AIA-LRGV Chapter Conference Tour: The Golden Age of Harlingen Architecture

On Thursday, September 5, 2024, 45 architects toured the mid-20th-century modern architectural highlights of Harlingen as part of the 2024 Building Communities Conference & Tradeshow, organized by Lower Rio Grande Valley chapter of the American Institute of Architects and held the first weekend of September on South Padre Island. Chapter president Nestor Camacho, AIA, conference committee chair Sergio Láinez, AIA, and executive director Maria Sustaeta coordinated the day-long tour of nine sites.

Harlingen may not immediately spring to mind as a hotbed of modern architectural production. But like many communities in Texas, it was home to exceptionally inventive architects during the postwar period. John G. York (1914-1980) and Alan Y. Taniguchi (1922-1998) are the two best-known Harlingen modernists. But York’s sometime partner, Walter C. Bowman (1912-1966), and Bowman’s subsequent partners, E. Lester Swanson (1927-2023) and James W. Hiester (b. 1929), as well as Taniguchi’s short-term partner Charles B. Croft (1927-2017), were also important contributors. Bowman’s firm would become SHW Architects.

The tour began with a stop in downtown Harlingen at the law office of McCullough & McCullough, built in 1983. Chronologically, 1983 is a bit of a stretch for “midcentury,” but the McCullough building embodies the outstanding attributes of 1950s Harlingen modernism. It was constituted by its concrete tilt-wall construction system; it demonstrated environmental responsiveness in its incorporation of a north-facing skylight that illuminates an interior patio; and it relied on architectural ingenuity to resolve such issues as providing for views out while inhibiting views from the street into the interior. The architect was Gustavo de Roza, a Chinese-Portuguese immigrant based in Winnipeg, Canada, who was briefly involved in a Harlingen architecture partnership in the 1980s. The tour then visited two religious spaces completed in 1962. One was the chapel of Kreidler-Ashcraft Funeral Directors, the other Bowman Swanson Hiester’s Wesley Methodist Church. The architectural character of both buildings grew out of their architects’ expressive use of glue-
laminated timber ribs to shape vertical interior spaces. 

A stop at a house designed in the mid-1950s by Alan Taniguchi demonstrated how he rotated its plan so that major rooms faced south (toward the side property line and a garden patio) rather than the east-facing street front. Taniguchi used a windowless plane of limestone to wall off the house’s street front while serving as a backdrop for the site’s profuse subtropical vegetation.

Lunch was at one of Harlingen’s midcentury icons, Taniguchi & Croft’s flamboyant Casa del Sol (1962) downtown, built as a municipal event center. What makes the Casa del Sol iconic is its radial, 16-bay, thin-shell concrete roof structure. The catenary profiles of the two-inch-thick roof plate, folded over protruding, curved post-tensioned beams supported on sculpturally faceted columns, give the roof a draped, fabric-like appearance belying its concrete construction. Harlingen architect John Pearcy, AIA, spoke about recent efforts to persuade the City of Harlingen to recognize the building’s architectural significance and improve its maintenance.

Following lunch, the tour moved on to a flat-roofed, steel-framed, one-story suburban office building constructed in 1950 as Cocke, Bowman & York’s design studio. The exterior of the small building shows how John York experimented with exposed structure, various surfacing materials, and climate-responsive spatial organization to produce a new building type for Harlingen: the garden office building. As participants noted, the diminutive building (now occupied by Green, Rubiano & Associates, a structural engineering firm) retains steel loops projecting from the roof fascia designed to support an exterior shading device.   

The tour bus drove past other examples of suburban office buildings, one by Croft featuring paired concrete upstand beams carrying a concrete roof plate, the other a subdivision of one-story medical buildings (several designed by Taniguchi). These demonstrated the suburbanization of the professional workplace in the 1950s. Participants dodged rain showers while admiring a one-block street of houses that Taniguchi designed in 1952 at the beginning of his Harlingen career. The small houses (one owned by Harlingen modern preservation activist Michael Dailey) orient rooms to the south and away from the street. They also treat their architecturally exuberant carports as surrogate front porches.  

The tour’s final stops were in Harlingen’s elite, midcentury garden suburban neighborhood, Laurel Park, developed along the north bank of the Arroyo Colorado in the early 1950s. There, John Pearcy led participants through two houses his firm, Megamorphosis, restored. One was the house of Laurel Park’s developer, John W. McKelvey. The other was architect John York’s own house of 1952, a South Texas version of the Eames Case Study House. The York House is steel-framed. Pipe columns and bar joists are exposed inside. All spaces in the one-room-deep house are lined up along a screened east-side breezeway running the length of the house. Pearcy described how he and the home’s current owner, Matthew Nichols, tore away bad additions and cheap alterations to recover the house’s stunning, radical design. Interior colors were restored using rare color photographs published in Progressive Architecture magazine in 1955. The restoration of the York House is as consequential as Lawrence Lof’s 2008 restoration of Richard Neutra’s Kraigher House in Brownsville. 

The AIA-LRGV’s 2024 study tour examined and analyzed how mid-20th-century architects extracted inventive architecture from the material and budgetary limitations that still confront architects in the Lower Rio Grande Valley. By looking at building design, materials, structural issues, sustainability, and preservation in the environmental context of a hot, humid climate, the tour group assessed and learned from the profession’s move from designing for passive ventilation in the 1950s to designing air-condition-dependent buildings by the 1960s. What stood out was the extraordinary innovations that York, Taniguchi, Bowman, Croft, and their peers were able to build into their economical, site-specific designs.