Sep 04, 2024
Exciting new changes are afoot. Next year will mark Texas Architect’s 75th year of production. To celebrate this significant milestone,…
Jul 09, 2024
In early June, I made my way to Washington, DC, for the AIA Conference on Architecture & Design. Though I’ve…
May 02, 2024
In this issue, we examine the idea of craft—of making—within the context of new technologies and how they collide with…
Mar 04, 2024
The wind whistled you in behind the springtimeFloat, Old Note, new among my mindYou hold the note, the note just…
Jan 05, 2024
The concept of “third places” was one our TxA Publications Committee latched onto early and enthusiastically in our planning for…
Nov 09, 2023
It’s impossible to ignore the incredible growth of Texas cities over the past decade. Houston, Dallas, San Antonio, and Austin…
Sep 01, 2023
Where does design really begin?
Jul 03, 2023
“For all its enormous range of space, climate, and physical appearance, and for all the internal squabbles, contentions, and strivings,…
May 01, 2023
In the time between the conceptualization of this issue last summer and its production this year, artificial intelligence (AI) has…
Mar 07, 2023
To be native to a place we must learn to speak its language. — Robin Wall Kimmerer, “Braiding Sweetgrass” After…
Jan 12, 2023
This past May, the University of Texas at Dallas announced the groundbreaking for the new Crow Museum of Asian Art…
Nov 07, 2022
There’s a running joke that the best time in Austin was whenever you first moved to the city. I returned…
Sep 08, 2022
In 448 B.C., what is widely believed by historians to be the first professional design competition in recorded history was…
Jul 06, 2022
Every seed braidedinto the crown of messengers before uncertain passages a love note to future generationsa grain of…
May 03, 2022
You Say Goodbye… Back in the early days of the Roman Republic, the term “dictator” did not have the negative…
Mar 07, 2022
After two years of compromised, constrained, or completely cancelled travel plans, this past winter break my family and I finally…
Jan 07, 2022
In the previous issue of Texas Architect, outgoing TxA President Audrey Maxwell, AIA, compared her role to that of a runner…
Nov 01, 2021
Last year when we chose the topic of “mental health” for this issue, we thought this whole global pandemic thing…
Sep 01, 2021
In the summer of 1993, “Jurassic Park” was in the theaters and Bill Clinton was in the White House. I…
Jul 01, 2021
As a member of an advisory group to MIT, I’ve been a bit critical. The other day while talking with…
May 03, 2021
This year, the Pritzker Architecture Prize, widely considered the discipline’s highest honor, was awarded to French architects Anne Lacaton and…
Mar 04, 2021
It used to be that after exiting I-35 and heading east, all you could see for miles was wide open…
Jan 11, 2021
A clearing in the forest. The boardwalk has brought you here, as if to show it to you. But why?…
Nov 04, 2020
It is, by design, dark, obscure. Some people, upon entering, feel uneasy, claustrophobic, creeped out. Others walk in, look around,…
Sep 01, 2020
No photos of tiny sheds in the colossal landscape under cotton ball clouds afloat in Big Texas blue skies. This…
Jul 30, 2020
Two months ago, already deep into lockdown life, I conceived this editor’s note as a paean to the opportunities of…
May 06, 2020
These days, with the advent of each next global crisis, members of the architecture and design profession ask themselves what…
Apr 26, 2020
Last month, an anxious ripple stirred the murky waters of architectural discourse. Architectural Record reported that it had obtained a…
Jan 07, 2020
Behold, thou hast driven me out this day from the face of the earth; and from thy face shall I…
Nov 05, 2019
“Welcome to the frontier,” is what I say at the Austin airport when picking up friends visiting from out of…
Sep 12, 2019
All physical ugliness and social ugliness have strong concomitants and roots. Incredibly, there is rampant today all manner of hate…
Jul 15, 2019
When John Saunders Chase, FAIA (1925–2012) graduated with an M.Arch degree from The University of Texas at Austin School of…
May 03, 2019
The 2019 TxA Design Conference took us to Tulsa. Entitled “Unexpected,” it laid out the proposition that, as the tag…
Mar 05, 2019
January 29 was a revelatory day for architecture in Texas. That morning, the Linda Pace Foundation opened the doors of…
Jan 10, 2019
Many architects must feel somewhat annoyed. So much of the rhetoric surrounding the profession these days directs them to solve…
Nov 01, 2018
In the last issue, I ended this column by suggesting that more diversity, promiscuity, and surprise in architecture might improve…
Sep 06, 2018
My first job after college was as a book editor at Edizioni Press, a boutique publishing house in Manhattan that…
Jul 03, 2018
‘‘Venice Architecture Biennale! What does that have to do with Texas?” Believe it or not, I’ve heard that more than…
May 08, 2018
On the afternoon of December 30, 2017, a Saturday, I was at Figure 8, my favorite East Austin coffee shop, struggling…
Mar 13, 2018
Lars Lerup has published a new book. “The Continuous City” (Park Books, 2017) presents the Swedish-American designer and writer’s latest…
Jan 18, 2018
TxA’s 78th Annual Conference and Design Expo took place in Austin on November 9–11, 2017. It attracted approximately 3,000 attendees…
Nov 20, 2017
There is a small crack in the flashing around one of the pipe vents that protrudes from my house’s metal…
Sep 12, 2017
‘‘It’s all basically Mexico now, from San Antonio on down,” said the taxi driver who took me to the Austin…
Jul 06, 2017
This spring, I had the opportunity to interview three of contemporary architecture’s bright lights — Mark Foster Gage and Patrik…
May 16, 2017
“If I ever write a book,” says Sinclair Black, FAIA, “it’s going to be called, ‘Austin Texas: Lost Opportunity National…
Mar 02, 2017
In response to the current political climate of our nation, I asked TxA web editor Alyssa Morris to write this…
Jan 06, 2017
“Convergence” was the theme of the Texas Society of Architects’ 77th Annual Conference and Design Expo. Of the approximately 1,200…
Nov 11, 2016
The view from the pool terrace was breathtaking, a sweeping vista that took in Texas, New Mexico, and Mexico —…
Sep 07, 2016
The building at 500 Chicon Street in East Austin has a storied past. Erected in the 1920s as a storage…
Jul 19, 2016
On our first day in Philadelphia for the 2016 AIA Convention, TxA Executive Vice President James Perry and I stood…