Site selection for many COD Conferences is obvious: who doesn't want to visit the world's great capitals? For others, the rationale is more elusive. When I planned our 2010 Conference the question, "Why Houston?" was one I anticipated. One wit observed that he wondered in advance if the title "The Perils of Planning . . . or Not" referred to the conference itself! I personally liked the ambiguity of "not" referring, possibly, to "perils" instead of "planning."
Any misgivings about Houston as a destination were allayed by the experience over two delightful days and parts of two more-to hear tell, the entire autumn season-in America's fourth-largest and possibly most American city. For one thing, thanks to our strong local committee chaired by Brian Malarkey AIA, the conference was terrifically well-planned with just enough spontaneity to keep it real. For another, conference attendees left with something we didn't come with: new knowledge, a more complex understanding of and far subtler questions about Houston, its architecture, and better insights into the future of the American City. We saw a young American city emerging from adolescence into a remarkably multicultural adulthood, a city where live oak trees, famously slow to mature, are providing more and more shade to more and more sidewalks than those at Hermann Park and Rice University.
We heard Houston credibly described as a city in the forest! Discussions about Houston referenced New Orleans most unexpectedly. We came to appreciate an evolving tradition of neo-Byzantine architecture at Rice University's campus and saw it all effectively deployed as a foil for (Thomas Phifer and Partners') Brochstein Pavilion. We experienced the grace of Mies van der Rohe's Brown Pavilion at the Museum of Fine Arts, at once powerful and demure. We saw polar expressions of Philip Johnson, from the exuberance of St. Basil's Chapel and the Republic Bank Building, to the iconic Pennzoil Place and the quietly poetic house (1950) for John and Dominique de Menil, whose understated quality is epitomized by the Picasso hanging knee-high in the bar.
The work of Houston's abundant native talent was evident at many, mostly smaller, scales as we made our way around the City, reminding us of our discussions about homegrown versus imported talent that became an important sub-topic in our 2007 Conference in Minneapolis. We saw outsider architecture where design just would not stop at the Beer Can House and the Orange Show.
Helping us understand Houston were our keynote speakers, Bill Neuhaus FAIA, the prominent Houston architect from a line of prominent Houston architects, and Stephen Klineberg, PhD, the Rice University sociologist who has tracked Houston's changing demographics and attitudes continuously for twenty-nine years (and counting). Our scribe was the young but accomplished Houston architect David Bucek AIA, and our guide for the entire conference was the incomparable architectural historian Stephen Fox, whose knowledge is comprehensive and eclipsed only by his uncanny ability to deliver the most important information at just the right time.Thanks to the advertised intimate size of the conference - we all just fit on one bus - everyone was able to hear the same expansive and fascinating narrative. Thank you for a great experience!