Home, Heat, Money, God
Home, Heat, Money, God
Texas and Modern Architecture
Thematically focused analysis of modern architecture throughout Texas with gorgeous photographs illustrating works by famous and lesser-known architects.
In the mid-twentieth century, dramatic social and political change coincided with the ascendance and evolution of architectural modernism in Texas. Between the 1930s and 1980s, a state known for cowboys and cotton fields rapidly urbanized and became a hub of global trade and a heavyweight in national politics. Relentless ambition and a strong sense of place combined to make Texans particularly receptive to modern architecture’s implication of newness, forward-looking attitude, and capacity to reinterpret historical forms in novel ways. As money and people poured in, architects and their clients used modern buildings to define themselves and the state.
Illustrated with stunning photographs by architect Ben Koush, Home, Heat, Money, God analyzes buildings in big cities and small towns by world-famous architects, Texas titans, and lesser-known designers. Architectural historian Kathryn O’Rourke describes the forces that influenced architects as they addressed basic needs—such as staying cool in a warming climate and living in up-to-date housing—and responded to a culture driven by potent religiosity, by the countervailing pressures of pluralism and homogenization, and by the myth of Texan exceptionalism.
I have a substantial library on the subject...and not one of those books might be considered definitive. Home, Heat, Money, God: Texas and Modern Architecture gets about as close as any. A chunky, colorful pleasure, it is the work of historian Kathryn E. O’Rourke, who provides the text, and the architect and critic Ben Koush, who supplies the photographs. . . . Many of the projects examined here will be familiar, but what makes the book so enjoyable (and an essential component of its argument) are those that are less so. Koush and O’Rourke have an admirable taste not just for the state’s conventionally ‘important’ architecture but also for the vernacular and idiosyncratic.
An expansive new book...tracks the cultural reach and style innovations of a state coming into its own...O’Rourke’s detailed history...and Koush’s photographs...weave together disparate threads of Texas design, with an eye toward materials, energy, climate and justice...Home, Heat, Money, God is both fittingly wide and surprisingly deep.
Kathryn E. O’Rourke and Ben Koush have teamed up to produce a lively, provocative, sometimes irreverent look into what might be described as the long mid-twentieth century, using Texan buildings and places to frame their observations. Told with O’Rourke’s engaging insight, Koush’s acute eye, and Ian Searcy’s no-nonsense design, Home, Heat, Money, God: Texas and Modern Architecture will join such classics as John Bainbridge’s The Super-Americans (1961) and Joel Warren Barna’s The See-Through Years (1993) in its penetrating examination of Texan cultural ambitions, achievements, and flaws.
Ben Koush’s gorgeous photographs beautifully accompany Kathryn O’Rourke’s vibrant prose to tell the story of modern architecture in Texas. And what a story it is: while I’ve already tabbed innumerable buildings here that I absolutely want to visit, Home, Heat, Money, God is less a guidebook than an engrossing, revelatory tale. 'Modernism in America' is typically associated with the northeast, California, or Florida, but that assumption has overlooked modernism’s important legacy in the Lone Star State. This book is a terrific account of Texas’s modern culture and the extraordinary buildings that reflect it.
Kathryn E. O’Rourke is an architectural historian and professor of art history at Trinity University. She is the author of Modern Architecture in Mexico City and editor of O’Neil Ford on Architecture.
Ben Koush is an architect and historian. He has written for Architects’ Newspaper, Cite Magazine, Texas Architect, and HoustonMod.org.
- Introduction: History and Mythology in Texas Architecture
- Part I: Priorities
- 1. Home
- 2. Heat
- 3. Money
- Part II: Preoccupations
- 4. God
- 5. Government
- 6. Care
- Part III: R&R and R&D
- 7. Sports and Leisure
- 8. On the Road
- 9. Knowledge and Power
- Part IV: Assemblage
- 10. Precious Objects
- 11. Hearts and Minds
- 12. Contact Zones
- Coda: What We Save and Why
- Acknowledgments
- Notes
- Further Reading
- Address List
- Index
Making Houston Modern
The Life and Architecture of Howard Barnstone
Edited by Barrie Scardino Bradley, Stephen Fox, and Michelangelo Sabatino
