Cite 20 was not given a theme, a name, or a named guest editor. The extraordinary set of articles cover a broad range of topics and ideas. In place of an editor's note, a selection from Drexel Turner's contribution, "Views from Nowhere: A Bend in the Bayou," is given below:
The prospects of American cities are unexceptional by and large: they seem waiting, in the formulation of Henry James, "for life, for time, for interest, for character, for identity itself."' By select consensus. Houston remains very much in waiting. When Reyner Banham came in the late 1970s to inspect a "New Babylon on the Buffalo Bayou" fueled by the OPEC windfall, he parted with the summary judgement "Is that all?", observing that even Calgary, the city's oily though smaller twin to the north, seemed more like a city by comparison. The Economist of London, in its latest guide for business travelers, advises those stranded in Houston to resort to the marginally more engaging charms of Galveston which Banham had supposed, in the absence of contrary evidence, to be the source of Houston's traditional past.
In a survey of what it called "city symbols," the University of Texas's journal Center (1985) bypassed Houston altogether, although it did acknowledge two peripheral precincts of special character: the Rice University campus, parts of which still sustain the illusion, as Colin Rowe has pointed out. that one is not far from Ravenna, owing to the Byzantine-Gothic production of Ralph Adams Cram's romantic eclecticism; and the Mcnil Collcction-Rothko Chapel area, where the bungalows that enfold Renzo Piano's understated museum pavilion take on a slightly surreal and unifying aspect, as though it had rained gray paint. A case also could be made for the botanically induced spectacle of the tree-lined stretch of Main Street from the U.S. Post office Buffalo Bayou Wortham Theater Center Bagby Street Coliseum Annex 1-45 Albert Thomas Convention Center Memorial Museum of Fine Arts. Houston to Rice and Hermann Park, a product of Houston's brief, more conventional encounter with the City Beautiful movement. But in Rowe's estimation, "while from high up. with towers seen above trees, Houston may occasionally look like a romantic fragment of the villiradieuse, as one descends to earth, apart from the Rice campus and certain adjacencies, there is little but visual misery to be experienced."
Natalye Appel; Mike Davis; Stephen Fox; Jay C Henry; Peter J. Holliday; Richard Ingersoll; Deborah Jensen; John Kaliski; Joanne Lukitsh; Peter C. Papademetriou; Neil Printz; Malcolm Quantrill; John Rogers; and William F. Stern.