about the whole thing, and I guess we just keep saying this in different ways, is juxtaposition—buildings like the gas station and The Tap bar in El Paso stand side by side with Paul Rudolph and these huge figures, and that hopefully what's also coming forward are the contributions of clients and other people in shaping these works.
Part of what was fascinating to me about the project was wrestling with the myths [about Texas] and histories and how you play with them—both push back against them, but also use them and expose them as constructs because that's what they are too. And one of the things that I found, especially thinking about '60s and '70s here is—there were so many horrible things of course that happened—but that the image of the deep red state that is so pervasive now, I think occludes so much stuff that is good, that isn't this hard right Texan stuff.
I think part of what's frustrating about being here is that the politics seem locked in really strongly in one direction when there's a real openness to pluralism, particularly in the big cities that is vibrant and dynamic, and the forces that make that possible today were set in motion in this period that we're talking about and that that openness to the world that sometimes manifests as, “let's get the fanciest architects we possibly can” is the counterpoint to the insularity. I don't know if that comes through in the text, but it's something that I think is a really important tension about the state, because it would not have become the kind of economic and juggernaut that it has become if it were only closed. And yet the strictures and structures get manipulated really strongly by people who have very particular agendas for it.
Ben: When I came here from living different places, I had never really thought much about the state. By the '90s, the reputation had quieted down. And after the oil crash, I think it faded out of so many people's views. And then, now in the last 10 years, Greg Abbott's done a good job of making people think about it again. But it's interesting living here, there's 3 or 4 of the top 10 largest cities in the country in Texas, and it's actually really urban. And the really right-wing people are in the exurbs or the small towns outside of the cities. But all the major cities are actually Democrat-run like Houston, Dallas, San Antonio, Austin, the Valley, El Paso—they all have democratic local governments.
So, there's a mini fight between the Harris County Judge Commissioner Lina Hidalgo, who's a 30-year-old Colombian immigrant who kicked out an old white man Republican who'd been in office for 20 years. And Greg Abbott's been picking a fight with her. He's trying to treat her like AOC or something. And during COVID, it was just a disaster. And she tried to make them during the election, let them have drive-in voting. And then Greg Abbott was like, "No, you can't do it because I'm the governor and you have to do what I say. You can't have home rule, even though that's written to the charter and everything." It's almost like a mini Florida, and Texas versus the federal government kind of thing. Greg Abbott's like, "You can't tell me, the federal immigration people. I'm going to just put whatever those things in the river are, I'm going to do. You can't stop me," kind of thing. So, it's weird how there's all these power plays happening inside the state that I think are not really documented outside the state. It's pretty chaotic, to be honest.
Kathryn: Yeah, it's very chaotic. And it feels to me like the front lines, the city-state tensions right now, and it has become very local. It's come very close to ordinary people. And it's come, I've seen this in two instances in San Antonio, to urban planning and architectural decisions. It's that close now.
Ben: It’s funny because they say the government should be small, but they want the Republicans to control everything, so they're such hypocrites, and it's just amazing to see how all of these things play out and the way people contradict themselves all the time and stuff like that. I don't know what's going to happen, but it seems like the cities are getting more liberal and they're not going to stop being liberal and where the Republicans are, it's going to shrink out. Because if you look, it's like there are little blue dots and then a sea of red, but there's more people in those blue dots than the sea of the red, but they've got the state government with the gerrymandering and stuff. So, you can't really correct that on the state level, but you can on the local level.
Laura: It’s interesting to think about the reputation of Texas as being so conservative and red, but then also think about it within the history of Lyndon Johnson coming from there and how he was the one who put through Civil Rights Act.
Ben: Well, he saw the writing on the wall. I think he knew he had to do what he did. He was obligated to do the right thing, even though I think personally he was fairly conservative because the Democrats used to be like Republicans. Texas used to be a Democrat state, but the Democrats did everything Republicans do. So Nixon switched it all around and after the civil rights stuff with his southern strategy shenanigans.
Kathryn: But it's absolutely true, the civil rights legislation and a lot of the important environmental legislation of the 1960s were things that Johnson signed and, in some cases, pushed through Congress. And again, I think that is part of the story that we're trying to tell that that's baked into what's happening here, at least in some parts of architectural culture at mid-century and is part of the good side of this legacy, although much of it was highly imperfect and as we all know, incomplete that work today. But yeah, there's this tension here. So, I'm glad that you have a sense of that.
Laura: I really enjoyed the way that you interwove the social and cultural aspects into the book and talked about segregation and all of these aspects of Texan history, American history—the personal stories like the two lesbian couples—and shone a light on them.
Kathryn: Architecture is about people. It's about the choices we make, the ways we live, the world we want to have. And I hope that that comes forward and the many ways that the built environment reflects that.
Wow, who knew, so many hidden gems!
Thanks so much for highlighting this book! My husband is an architect, so I think we should add it to our library.
Oh gosh, Laura, you know I LOVE this!! I have been a big big fan of Ben's for years, and this was such a delight to read. I must get my hands on this book! His photographs of Houston are especially dear to me, as someone who grew up in the south of the city which is full of these amazing little treasures like the dental offices and office buildings. I loved reading his enthusiasm for Houston (best city ever in my humble opinion) and I have to agree with him on the Menil building -- it's incredible. Such a great interview, thank you for doing this for all of us to enjoy!!