Cities evolve as collections of circumstances, of real events occurring in real time, as records of how each city dealt with its particular potentials and problems. Each generation of Houstonians has seen the city in a different way. Houston is perhaps the least settled down of cities, always growing, always evolving. Where most cities converge on their past, Houston seems to be running away from its history, all too willing to sacrifice its heritage for future prospects, for the lure of the deal. It's not an easy city to describe, as freelance writer Doug Milburn illustrates in an article on Houston: "From my earliest days of thinking and writing about Houston, I have played a little game. I ask people to describe the city in one word, with one restriction: the word cannot be hot, humid, or flat." His collected responses include "reticulated," " fetid," "boring," "festive," "demanding." "Elusive" is his own favorite: "Take the urban complexities and contradictions, racial and economic, so visible in every other American city, add certain peculiar elements of geography, climate, and history, and you have city as conundrum, chameleon. Hard to pin down. Hard even to perceive."

From the beginning, Cite has tried to present Houston more in terms of critical observations than as an object of theoretical speculation. In the first essay of this volume, "Pursuing the Unicorn: Public Space in Houston;" novelist Phillip Lopate, a New Yorker who taught in the creative writing program at the University of Houston for several years, reflected on his own stream of experiences as he searched for signs of a public environment. Lopate's observations add up to a revealing critique of a city built largely by private interests and one that has invested very little in creating quality public spaces where people can enjoy and appreciate the collective nature of the city enterprise. Part of the elusiveness in Milburn's characterization of the city is attributable to this formless quality of Houston's in-between spaces and the ways the city reflects a calculus of private speculation rather than of deeply held civic intentions.

"The pell-mell of names that accrues to a city in the course of time is a forceful reminder of metropolitan complexity," wrote cultural geographer Yi-Fu Tuan. "In any large urban center, multifarious interests exist, and each will push for a label that suits its purpose. Over time these nicknames become a part of the genius loci." In homage to the most prominent natural features of the city, Houston was for a long time known as "the Bayou City." The name linked Houston to Southern and Gulf Coast cultures similar to some in Louisiana, Texas's neighbor to the east. Houston's natural site and its historical formation recall surrealist Marcel Duchamp's definition of collage: "the chance meeting on a non-suitable plane of two mutually distant realities." The non-suitable plane in this case was a jungle of swampy woods in a steamy-hot region of clay-bottom land that shares the 30th parallel with the Sahara Desert.

Water--flowing, drenching, rising, as well as invisibly suspended in the sultry air most of the year--has always been a big part of the city's sensorial genius loci. Water has presented both problem and opportunity, Barrie Scardino writes in her essay "H₂Ouston." Indeed, the intricate weave of sleepy bayous that crisscross the city has usually been more of an obstacle than an amenity, necessitating hundreds of perfunctory little bridges to accommodate the expanding network of streets and highways. Lined in concrete following the flood-controlling specifications of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, the bayous have lost nearly all of their romantic associations. Instead, they are symbols of the city's abhorrence of natural surface water, a breeding ground for mosquitoes, and a reminder of just how flood-prone and low-lying the city is, particularly during a serious rainstorm.

The two distant realities shaping the destiny of the city were both liquid: first, the Ship Channel, an ambitious waterway dredged almost 50 miles to a depth of 25 feet linking Galveston Bay to an inland port in Houston; and second, the liquid gold discovered at nearby Spindletop. They come together as a callous landscape of refineries and an industrial port in a sullied liquid atmosphere. The thick, soupy ether congealing out of the superheated air causes shapes to lose their starch.

Houston's natural site was never sufficiently endearing to discourage people from remaking it into something more temperate, more accommodating. Houston embraced technology with a can-do ethos that said no problem was so large that it couldn't be altered or fixed. With few prominent natural features such as broad rivers, lakes, or hills, the cityscape is dominated by an artificial topography of freeways, the Ship Channel, and buildings. It emerged in the 20th century as the most air-conditioned city in the world, a city flavored by Texas but not exactly contiguous with it.

The precise metaphor for this big-scale modern engineering appeared in 1964, when the NASA Manned Space Center arrived at nearby Clear Lake, and Houston traded its old-fashioned "Bayou City" name for a new title: "Space City." It also showed off an audacious work of earthbound engineering--the Astrodome, the world's first full-size, fully air-conditioned indoor baseball stadium. To complete the theme, the baseball team's name was changed from the Colt .45s to the Astros, trading an old frontier hero for a new one.

It is hard to talk about Houston without talking about its developer-friendly way of doing business. British architectural critic and historian Reyner Banham, after visiting Houston in the 1970s, described the city as a real-life version of a Monopoly game. To Banham, the decorated condo was the prime game piece for developing a real estate fortune in a place where you only had to answer to the banker. And Houston did, indeed, begin as a real estate invention of the Allen brothers, New York sharpies who successfully promoted the swampy site as the great interior commercial emporium of Texas. As game or city, Houston is both wide open and impenetrable at the same time. "Property wheels and deals there with less restriction than anywhere else in the Anglo Saxon world;" Banham wrote. "Los Angeles in the Chinatown epoch seemed like a socialist economy by comparison."

Some of Houston's reputation for being something of a renegade city can be attributed to the paucity of developmental restrictions Banham refers to, most notably the city's lack of zoning and its light-handed ap proach to planning. Houston voters have consistently rejected zoning. But as Stephen Fox points out in his essay "Planning in Houston: A Historic Overview;" the generally held view about the city's antipathy toward planning may be oversimplified. Still, planning efforts have tended to be short on vision and long on trying to keep up with the city's burgeoning growth. In Cite's very first issue, in August 1982, an article titled "Trading Toilets" recounted a classic case of how even an unzoned and unplanned city must finally account for the implications of its own growth. A lack of sufficient sewage capacity ("sewer hook-ups;' in developer parlance) engendered a building moratorium within the inner city while encouraging development in other areas, mainly outside Loop 610. Thus a default form of planning and zoning that favored sprawl was inspired by the most primitive requirement of city building.

More than anything else, Houston's development as a 20th-century city has been shaped by the automobile. New York Times architecture critic Ada Louise Huxtable, when she visited Houston in the 1970s, was impressed by the degree to which the automobile had invaded the Houston experience. She wrote something of a paean to the city's kinetics in which she nicknamed Houston "Freeway City," "Strip City," and "Mobility City." Mobility captures an important part of the Houston spirit and helps explain its congenitally spread-out dimensions. But mobility doesn't entirely explain the devotion to the private automobile, a passion that is an expression of the city's culture of freedom and identity.

From the 1950s on, freeways became the most powerful marks on the Houston landscape, providing the city with determined economic and social partitioning and spawning aggressive commercial development along its flanks. Houston freeways have become, like those in Los Angeles described by Beyner Banham, "a single, comprehensible place, a coherent state of mind, a complete way of life, a fourth ecology." But the freeway is always a victim of its own success, as Joel Barna shows in his essay "The Mother of All Freeways," which looks at Houston's legendary West Loop. One of the busiest stretches of freeway in America, it flows through some of the city's most affluent playgrounds. Having created the conditions of prosperity, the issue became how the already oversized highway could become supersized while at the same time fending off vigorous protests from the freeway's upscale adjacencies.

As it spread spiderweb linkages of concentric and radial lines outward from the axis mundi at the city center, the freeway system allowed the city to metastasize in a more or less evenly densified sprawl. Suburban living has been an important part of Houston's growth, and architectural historian Richard Ingersoll describes how freeways became the armatures of suburban development. In his article "Utopia Unlimited;" Ingersoll looks at three of Houston's planned suburban communities: The Woodlands, Kingwood, and First Colony. These more coalesced, planned developments have been touted as alternatives to less organized and more ubiquitous sprawl. Far from being the salvation of the city, as the garden city reformers of the 19th and early 20th century thought them to be, Ingersoll finds them to be only marginally better. Like the rest of the city's vast hinterlands, they are wasteful consumers of land and natural resources and reinforce social and ethnic segregation, besides having so little noteworthy architecture in them.

David Kaplan in "Suburbia Deserta" shows how the newer suburbs, too, are vulnerable to economic events and ever-changing lifestyle preferences. Houston's suburban neighborhoods have often been pass-through settlements where older and smaller houses serve as stops on the way to bigger houses in newer subdivisions. But as the city's economy began to unravel in the 1980s, many new suburban developments witnessed foreclosures and empty mini-mansions on streets only a decade old or less. Kaplan shows that thoughtful planning and creating a sense of community can make a difference when a neighborhood finds itself in economic distress.

Development in Houston feels the competing tugs of centrifugal as well as centripetal forces that alternately draw the city's growth pattern out to the perimeter and sometimes back into town again. For most of its modern life, Houston invested in the expanding suburbs, dismantling old forms of urbanization in the city core and reconstructing them in entirely new forms on the perimeter. By the late 1970s, the inner city had shriveled into a socially inert collection of office buildings incongruously matched with the city's legitimate theaters that were gathered tightly together, an island of prosperity surrounded by neighborhoods and older businesses in serious decline. During the 1990s an almost unimaginable shift occurred that refocused attention on the downtown--a mini-boom of loft conversions and townhouses that has transformed a derelict central city area into one of Texas's fastest-growing residential neighborhoods. Joel Barna calls this "Filling the Doughnut" in his essay. High-profile projects helped boost the image of downtown, among them the remodeling of the venerable Rice Hotel, which had stood empty on a prominent corner downtown for some 30 years, and the conversion of the architecturally banal 1960s vintage Albert Thomas Convention Center into a restaurant and entertainment center. A new inner-city baseball stadium, replacing the peripherally located Astrodome, together with an impressive array of performing arts spaces and a new convention center, affirmed a new social prominence for the downtown as a companion to its uptown rival in the Galleria/Post Oak district along the West Loop.

Houston left the 20th century with an astounding 620 square miles in surface area and a voracious appetite for annexing whatever settlements appeared on the horizon, even if the intervening distances seemed decidedly un-urban. As Houston grew it became more and more an urban anomaly, a puzzle struggling to find the difference between building a great city and merely housing a huge population--a choice and a warning recognized as early as 1929 in a report from the City Planning Commission. Entering the 21 st century, Houston is still elusive. But as in all modern cities, many of its unique qualities are being dismantled, razed, and marginalized, only to be replaced by generic forms belonging to the heterotopia. It is a case, as Italo Calvino wrote, of how "cities begin to resemble one another in a labyrinth of reflections."

In the modern city, there may no longer be anything like a sense of place as it has been understood in the past but only place metaphors that drift across the city, giving it nicknames. As Japanese architect Atsushi Kitagawara reflected, "The city is not streets, buildings, crowds, and freeways. It's just that metaphorical condition we call the city." In Houston, the idea of the city as an organic, historic genius loci is hidden away in the cracks and grooves and margins and in things discovered by looking at a smaller and larger scale than the ordinary. Behind the corporate city reaching for seamless resemblance there are still lazy bayous harboring mysteries as they move in a different time frame from the mechanical pulse of the city of our creation. There is a transformative liquidity of the city as it seems to melt, flow, and congeal in new configurations. There are still distinct chunks of the city's old patchwork quilt that reflect places without names or maps. There is a city of profit-making beyond civic control. There is a city of mobility--always restless, always on the move, slipstreaming through space in pursuit of a million individual dreams and destinations. There is a city harboring space, half-empty, part garden, where a persistent background technology makes temperate machines in the garden. There is a city built around characteristic features of modern life: rapid change, builtin obsolescence, indeterminacy, media orientation, a culture of style and gratification. It is a city literally attacked by time and motion. Its existence is formed in a series of conjunctive episodes that hold onto their relationships for relatively brief periods. In the ephemeral city, time conspires to fashion a sense of place.

The concept of place is as fundamental to the identity of community as it is to the identity of the individual. Like all cities, big or small, Houston is a constellation of places--hidden and exposed, public and private, ordinary and special, peaceful and crowded. In looking at various areas of the city over the past 20 years, Cite has been fascinated by the ways places grow and change as well as by the diversity found within any given place. Houston places, we have discovered, are neither so easily recognized nor so well behaved as the piazza or promenade, and sometimes the most authentic among them are found outside the city's mainstream.

In his exploration of the Montrose district in "Evolving Boulevard;" Bruce Webb begins: "There are places that hold our interest because they seem to compress time and space into a picture of the city in miniature:" Such places have been called "epitome districts." Houston has other epitome districts--areas that seem to encompass a range of history and culture and that give "clues that trigger our awareness of the larger scene"--but not many. The essays that follow are about places "inside the Loop;" which in Houston means the older, more densely settled areas. Cite also has ventured into the vast expanse of Houston's suburban sprawl, where loose, inchoate communities of subdivisions, automobile strips, and shopping malls form cities of the non-place urban realm. In seeking those areas of Houston that are the most revealing and significant, it was not surprising that we found them in areas with longer and more complex histories. Webb's walk down Montrose Boulevard is a journey from the high culture of the Museum of Fine Arts to the low culture of tattoo parlors and condom shops. It is also a journey back in time, for the closer one gets to downtown, the older and seedier the scene becomes. Nevertheless, this particular seam in the fabric of Houston, with more substantial neighborhoods to its west and developing neighborhoods to its east, serves as a place where Houstonians can walk together and feel comfortable.

Houston's Freedman's Town grew up in a very different way from the streetcar suburb of Montrose. A part of the city's Fourth Ward partitioned in 1837, Freedman's Town became a community of freed slaves following the Civil War. The historic legacy of the area with its tight, brick-paved streets and wood-frame shotgun houses was acknowledged when Freedman'sTown was designated a National Register Historic District in 1985.

Because of its adjacency to downtown, some of the land within the designated district had valuable developmental potential, particularly the land on which Allen Parkway Village was located. The large, architecturally distinguished housing project from the 1940s, with beautiful mature landscaping and views out to the greensward along Allen Parkway, became the prize in a struggle that was seen as pitting mercenary developers abetted by city officials against a powerless minority community. Among several Cite stories on the subject is one by Diane Ghirardo called "Wielding the HACHet" (Housing Authority of the City of Houston). Ghirardo centered her discussion around two critical questions: "How does the community treat its least advantaged members?" and "How are decisions made in Houston?" Ghirardo not only describes the place called the Fourth Ward but also hints at its meaning as a part of Houston's social conscience. Allen Parkway Village was not saved, but neither was it turned into an expensive high-rise neighborhood near downtown. Compromises were reached on all sides, and no one was completely satisfied. Most of the solid, old units have been replaced by suburban-looking apartment houses painted beige and blue with pitched roofs--making no reference whatsoever to the historical associations of the area. If any generalization about the city and its decision-making processes can be gleaned from this neighborhood's struggles, it is that Money Talks--this is the one constant that has made most of the places in Houston what they are today.

Some of those displaced from Allen Parkway Village were Indo-Chinese immigrants. But these nomads seemed content to relocate, since their cultural identity is not in where they live but in places where they shop and meet and worship. Deborah Velders (then Deborah Jensen) documented this in her study of the Asian hold on part of Midtown, not far from the Fourth Ward. She found a bustling community of Vietnamese, Indonesians, Cambodians, Laotians, Thais, Chinese, Malaysians, and Filipinos generally appreciated for their Asian restaurants and discount fabric stores. But she also discovered that such cultural communities are held together by deep ethnic and social ties that leave an imprint on the places where they gather.

Houston, like big cities everywhere, has a myriad of both hidden and visible ethnic neighborhoods. Hermann Park, the city's oldest and most heavily used park, provides an extraordinary opportunity for the city to come together in a relaxed, bucolic setting. The automobile culture may have stripped Houston of a pedestrian-friendly urbanity, but this park goes a long way toward offering the in-town diversion city-dwellers crave.

Hermann Park is, like Webb's right bank-left bank notion about Montrose Boulevard, a place in between. It borders one of Houston's most exclusive subdivisions (Shadyside) on one end and honky-tonk Almeda Road and poor neighborhoods on the other. Residents of both enjoy the park and its facilities, including the golf course (the first racially integrated golf course in the country), the zoo, Miller Outdoor Theater with free summer evening performances, the Museum of Natural Science with an IMAX theater and glass butterfly house, as well as picnic areas, playgrounds, formal gardens, and woodland trails. In "Big Park, Little Plans;" Stephen Fox recounts the history of this park and hints at still greater possibilities within its borders.

Most of the city's museums are gathered just across the street from Hermann Park. In "Loose Fit;" Peter Papademetriou explores the idea of an identifiable district in this collection of institutions. The impressive list in cludes the Museum of Natural Science, the Museum of Fine Arts, the Contemporary Arts Museum, the Children's Museum, the Holocaust Museum, the Lawndale Art Center along Main Street, and the collection of Menil-associated museums a short distance away on Montrose. This latter group of private museums, sponsored by the late Dominique and John de Menil, is brought into sharp focus in William F. Stern's "The Twombly Gallery and the Making of Place." If the museums around Hermann Park form the nucleus of the district, the Menil museums float on the edge, adding considerable content to the whole. Papademetriou concludes that Houston's major museums do form a "loose" sort of district, though he points out the difficulty of walking in an orderly fashion from one place to another.

The same could be said of the Theater District downtown. It's cozy to think of the opera, the symphony, a play by Edward Albee, and the roadshow of Cabaret all happening at the same moment in a clustered menagerie of theater buildings--but you only go to one show at a time. While the heart of downtown may constitute a more cohesive district than the museum area, it is not a place in the sense that Broadway and Times Square are. Drexel Turner in "The Neighborhood of Make Believe" notes that while the Theater District is "conspicuous, [it is] still somewhat disjointed." The nightlife in Houston had not yet developed to make the place as memorable as the show when Turner wrote this piece in 1998.

Houston's universities are memorable places. Larry McMurtry admitted that Rice University, where he once taught, was one of his favorite Texas places (Cite 37, fall 1997): "Rice is one of the nicest campuses in the nation. What I like about it is that it's the center of a really dynamic city, and yet it doesn't dominate the city, nor is it dominated by the city ... [I] like a university that can sort of hold a dignified place in the center of a huge city. I still feel very attracted." High praise for a place that Richard Ingersoll, in "Academic Enclaves;" worries might be less involved with the city than it should be. Each of the city's universities has a specific identity that reflects its social community: Philip Johnson's compact, Miesian cloister at the University of St. Thomas; the classical quadrangles at Rice; the painted trees and student murals inspired by the African-American artist John Biggers along the central mall at Texas Southern University; and the huge, proletarian, commuter campus of the University of Houston identified from the freeway by the tempietto atop the Gerald D. Hines College of Architecture building.

While some of the seven essays that follow show the rich and evolving cultural spectrum provided by Houston's museum and theater districts, others discuss places less easily discovered--the precincts of specific social or ethnic groups. The writers provide us with a unique way of seeking the city by looking through the veil of refinement, surface spectacle, and boosterism to find a more authentic experience. These essays examine only a select few from among Houston's landscape of places. Other places that bolster a sense of its identity include NASA's Johnson Space Center in nearby Clear Lake, the Texas Medical Center, and the Galleria. Along with the Astrodome complex, still a strong Houston icon, these places are prominent on the visitor's map of the city.

Houston is a restless city, constantly changing, and the concept of place is often at odds with these shiftings. Houstonians like the novelty more than the substance of the new, but they also cling to the stability of the familiar, even--ironically--when it means rejecting protective land use controls. Uniquely and paradoxically, Houston is a city of ever-renewing old places and new places designed to provide comfortable familiarity.

Perhaps the strongest impetus behind the founding of Cite was the almost complete absence of consistent architectural criticism and commentary from the local press. By 1982, the year Cite began publication, Houston featured prominently among American cities as a leader in new building. Celebrated architects from Philip Johnson to Cesar Pelli were leaving their mark in Houston with buildings that had caught the attention of the national press, recognizing Houston as something of a mecca for a bold, new form of commercial architecture. In 1976 Ada Louise Huxtable, the New York Times architectural critic, remarked on this unprecedented wave of building, suggesting that in Houston one could witness the future direction of architecture in America. By the 1980s newspapers in most cities of comparable size employed full-time architectural critics, even in places where growth was nothing like the building boom in Houston. The two daily papers, the Houston Chronicle and the Houston Post, regularly presented design features on home decorating and furnishings, but in-depth reviews of new buildings were rare. At the Chronicle, that writing was left to the fine arts editor, who also covered ballet, opera, and theater, leaving little time or space for architectural reviews. What news there was about new buildings was likely to be found in the business or real estate sections.

Cite's first issue, published in August 1982, presented a mix of articles about architecture and the city of Houston intended to place the discussion of Houston buildings in a larger social, cultural, and urban context. From the beginning, the publication viewed architecture as a very direct part of the city's formation, demonstrating how buildings give shape to what was, and still is, a young, unruly city looking for a sense of itself. Comprehensive reviews of individual buildings, along with shorter design reviews, photo essays, neighborhood tour guides, exhibition reviews, book reviews, and interviews with noted architects have formed a running commentary on Houston's architecture during an expansive period of building activity. Cite has examined many of the buildings that have had a significant architectural impact on making the city and in so doing has chronicled much of Houston's architectural legacy in articles that also reveal the city's experience with the major movements in American architecture.

By 1980 Houston's very image as the booming American city was keenly associated with its recently built crop of sleek modern skyscrapers. Savvy commercial interests creatively combined with skilled architectural expert ise to produce the latest versions of America's most powerful building type. To give a critical framework to this outpouring of high-rise construction, the spring/summer 1984 issue of Cite was devoted to the phenomenon of tall buildings in Houston. In that issue's lead article, John Kaliski reviewed the architectural competition for the new Southwest Center, presenting not only the winning scheme by Chicagoan Helmut Jahn but critiques of the two runners-up as well. Kaliski used the competition as an opportunity to talk about some of the latest directions in high-rise design.

Balancing Kaliski's view of the future skyscraper, Stephen Fox in his retrospective article "Scraping the Houston Sky: 1894-1976" traced the development of tall buildings in Houston from the earliest structures in the 19th century through the Modernist era of the post-World War II years and into the mid-1970s, just as an economic boom would flood downtown and new regional commercial centers like the Galleria with an array of impressive skyscrapers. In his carefully researched survey, Fox set Houston's historically important tall buildings within a national context. The issue also included an illustrated essay that reflected on skyscrapers that never were or had yet to become. Ironically, Helmut Jahn's Southwest Center was fated to become an unbuilt dream itself, falling victim to the 1984 recession that seriously curtailed high-rise construction in the city.

Among the architects who predominated the Houston skyscraper scene at that time was Philip Johnson. Indeed, no other architect in modern times has had a greater presence and influence in Houston than Johnson. Beginning in 1950 with a house for the Menil family and culminating with a series of high-rise office buildings commissioned by developer Gerald Hines, Johnson's career was nurtured by Texas patrons. Mark Hewitt in "Much Ledoux about Nothing?" previewed Johnson's latest visitation upon the city, a new building for the College of Architecture at the University of Houston. As curious as Johnson's seemingly Xeroxed design (which closely followed a visionary scheme for a building in Claude-Nicolas Ledoux's 18th-century plan for the ideal city of Chaux) was Hewitt's explanation of how Johnson, late in his career, received the commission. As he points out, the choice had more to do with the image the university hoped to project than the wishes of faculty members who had sought a competition. Johnson with partner John Burgee responded to the university's charge, delivering a building that was indeed more image than substance, providing the University of Houston with distinctive signage by way of an "octastyle Doric temple crowning the building" easily seen from the nearby Gulf Freeway. Three years after the building's completion, it was once again the subject of a review, this time by John Kaliski (Cite 14, summer 1986). Less accepting of Johnson's historical premise, Kaliski confirmed much of what Hewitt anticipated, taking the architects to task for contradictions in plan resolution and a general lack of detail and craftsmanship.

Documenting the influence of Frank Lloyd Wright, Kaliski's article "The Wright Stuff: Houston's Natural House" was one of several articles that featured Houston in the 1950s in Cite's fall 1984 issue. "The Wright Stuff" portrayed Houston in the boom years following World War II as a city that wholeheartedly embraced the new and modern. Two distinct schools emerged: one influenced by the work and teachings of Frank Lloyd Wright and the other as influenced by the work of Mies van der Bohe. "The Wright Stuff" reviews the work of the "master's" foremost followers in Houston, MacKie & Kamrath, along with a discussion of work by Bailey Swenson, Herb Greene, Bruce Goff, and Wright's only contribution to the architecture of Houston, the Thaxton House. Cite's fascination with Houston's architecture at mid-century, a subject Cite's editors would return to again in subsequent issues, derived as much from the architecture itself as its desire to portray the vitality and innovative spirit of the work at a time when Houston was on the cusp of becoming one of America's economic and cultural centers.

Cite regularly has visited the lives and careers of Houston's key architectural figures, including memorial essays on William W. Caudill (fall 1983), Hugo Neuhaus (winter 1987), Sally Walsh (spring 1992), and Donald Barthelme (fall 1996). "Howard Barnstone (1923-1987)" chronicles the life of Houston's most celebrated modern architect. Stephen Fox, who worked as Barnstone's research assistant on The Architecture of John F. Staub: Houston and the South, reviews Barnstone's career overall in this extended memorial. Fox shows how Barnstone, who came to Houston in the 1940s after studying architecture at Yale, combined influences of Mies van der Rohe and Philip Johnson in his own stunning array of steel-frame houses, which he designed with his partner Preston Bolton. Barnstone produced an equally distinguished body of work in the 1960s realized in a modern, expressionistic language executed in a variety of materials from wood frame to reinforced concrete. Throughout his career, Barnstone's work demonstrated an almost magical combination of space, light, and proportion.

Houses and housing have been frequent subjects in Cite, since residences, whether single- or multi-family, make up the majority of Houston's building inventory. Moreover, the house often exercises the most progres sive thinking in architecture and historically has been an incubator for architectural innovation. While Cite occasionally has reviewed individual houses, more attention has been paid to residential architecture as a collective phenomenon, seeking to explore the broader social and historical issues of urban form. This was exactly the approach Peter Waldman took in "Recent Housing in Houston: A Romantic Urbanism." Coinciding with the commercial building expansion of the 1970s and early 1980s, a spate of inner-city housing developments had brought an innovative typology of automobile-oriented townhouses to Houston's older suburban neighborhoods. The work of young architects in concert with a group of adventuresome developers, these housing enclaves pointed to a new direction for the future of Houston's urban housing form. Waldman reflects on these new housing trends by looking back at several historic housing models, which in their time projected a visionary image of what Houston might become.

Stephen Fox in "Framing the New: Mies van der Rohe and Houston Architecture" expands upon Ludwig Mies van der Rohe's influence on Houston's architectural scene in the 1950s, 1960s, and early 1970s. Fox relates the story of how a group of young architects including Howard Barnstone, Hugo Neuhaus, Burdette Keeland, and Anderson Todd, many of whom were teaching at the University of Houston or Rice University, were captivated when John and Dominique de Menil retained Philip Johnson, Mies's acolyte, to design their home. Though the house lacked the structural purity and rationale of the Mies's Farnsworth House, its interior spaces exhibited the "expansive, lofty proportions" associated with the German master's work. The completion of the Menil House marked the beginning of what would be an outpouring of Miesian-influenced work by the array of those young, talented Houston architects, Philip Johnson at the University of St. Thomas, and, later, the nationally well-regarded firm of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill. Mies van der Rohe himself was brought to Houston through the influence of his admirers--Anderson Todd, Preston Bolton, and Hugo Neuhaus--to design two additions to the Museum of Fine Arts: Cullinan Hall (1958) and the Brown Pavilion (1974). Fox describes how Houston, through the leadership of a handful of cultural patrons, became a leading proponent of modern architecture in America.

A photograph on the cover of Cite's fall 1989 issue caught the reflection of an architectural detail mirrored in the glass fagade of the Conoco Headquarters Building, a suburban office complex completed in 1985. While the three-story structures of this complex are not nearly as visible as the more glamorous downtown skyscrapers, the new Conoco Headquarters is a superlative work of architecture by the renowned firm of Kevin Roche John Dinkeloo and Associates. The Conoco Headquarters, as described in the article "Floating City," set a standard for the suburban office building in Houston with a complex of structures that was as sensitive to its site as it was to the workplace. As author of the article, I was fascinated with the building as a phenomenon of Houston's most recent suburban growth, miles beyond the center city, as part of a cluster of buildings whose location along I-10 had become known as the Energy Corridor. With its annexation laws, forgiving geography, and consequently ever-expanding city limits, Houston was fast defining a new kind of suburban city. The Conoco Headquarters would come to represent the ideal for its business environment and the model for a city on wheels.

"Diamond in the Round: The Astrodome Turns 25" by Bruce C. Webb and "Fair or Foul" by James Zook tell the tale of two cities: Houston in the 1960s and Houston in the 1990s. Webb's article about the making of the Astrodome, on the occasion of its 25th anniversary, portrayed a city itching to get into the big league with a baseball venue unlike anything else in the country. Under the guidance of the legendary Judge Roy Hofheinz, the city built what was touted as the eighth wonder of the world--the first domed, air-conditioned stadium in the country, easily visible for miles around in a field on the outskirts of town. Less a work of great architecture, the building was a spectacular engineering feat, especially for environmental control of air-conditioning on a grand scale that helped to establish Houston as the air-conditioning capital of the world. But by the early 1990s the Astrodome no longer fit the needs of a modern sports franchise.

Threatened with the loss of the city's Major League baseball team, the Houston Sports Authority, prodded by Astros franchise owner Draytor McLane Jr., pulled up stakes for a move downtown. While the Astrodome, built on cheap land surrounded by acres of parking asphalt, symbolized a city moving inexorably outward into an endless coastal plain, the new stadium was planned as a catalyst for revitalizatior in the city's downtown core. Initially called the Ballpark at Union Station (now Minute Maid Park), the new stadium was strategically sited in an area ripe for development on the east side of downtown, and it incorporated as its grand entrance Houston's historic Union Station (Warren & Wetmore, 1911). The years between the building of the Astrodome and the design for the new downtown ballpark had not been kind to progressive modern architecture, which had become overwhelmed by a stylistic neo-traditional fashion favoring a historicist approach. Unlike the Astrodome, whose design looked to the future, the Ballpark at Union Station looked backward, taking its cues from the adjacent rail terminal building and the romance with baseball parks from the beginning of the 20th century to evoke the nostalgia of an era gone by. Designed solely for baseball, the stadium is an open-air affair, protected in rainy weather or when the temperatures soar with a sliding retractable roof, a hulking form looming awkwardly over the stadium and its downtown neighborhood. The two authors reveal the force of personalities and dynamics that produce these kinds o grand civic projects, both symbols of the city's perceived image and its aspirations at two distinct times in its recent history.

Preservation has never been an easy sell in Houston, the only major city in the United States without an effective preservation ordinance. Regulations of the sort entailed in landmark designation have more often than not been viewed as anathema by the dominating development forces that build the city. But when preservation is deemed good for business, those forces can often be reversed. Such was the good fortune for the Rice Hotel, where the same sort of cooperative revitalization efforts that brought the Ballpark at Union Station to its downtown home were applied to restoring the 1913 hotel as a residential apartment house. Bruce C. Webb in "Deconstructing the Rice" thoughtfully reviews the history of the Rice Hotel. He analyzes the financing mechanisms between the city anc the developer and concludes with a balanced critique of the finished renovation, which converted a 1,000-room hotel to 312 rental loft apartments with a new adjoining parking garage. A fold-out page in Cite neatly illustrated the renovation with a vertical section through the building keyed to brief descriptions of the restoration components. This kind of article, the story of a noteworthy older building and the struggle to save it, represents Cite's advocacy for preserving Houston's legacy of historic buildings.

The individuality of American cities is derived as much from their architecture as from differences in age, topography, climate, and planning regulations. While there is duplication of form and building types throughout the country, every American city contains certain buildings that are absolutely particular to its place. The Houston buildings reviewed, referred to, and described in the pages of Cite are those that most set this city apart from others. These buildings supply the information we need to read the history of our place. They stand as symbols of the aspirations of the people who built them and underscore the contribution that Houston has made to the larger history of American architecture.