18 Anthology
The Architect’s Newspaper
The Latest in Neo–New Formalism
The new Houston Endowment headquarters, designed by Kevin Daly Architects and PRODUCTORA, conjures all-too-specific shadows of the past.
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Architect: Kevin Daly Architects, PRODUCTORA Location: Houston General contractor: W. S. Bellows Civil engineer: BGE Structural engineer: Arup Texas Landscape: Tom Leader Studio Envelope consultant: CDC Sustainability consultant: Transsolar Custom facade fabrication: Kinetica What’s old is new again. The gleaming white Houston Endowment headquarters building, designed by Kevin Daly Architects of Los Angeles with PRODUCTORA from Mexico City, is a temple on a hill. Occupying a choice location on a bluff overlooking Buffalo Bayou, the architecturally ambitious Houston Endowment building is sited like a parameterized Mount Vernon. The Houston Endowment is a nonprofit philanthropic organization established in 1937 by Jesse Jones, Houston’s first major commercial real estate developer, which both gives grants to organizations that enhance public life and preserves his assets from taxation. The Houston Endowment’s previous
headquarters was in a downtown skyscraper, and the organization desired a freestanding building to present a public face and sense of civic presence. The architects created a relatively solid elevation facing the street. Instead, facing the bayou, whose slow waters wind through the bucolic scene, the building’s carefully sculpted frontispiece is surmounted by an overhead sunshade supported by a row of thin steel columns. This elevation is composed of terraced volumes, interspersed with outdoor patio spaces on the ground and upper floors. The exterior walls have a rainscreen cladding made of pressed aluminum panels. The panels have a strongly scalloped profile and appear like the fragments of oversize, fluted Doric column drums piled up on an archaeological site. At 32,000 square feet on just two floors, the building is not large, but its scale is ambiguous owing to the repetitive, undulating facades. The effect is intriguing, and, like many contemporary buildings featuring idiosyncratic design elements, it looks like a computer rendering come to life. The straightforward interiors, pleasantly illuminated with abundant daylight, are otherwise typical
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of what one would expect for a tastefully appointed corporate office space. This building, like an ancient Greek temple, is all about the exterior. It will no doubt win recognition in design awards programs. The Spanish moss draped on the nearby trees and the nearly blinding whiteness of the columned building conjure highly specific feelings of the “Old South.” The landscaping gabions at the foot of the loggia recall, with a bit of imagination, the stony Acropolis of Pericles. However, in public presentations and the articles already written about it, there is no suggestion of the design’s potent historical and symbolic allusions. Instead, we are proffered a lot of earnest, “functional” explanations of its climatic responsiveness, energy efficiency, and economy. While visiting, I was so struck by the building’s allusive power, however, that I felt compelled to examine what it could mean to produce such an effect. In the early postwar years, influential architectural historian Vincent Scully began to analyze the peculiar return of frankly classicizing elements in modern American architecture. In “Archetype and Order in Recent American Architecture,” an article published in Art
in America in December 1954, he described a trend toward “order and clarity in design … along with these have come precise pavilions, defined by the metrical beat of high colonnades … in which the overall spanning structure is essentially unified and cellular … Yet so earnestly does it seek for integrity and order in the parts and the whole that one is tempted to call it truly ‘classic’ in its aspirations.” In an essay written for the British publication Architectural Review in March 1960, another American architectural historian, William Jordy, coined the term “New Formalism” to describe what could by then be considered a recognizable style. During the 1960s, “critical” topics like history and symbolism, along with the qualitative criteria of beauty and elegance, were employed to explain works of modern architecture. Each “classic” pavilion produced by major and minor American architects implicitly rebuked the avant-garde, socially oriented version of modern architecture—that of Bauhaus functionalism—for its failure to recondition a culture emotionally battered by the crisis of economic depression and world war. Instead of seeking to subvert the postwar status quo, these new arrière-garde buildings