"This ambitious study of Staub's work by architectural historian Stephen Fox goes beyond a description of Staub's houses. Fox analyzes the roles of space, structure, and decoration in creating, defining, and maintaining social class structures and expectations and shows how Staub was able to incorporate these elements and understandings into the elegant buildings he designed for his clients. In the process, he contributes greatly to a fuller understanding of Houston's emergence as a premier American city."--BOOK JACKET.
Progressive former governor James Stephen Hogg moved his business headquarters to Houston in 1905. For seven decades, his children Will, Ima, and Mike Hogg used their political ties, social position, and family fortune to improve the lives of fellow Houstonians. As civic activists, they espoused contested causes like city planning and mental health care. As volunteers, they inspired others to support social service, educational, and cultural programs. As philanthropic entrepreneurs, they built institutions that have long outlived them: the Houston Symphony, the Museum of Fine Arts, Memorial Park, and the Hogg Foundation. The Hoggs had a vision of Houston as a great city—a place that supports access to parklands, music, and art; nurtures knowledge of the "American heritage which unites us"; and provides social service and mental health care assistance. This vision links them to generations of American idealists who advanced a moral response to change. Based on extensive archival sources, The Hogg Family and Houston explains the impact of Hogg family philanthropy for the first time. This study explores how individual ideals and actions influence community development and nurture humanitarian values. It examines how philanthropists and volunteers mold Houston's traditions and mobilize allies to meet civic goals. It argues that Houston's generous citizens have long believed that innovative cultural achievement must balance aggressive economic expansion.
Complex, controversial, and prolific, Howard Barnstone was a central figure in the world of twentieth-century modern architecture. Recognized as Houston’s foremost modern architect in the 1950s, Barnstone came to prominence for his designs with partner Preston M. Bolton, which transposed the rigorous and austere architectural practices of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe to the hot, steamy coastal plain of Texas. Barnstone was a man of contradictions—charming and witty but also self-centered, caustic, and abusive—who shaped new settings that were imbued, at once, with spatial calm and emotional intensity. Making Houston Modern explores the provocative architect’s life and work, not only through the lens of his architectural practice but also by delving into his personal life, class identity, and connections to the artists, critics, collectors, and museum directors who forged Houston’s distinctive culture in the postwar era. Edited by three renowned voices in the architecture world, this volume situates Barnstone within the contexts of American architecture, modernism, and Jewish culture to unravel the legacy of a charismatic personality whose imaginative work as an architect, author, teacher, and civic commentator helped redefine architecture in Texas.
In HISTORIC HOUSTON: HOW TO SEE IT, Lucinda Freeman brings Houstons history to life by coupling entertaining stories that highlight influential personalities and key historical events with day-trip itineraries, providing a comprehensive and useful guidebook for heritage tourists interested in the history of Houston and surrounding region. Freeman is a native Houstonian, a fifth-generation Texan, and the daughter of two parents who also wrote books on Houstons history. She relies on careful research and personal experience to offer unforgettable adventures into early Houston and Texas. She brings to light colorful historical characters like Sam Houston, Deaf Smith, and legendary cattle rustler and oilman Shanghai Pierce. Freeman also recounts stories of immigrants and highlights events from key time periods like the Texas Revolution, Antebellum Texas, and the Civil War, offering guided day-trip plans for seeing it all, including historical markers, museums, plantations, battle sites, and renovated historical buildings. HISTORIC HOUSTON: HOW TO SEE IT com bines historical facts and easy to- follow itineraries with captivating anecdotes about the famous, the infamous, the heroic, and the eccentric in order to provide a fascinating, in-depth glimpse into a forward-thinking city and region with great personality and character. For more information about the book and related projects and events, visit www.historichoustontourism.com
In the early twentieth century, developers from Baltimore to Beverly Hills built garden suburbs, a new kind of residential community that incorporated curvilinear roads and landscape design as picturesque elements in a neighborhood. Intended as models for how American cities should be rationally, responsibly, and beautifully modernized, garden suburban communities were fragments of a larger (if largely imagined) garden city—the mythical “good” city of U.S. city-planning practices of the 1920s. This extensively illustrated book chronicles the development of the two most fully realized garden suburbs in Texas, Dallas’s Highland Park and Houston’s River Oaks. Cheryl Caldwell Ferguson draws on a wealth of primary sources to trace the planning, design, financing, implementation, and long-term management of these suburbs. She analyzes homes built by such architects as H. B. Thomson, C. D. Hill, Fooshee & Cheek, John F. Staub, Birdsall P. Briscoe, and Charles W. Oliver. She also addresses the evolution of the shopping center by looking at Highland Park’s Shopping Village, which was one of the first in the nation. Ferguson sets the story of Highland Park and River Oaks within the larger story of the development of garden suburban communities in Texas and across America to explain why these two communities achieved such prestige, maintained their property values, became the most successful in their cities in the twentieth century, and still serve as ideal models for suburban communities today.
In sixty-seven exquisite watercolors and drawings, nationally famous architect Eugene Aubry captures on paper the sensibilities, the memories, and the grace that evokes Galveston, especially for those who are BOI (“born on the island”). Commissioned by the Galveston Historical Foundation, these works of art are intended to enhance the visual record of the buildings and the unique local architectural style that so many have appreciated over the years.? In the aftermath of Hurricane Ike, Galvestonians became more aware than ever of the treasure of the island’s historical architecture and the vulnerability of this heritage to forces beyond human control. Aubry’s art captures the almost palpable sense of past glories these buildings bring to mind. Aubry—himself BOI—has fashioned these pieces in a way that resonates with those who love the island’s ethos. With a fine eye to the artist’s intent and a mastery of detail, architectural historian Stephen Fox expertly and eloquently introduces the work as a whole and, in discursive captions that accompany each image, informs the reader’s appreciation of Aubry’s art. So much more than a tribute, Born on the Island: The Galveston We Remember stands as a loving homage to Galveston—one that will call its readers home to the island, even if they have never ventured there before.
**NAMED ONE OF THE BEST ART BOOKS OF THE DECADE BY ARTNEWS** The first and definitive biography of the celebrated collectors Dominique and John de Menil, who became one of the greatest cultural forces of the twentieth century through groundbreaking exhibits of art, artistic scholarship, the creation of innovative galleries and museums, and work with civil rights. Dominique and John de Menil created an oasis of culture in their Philip Johnson-designed house with everyone from Marlene Dietrich and René Magritte to Andy Warhol and Jasper Johns. In Houston, they built the Menil Collection, the Rothko Chapel, the Byzantine Fresco Chapel, the Cy Twombly Gallery, and underwrote the Contemporary Arts Museum. Now, with unprecedented access to family archives, William Middleton has written a sweeping biography of this unique couple. From their ancestors in Normandy and Alsace, to their own early years in France, and their travels in South America before settling in Houston. We see them introduced to the artists in Europe and America whose works they would collect, and we see how, by the 1960s, their collection had grown to include 17,000 paintings, sculptures, drawings, photographs, rare books, and decorative objects. And here is, as well, a vivid behind-the-scenes look at the art world of the twentieth century and the enormous influence the de Menils wielded through what they collected and built and through the causes they believed in.
