Cite 26 was guest edited by Deborah Morris and Stephen Fox. In "ForeCite: Getting Real in the Nineties," Morris begins her introduction to the issue with the following:
We are faced today with a number of grim realities. They include but are by no means limited to the following:
- Toxic air and water. Houston claims the second most polluted air in the nation.
- Rapidly diminishing natural resources. The average prediction for the depletion of national oil reserves is the year 2020, with an additional two or three decades granted for world reserves.
- Tens of thousands of homeless in our streets. It is estimated that in Houston and Harris County, on any given night, 10,000 people sleep in shelters, public places, and abandoned buildings.
- Substandard and insufficient housing. While 480,000 Houstonians live below the poverty level, the city offers the lowest number of public housing units per capita of the 25 largest cities in the United States.
- Fragmentation and decay of low and middle-income neighborhoods. In a paper titled "The Environmental Destruction of Houston," Jack Matson, professor of environmental engineering at the University of Houston, cites additional Houston liabilities: "Flooding, subsidence, impending water shortages, toxic contamination of the Ship Channel and Galveston Bay, poisoned fish and aquatic life, and abandoned hazardous waste sites freckling the landscape."'
These problems pose a formidable challenge to the environmental professions. They are issues that must be addressed in formulating an architecture that can respond effectively to environmental conditions and social needs as we approach the millennium. Yet current thought and practice in architecture espouse a far less integrated system of values. Much contemporary architectural theory and criticism is configured within a framework of purely formal and stylistic issues and denies more compelling priorities, the complexity of contemporary programs, and the potential for architecture to represent more than single-issue propositions. Moreover, this discourse, bloated by philosophical projection, is frequently couched in such obscure and arcane language as to render it virtually inaccessible ro all but a wellinformed elite - which is the more to be regretted, since it stands unchallenged by many who would ultimately be the recipients of its products.
Deborah Arbes; Cameron Armstrong; Johannes Birringer; David Brauer; Deborah Brauer; William Curtist; Peter Dorsey; John Major; Tim Fleck; Stephen Fox; Olive Hershey; Paul Hester; Richard Ingersoll; Rafael Longoria; Elysabeth Yates-Burns McKee; Deborah Morris; Robert Morris; Patrick Peters; John Rogers; Rives Taylor; Bruce C. Webb; and Gordon Wittenberg.