Skip to main content

Houston, We Have a Program - Part 1

The following post was written in early June when I started at TIP - but I didn't have time to complete it.  The rest of my TIP posts will be written now, in late July / early August, after the fact.

It feels crazy to write it, but I'm back at summer camp, and not just any camp, but Duke TIP.  I'm here at Rice University in Houston for the month of June, living in the dorm, eating cafeteria food, and re-acclimating to the heat and humidity.  This time, though, I'm going to be the adult in the room, teaching a class of 8th to 10th grade students on "Architecture in the Urban Environment."  Maybe we'll call it CityLab for short, because that sounds cool.  [Edit: we didn't call it that.  Oh well!]

I've been here a few days and have managed to get off campus most days, if only for short distances.  I walked to the Museum of Fine Arts - Houston (MFAH), the Contemporary Art Museum - Houston (CAMH), and the Menil Collection.  Since Rice is located adjacent to the city's Museum District, museums are about the only thing within walking distance, and almost none of the staff have cars.  This means I've walked about 5 miles a day since arriving.  The MFAH has a Yayoi Kusama exhibit going on, which I was lucky enough to wander into during the preview, so I got to see both immersive environments without having to make an advance reservation or anything!  I only took photos in one, though, because the other one wouldn't make sense in a photo.  It's truly something you need to experience in person.  One of the best things about Houston so far is that most of the museums are free, probably thanks to the many wealthy (oil-funded) donors here.

Here are some photos from the art museums:







And here are a few thoughts on the Rice University campus so far:

1.  What is with all the live owls?  Did the university release them here, or have all the owls in Houston discovered that they are welcome on the Rice campus (since the owl is the university mascot) and have flocked here?  I have never heard so much owl hooting in my entire life.

2.  Wow, your campus is spread out.  Is all this grass really necessary?  Are these giant lawns normally full of students in the school year?  Because it's starting to wear me out.  Rice's campus isn't at all compact, and our dorms are pretty far from the center of campus, where the library, student center, and classrooms are located.  Thus all the walking.

3.  At least your food is excellent.  I have yet to try anything that's not been tasty.  Or maybe it's just that I'm hungry from all the walking.




I shouldn't neglect to mention my visit to the James Turrell Skyspace, "Twilight Epiphany," which was an interesting experience.  This site-specific installation on Rice campus seemed a bit dilapidated; the roof edges were not as crisp as they should be.  However, the changing light sequence was soothing and we enjoyed watching the reflected glow of the sunset on the downtown buildings.  I'd recommend getting there early enough to snag a seat in the lower part of the structure, which we were not able to do.  I expect that the effect is better from there.



Next up - the start of class, and assorted side trips!  All this and more, in Part 2.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Book Review: "Theory and Design in the First Machine Age"

Reyner Banham 's Theory and Design in the First Machine Age (1960) is an engaging overview of the important theoretical developments of the early 20th century leading up to the "International Style" of the 1930s-40s.  Banham does a fairly good job, in my opinion, of avoiding excessive editorializing, although he has a clear viewpoint on the Modern Movement and finishes with a strong conclusion.  In opposition to his teacher, Nikolaus Pevsner , whose own history of modernism came out in 1936, Banham dismantled the " form follows function " credo that became the stereotype of modernism, arguing instead that formalism (a preoccupation with style and aesthetics) was an important, if not overriding, concern of Modern architects.  Two sections of the book struck me in particular: his analysis of Le Corbusier's famous book Vers une architecture (Toward a [new] architecture) from 1923, and his Conclusion (chapter 22), where he breaks the link between functionali...

Vertical Bike Rack

The work of our hands! A little backstory:  We bought two bikes as soon as we could after moving here, so we could both bike to work.  After a few uneventful months of chaining up our bikes next to our car in the carport of our apartment building, Justin's bike was stolen.  (Mine was mysteriously left behind, together with Justin's pannier, which the thieves helpfully folded up and placed on top of my bike.  My only guess is that the chain holding my bike was harder to cut than the chain on Justin's.)  Since then, we've kept our bikes inside, hauling them up and down two flights of stairs to our third-floor apartment every time we take them out, which is usually a few times a week.  Ugh.  Better than buying a new bike every few months, though. We needed a rack that would keep the bikes off the floor, off the walls, and in as small a footprint as possible, without requiring us to drill into or otherwise damage the walls (or floor or ceiling). ...

Infrastructure and Urbanism in 1920s Sarasota, Florida

This post is based on research I did for "History of the American City" taught by Gwendolyn Wright this past fall. As an undergraduate in architectural history I was encouraged to think critically about my home town as part of an exercise in historical writing.  This past semester, for a course focused on the history of American cities, I decided to take this further and research the history of the city as a whole.  I was surprised to find that Sarasota, Florida , has a much richer architectural history than I had understood from living there as a teenager.  Settled as a frontier outpost in the 19th century, it grew thanks to tourism, the circus , and real estate speculation, resulting in an incredible expansion in the 1920s that died with the Great Depression.  The city grew again after WWII, and in the 1950s was home to the Sarasota School of Architecture , a nationally-renowned architectural style and movement (not a physical school) that produced early attempt...