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Architecture Boston does a terrific job at this, often using roundtable discussions with experts on specific topics. The latest issue is titled “Small,” and covers everything from small houses to microscopic photography. Another good model has been Cite in Houston, which isn’t a chapter magazine but focuses mainly on the city in all its complexity and quirkiness instead of only its buildings. “Local, local, local” is the new publishing mantra in our instant access age, and it applies to chapter magazines as much as to metropolitan dailies. • Introduce other voices into your editorial mix to broaden its appeal. Architecture magazines written exclusively, or nearly so, by practitioners are a bad idea because most architects can’t write, and those who can tend to write for one another, not for the wider public you want to reach. Worse, because they are all members of the same club they tend not to write critically about one another even when that’s precisely what’s needed. Architects criticizing other architects is considered disloyal and unprofessional. So invite journalists, educators, public officials, poets, and essayists from your area to write for you. I’m not suggesting you go after
name writers, only that you listen to different voices. You’ll be surprised at what you’ll find. • You can’t start a conversation unless you’re willing to open your mouth. So be vocal and out front editorially on issues of local and regional importance. Be willing to take a stand. Obviously this can create political problems, which is why generally architects have been more effective as individuals than as members of the AIA. But if you want to raise community design awareness, to start a dialogue, you’ve got to take some chances and speak out editorially . • Another way to become more visible, and more relevant, is by sponsoring community forums, small design competitions, guest speakers, and lecture series. For financial reasons, this may require partnering with other organizations, such as schools of architecture, friends of the library, the local museum league. Go beyond the annual awards issue. Become conveners. Another way to put this is that architects and architecture magazines are looking for a way to regain influence and establish authority, which is not the same thing as power.
Power is the ability to make something happen, or not happen, or happen differently. Authority is a different matter. Authority means that your work is read, listened to, talked about, paid attention to. Influence or authority comes not from stopping Project X in its tracks, but from being able to gradually sharpen community perceptions about good design, and thereby to raise public expectations about what is acceptable and what is not. The great critic Ada Louis Huxtable once said that the public knows its rights when it comes to the law, or Social Security, or Medicare; it’s up on all the entitlement programs. But it does not know what it is entitled to in terms of architecture, urban design, or environmental policy. One job of a good design magazine is to help educate the public about its rights in these matters, because in the end its biggest ally is a concerned public, and its most powerful weapon the ability to arouse public opinion in the service of good design. This article is adapted from a speech presented by the author to the Council of Architectural Component Executives in Richmond, Va, in August 2008.
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kind of nice by yourself on the shore.” (p. 41) Perhaps the only thing constant about Houston is the mess. But if you play your cards right, you can veer off and do as you please while everything else swirls slightly out of control. In this relaxed, spontaneous method, there are the remnants of 1960s counterculture (the years when Lerup came of age); the détournement in an uneasy co-existence with capitalism, and mind-altering experiences of psychedelic subculture without the LSD. Such overwhelming disorder underscores the importance of navigating in the present. It makes the past seem pointless because it offers only a history of the same problems, and suggests the future might not appear because it is so much work to alter the course of destiny. The projects that I liked best were those that did this. They make us look anew at this place, disturbing and banal, but so easy and comfortable that we don’t always think about it. Lee Moreau’s 1999 thesis directed by Albert Pope, “Houston, Inside Slowly,” consists of photographs collected during a suburban walkabout, depicting a city which Stephen Fox observed
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“has so little need of architects and what they have to offer” because of its instinctive “populist inclinations toward truculent independence and impulsive expediency.” (p. 31) “Sweeny, Texas” was a graduate option studio led by Keith Krumweide in 2000 to produce a masterplan for this little town in Brazoria County. One scheme, “Flexible Sweeny,” presents a fantastic image of snowbirds congregating along the banks of the San Bernard River amid a large collection of adult tricycles with a collaged scan of Henri Rousseau’s Combat du tigre replacing most of scenery. Brett Linden’s 2004 thesis directed by Nana Last, “As Found: Space–Light–Situation,” is a series of haunting montages created from shots of empty corridors and parking garages of lowbudget office buildings that cause you to pause to try to figure out what has gone off-kilter. Last, Larry Albert’s 1999 thesis, also directed by Albert Pope, “Houston Wet,” depicts simultaneously the futile efforts to save the sinking Brownwood subdivision and the efforts of NASA engineers a few miles south in Clear Lake to devise a way to get an American flag on the Apollo
11 flight to the moon. Albert suggests Houston is a “war zone and laboratory” where people spend considerable energy to devise methods to temper existing environmental factors that are at once conceptually simple but technically complex and prone to failure. Albert’s cheeky commentary also serves as a cautionary tale for the increasingly technologically dependent and large-scaled projects coming out of the program at the end of Lerup’s tenure. With the arrival of a new dean it will be interesting to see how the curriculum changes. Will Lerup’s wit be superseded by something more earnest— perhaps studios where every student is expected to design a building? Or will a truce be established? In any case, Everything Must Move presents an interesting 15 years. Here’s to the next decade-and-a-half. Ben Koush was a graduate student at Rice School of Architecture during Lerup’s tenure.
This article is an expanded version of one that appeared online at offcite.org, the Web site of the Rice Design Alliance’s Cite magazine.
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