Table of Contents
Contributors
Stephen Fox; Christopher Genik; William Hartman; Jay C. Henry; Marti Mayo; Gerald Moorhead; Albert Pope; Neil Printz; Eduardo Robles; William Sherman; Drexel Turner; Peter D. Waldman; and Bruce C. Webb.
Cite 17: Gehry, Botta, Moore
Spring 1987
Editor’s Note
Cite 17 was guest edited by Peter D. Waldman. His contribution, "On Springtime Conjunctions in The Warehouse of the Imagination," serves as the introduction to the issue. The following is an excerpt:
"Spring has always been the proper time for cleaning out attics and warehouses in the spirit of renewal and reconstruction. This spring issue of Cite brings into conjunction three distinct landscapes of aggression to be discovered within the storehouses of our culture. The first territorial argument locates Houston as the forum of a debate polarized between California and Switzerland. The second encompasses both landscape and skyscape prophesied as the geography and cosmography of this city. The third establishes the frontier between familiarity and estrangement, recording temporal isolation as a Texas phenomenon.
The temporal confrontation of two major architectural exhibitions in one city --- one on the work of Frank O. Gehry at the Contemporary Arts Museum and the other on Mario Botta at the Farish Gallery - confirms that Houston is either the most critically astute or fortuitous city in the land. These exhibitions, prepared respectively, at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis and the Museum of Modern Art in New York, represent the clearest critical positions in the cultural debate between the normative and the archetypal.
Albert Pope postulates that the personally contrived work of Gehry paradoxically utilizes the most accessible artifacts of popular culture. Not necessarily the vernacular, but the normative language of contemporary building types and of contemporary constructional practices is not "built upon," but "built with," in an extraordinary body of work, one example being the SunarHauserman Showroom at Innova in Houston.
William Sherman argues that the apparently more reductive and logical work of Botta is another paradox of archetypal domestic models evolving into stereotypical contextualism at the urban scale. At first appearing to he an exemplar of critical regionalism, this high priest of the rationalist Tendenza has been suggested by Sherman not to hold the constructural ethic so dear, but to reside within the diminished limits of Form measured by geometry, not gravity."
Peter D. Waldman