A few years ago, there was an ad campaign here in Houston called Houston It’s Worth It. There are always ad agencies coming up with ad campaigns to make Houstonians think that the city they live in is actually a good place to live. Usually this kind of civic ad campaign is pointed outward—trying to gin up tourism and business travel dollars. But the intended audience for HIWI were Houstonians themselves. Why? Because many Houstonians, though they may wish to be boosters, know in their hearts that Houston sucks.
Lars Lerup was the Dean of the Rice University’s Architecture school from 1993 until 2009. In One Million Acres & No Zoning (published in 2011), Lerup sets out to do for Houston what Reyner Banham did for Los Angeles in his book Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies or what Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, and Steven Izenour did in Learning From Las Vegas. Lerup fails to reach the epoch-making acheivement of either of these two classics, and he doesn’t even really make a very strong case for Houston.
He describes Houston using a series of portmanteau words and phrases, like “zoohemic”, “the holey plane”, “atrium space”, “the great retro-fit”, and “megashape”. I’m not totally sure that Lerup originated these terms, but when I look them up on Google, they usually link back to him or writers addressing his work. There is something about the world of architecture and city planning that loves making up new words: for example, “stroad.” And for the most part, these new words are descriptive of features of Houston that one would find typical of, if not unique to, this city.
One Million Acres doesn’t have a strong thesis. Lerup tries to describe Houston by identifying its structures, but doesn’t reach a well-articulated conclusion. I think this is in part due to conflicting motives: on one hand, Larup is trying to be a booster like Banham, but as a well-educated citizen, he can’t help but notice that Houston has made some serious mistakes. (Lerup imagines fixing them in an unimaginably huge project that he calls “the great retro-fit.”)
Lerup appears to dislike the Medical Center, the light rail system and apartment complexes that he calls “White Collar Prisons”. “The TMC and its ragged vicinity is an example of man-made self-organization.” And would-be urbanist emperors don’t particularly like “self-organization.” The “white collar prisons” are the apartment blocks that are so popular now. They usually have a parking garage topped with apartments, occupying a whole city block. And they do indeed feel like prisons in some way—the fact that they are mostly closed off from the street except for the entrance and exit from the garage. They seldom have street-facing businesses on the first floor (although some do in Midtown, such as the apartments above the Whole Foods Market on Elgin), They are very closed off. Even though such apartments are mostly built in the more urban parts of Houston, he considers them basically suburban. He writes:
Denying all forms of democratic collectivity in favor of socioeconomic tribalism, sequestered suburban thinking permeates all aspects of the attenuated metropolis.
Unlike me, Lerup mostly refrains from snarkiness when talking about Houston, but the term “white collar prisons” is an exception to this rule.
He speaks of the “holey plane” (another phrase he has made up for this book) to describe how development works in Houston—one area is developed, then another—but they aren’t always contiguous. This leads to same strangely undeveloped parcels—“holes”—that are places on the map that for whatever reason didn’t get built up at the same time as their immediate neighbors.
As an aside, I grew up about a block from one of those holes. When I was growing up, on the northwest corner of the intersection of Gessner and Memorial Dr. was an undeveloped hole surrounded by suburban subdivisions. As a boy, this strange section of woods was a playground for me, but one had to be careful because bad older boys liked to go there to smoke and look at porn mags. Eventually, someone realized that this land was worth a small fortune and built large suburban villas there. That seems to be the fate of all the “holes” in the “holey plane” eventually, but as one drives around, it is unsurprising to see random undeveloped areas that sit for decades.
One Million Acres & No Zoning was published in 2011 and he identified flooding as a major issue that Houston would have to fix via “the great retro-fit”. Six years later, the urgency of this was reinforced when Hurricane Harvey flooded the entire city. And Lerup doesn’t have a ton of faith in the political powers that be: “In my limited understanding of their achievements, no mayor has dealt seriously or consistently with daunting environmental problems. For example, flooding has been regarded not as an ‘environmental problem caused by development’ but as a problem for development—and those living on the flood plain.” And a few pages later, he explains why there is always a conflict between people who want sprawl and those who want to correct it: “The small but active group of ‘progressives’ and the large majority are worlds apart. While progressives see the need for radical reorganization of housing, by increasing density near freeways to shorten commuting distances and thereby de-emphasize single-family housing, the others strive not to give up on the original desire to live in the suburbs.”
So given this, what is the solution? How can a “great retro-fit” happen. Personally, I think it’s impossible. I think Houston is going to face the same fate as the Indus River Valley Civilization which existed from about 3000 BCE to 1300 BCE. We call it the “Indus River Valley Civilization” because we have never deciphered their writing and we don’t know what its contemporaries called them. It was one of the earliest urbanized civilizations (along with Egypt, Sumer, Norte Chico, and China), but a series of environmental disasters eventually made life there too difficult. Their cities were abandoned. This will be Houston’s fate. There will be no “great retro-fit.”
So if One Million Acres & No Zoning doesn’t work as a prescriptive or cautionary work, nor as a theoretical one, nor as a Reyner Banham-style, “European comes to America to tell us why we’re great” book, then what does it have? Aside from the profligate coining of new terms, its main virtue are Lerup’s drawings. Lerup draws architectural views with colored pencils that look absolutely beautiful. They have a sketchy feel, like he was making notes for himself. I want show a few of them here.
I love this one—an enormous thunderhead is about to envelope downtown as seen from a distance. He describes the profile that downtown makes as a “mega-shape”, and this drawing shows how our “mega-shapes” are completely outmatched by nature. And, using some comic book visual language, Lerup envisions this as downtown startled by the storm as represented by the crown of red anxiety lines.
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