At Home in the Texas Sun: Regional Architects Use Stone and Other Native Materials to Make Houses Comfortable
SCATTERED ACROSS the center of Texas, from south of San Antonio to Austin and northward, are a few dozen architects known as regionalists. Early in their development many of them drew inspiration from O’Neil Ford, an exuberant, cigarsmoking architect who traveled the state in the 1920s to look at old Texas buildings and then devoted a long career to preaching the regionalist gospel. By the time of his death, in 1982, Ford had become virtually the patron saint of Texas regionalists; he is still revered for his passionate conviction that a building must respond to the conditions of its locale.
In most of Texas the harshest condition a building endures is the fiercely hot climate. Ford designed houses with deep overhangs, extensive crossventilation, galleries, arcades, and other means of combating the intense summer sun. He molded his houses to a hospitable way of life. Texas was, and is, a highly sociable state, and many of his houses feature courtyards, screened porches, and other places where people entertain with a minimum of pretension.
In other parts of the country, too, regionalism was on the rise in the period between the First and Second World Wars. Climate, architectural traditions, and indigenous materials heavily influenced architecture in New Mexico, southern California, the San Francisco Bay area, and elsewhere.
Ford capitalized on limestone from the Hill Country, west of Austin; terracotta-colored tile from the town of D’Hanis, west of San Antonio; dense block flooring of mesquite from south and west Texas; and tawny soft-fired brick from Mexico. He brought in Mexican masons, known as bovederos, to make remarkable brick-vaulted domed ceilings. Some of Ford’s work, especially office buildings, turned out to be architecturally unimpressive, but his houses have been exceptionally livable, exhibiting a high level of craftsmanship.
Over the years regionalism’s influence has waxed and waned. Now it is waxing in many parts of the country, in affinity with today’s widespread quest for what is called a sense of place. “You look at a regionalist building,” says Chris Carson, a partner in Ford’s old San Antonio firm of Ford, Powell & Carson, “and you say it fits where it is and it doesn’t look like it would be comfortable somewhere else.”
Some architects now in their thirties or forties, like the ex-Ford employee David Lake, turned to regionalism during the 1970s because they wanted to design buildings that would cope with the climate, mainly in natural, energy-conserving ways, and that would incorporate hand-crafted materials conveying emotional warmth. In recent years disenchantment with the failings of modernism and postmodernism has also helped prod architects toward regionalism. “We’re searching for a dignified way of getting to something better,”says Hal Box, the dean of the University of Texas School of Architecture, in Texas regionalism’s academic heartland, Austin.
CURRENTLY TEXAS regionalism is led by a diverse group of practitioners, including Frank Welch, in Dallas; Lawrence Speck, in Austin; and a number of architects in San Antonio—among them David Lake, his partner Ted Flato, Andrew Perez III, and the firm of Ford, Powell & Carson. All of them draw some of their ideas from old Texas buildings, but what they produce is quite varied.
Welch, who left Ford in 1959 to start his own firm, is known for a cleanlined regionalism, with a crisp detailing that unquestionably marks his houses as products of the twentieth century. The home of Cliff and Judy Morton, on a hilltop northeast of San Antonio, is a good example of his techniques. On the Mortons’ property Welch and the landscape architect H. Dan Heyn kept all the trees—an evergreen species called live oak—and laid out an entry walk of Mexican stone so that it meanders in the shade past pools of water and low limestone walls before it reaches a front door that is mostly glass. “A door you can see through,” Welch says, “is more welcoming than one of solid wood.”
The Morton house is divided into three segments—a bedroom wing, a central library and living room, and a wing containing the kitchen, the dining room, and a carport—each of the three under its own gable roof of weathered bronze-colored copper. Metal roofs have long been a trademark of Texas regionalists. They carry on a tradition that began with the tin roofs that settlers built over spartan houses in the nineteenth century. Metal roofs, when they’re insulated underneath, are ideal for a sun-baked climate; being thin, they don’t store a lot of unwanted heat, as tile, slate, and asphalt-shingled roofs do. However, Welch says of his choice, “I just like the way they look. I don’t like the way wood shingles curl or the way thick wood shakes make the building look like it needs a haircut.”
Inside the house simple exposed wooden trusses support pitched ceilings eighteen feet high in the library and living room. Glass in the peaks of the ceilings ensures that both rooms enjoy a pleasing, well-distributed light, while a series of flat-roofed porches prevents the interior from getting too much direct sun.
How things come together is a major concern for Welch, who practices a sort of minimalist craftsmanship. In the library the walls, which are of resawn cedar, have, instead of a base molding, just a quarter-inch horizontal groove cut into the wood half a foot above the floor. Where a wall comes to a doorframe there is a quarter-inch-wide recess—this, as well, making a precise shadowline that contributes subtly to the house’s elegance. Welch has a delicate touch unusual for someone working in brick and stone.
Lawrence Speck, a University of Texas professor who runs an architectural practice in Austin, takes pains, too, to fit houses carefully into landscapes, but he’s more inclined to give the houses a feeling of weight. Near the Hill Country town of Burnet, Speck designed a house on a goat ranch for a local dentist, Mike Matthews, his wife. Happy, and their two girls. I had seen a bird’s-eye perspective some time ago and had half expected to dislike the Matthews house, because it comes from the train-wreck school of architecture, in which segments of the house join at odd angles like boxcars after a derailment. But in visiting the house it became evident that the irregular layout, though still a little erratic for my tastes, arose in response to what are for regionalists fundamental concerns: climate, terrain, views, and people’s relationship to the outdoors.
The stretching of the house into thin, irregular segments, each about one room deep, maximizes cross-ventilation and allows for a variety of sheltered outdoor areas. On the north side, accessible through sets of glass double doors in the living room, is a porch that sits in the shade all summer king and offers a tree-framed view toward the road. On the opposite side, buffered against wind from the north, east, or west, is a porch that becomes a sunny, protected place to bask during the winter. On the front, facing the entrance drive and catching the summer southeast winds, is a two-story veranda.
THE MATTHEWS house exterior is covered partly in stone and partly in cedar clapboards that have been bleached (an O’Neil Ford technique) to kill mildew, which would eventually turn the wood black. The most notable feature of the interior is the double-height living room, with walls of cream-colored limestone so soft that if you rub the stone it comes off on your hands, like chalk. When sunlight hits the stone, the room practically glows. The most striking attribute of the Hill Country, aside from its rolling topography (or “topo,”as architects and engineers call it), is the abundance of limestone just beneath the surface of the earth.
Although limestone is becoming too expensive to be common in new lowto medium-priced houses, it remains an affordable material for custom houses in central Texas and a bargain compared with stone in most parts of the United States. The quality of stonework has improved in the past several years, as architects have learned more about it. “You can get exquisite stone-carving,” Speck says. “The craftsmen are great. They’re not what you’d think—old men doing things in age-old ways. They’re equally likely to be twenty-one-year-old women with diamond-tipped drills.”
A house that Speck built for himself last spring, in an established neighborhood in Austin, exemplifies up-to-date stone installation. First a two-by-six stud frame was raised and packed with insulation. Then a stone wall seven inches thick was built on its exterior side, and an equally thick stone wall was built on the interior. The sun can warm the exterior stone, but the layer of insulation prevents most of the heat from penetrating the house’s interior. Once the srone on the interior has been cooled by air-conditioning, it stays cool, helping to keep electric bills down. Michael Garrison, a specialist in climatology and architecture at the University of Texas, says that because cool masonry draws radiant heat from people’s bodies, people can be as comfortable in a stone-walled room with an air temperature of 82° to 84° as they would be in a conventionally built room with an air temperature of 70°.
But of course neither Speck nor anyone else uses stone solely because it cuts utility bills. The aesthetic and psychological impact of the masonry walls is at least equally important. In the Matthews house the stone was laid with deeply raked (recessed) mortar joints, which have the effect of emphasizing the separate blocks. In Speck’s own house the mortar was made flush with the surface of the stone and then the walls were rubbed with gunnysacks, spreading the mortar beyond the joints. The result is that in the twostory living room, the walls, which are twenty inches thick and sixteen feet high, seem magnificently monolithic, exuding strength and security. “You see the craggy edges of individual pieces,” Speck says, “but you also see the whole mass, solid, like it is in the earth.”This is stonemasonry of great emotional power, which is at its most dramatic when sunlight late on a winter afternoon reveals its texture and illuminates its whiteness.
The feeling of being protected by a sturdy and thick-walled home is common to a great deal of Texas regionalist architecture, even when stone isn’t the predominant material. A property in Austin on which David Lake designed a house for his mother has a nine-foothigh stone wall separating the front yard from the street. When visitors open a pair of old Mexican doors in the wall, they enter a secluded front courtyard. The house itself is made of stucco applied over conventional stud walls, but the studs are extra-thick— six inches in most areas and eight inches on the living-room wall. The thickness allowed Lake to recess windows two inches or so into the wall openings and to recess the main doors by about five inches, making the walls appear massive and uncommonly protective. Lake/Flato Architects instructs plasterers to apply stucco with rounded edges at corners and around windows and doors. The curves make the walls less cardboard-like, more solid looking, yet also softer feeling.
By the time I finished looking at these houses, it had become evident to me that the main current in Texas regionalism is toward houses that give an impression of being soothingly thick and durable and that are highly sensitive to the outdoors. One of the last houses I visited was the Lifshutz home, in the San Antonio suburb of Alamo Heights. Chris Carson and Carolyn S. Peterson, of Ford, Powell & Carson, designed it as a kind of stucco fortress for Yvonne Lifshutz, who wanted, she says, “a feeling of refuge from the absolutely violent heat we have.”
Ms. Lifshutz requested “dead-end rooms.” With no cross-traffic, the rooms seem still and cozy; they magnify the sense of refuge. The house’s simple exterior styling draws from the Spanishterritorial period in Texas. On the interior are hand-hewn whitewashed timbers (reminiscent of Texas German settlers’ houses from the 1850s), plaster, and barrel-vaulted ceilings. Heavy floor-toceiling wooden shutters allow windows and doors to be closed off from the hot breath of the outside world.
The Lifshutz house stands—oddly, for either an expensive custom house or a regionalist house—next to suburban-roadside commercial development with lots of cars coming and going. Consequently, instead of looking outward the house focuses inward on a central courtyard, where people can sit in the sun. When the weather is hot, they can stretch out long sections of cloth to make a fabric roof over the courtyard, filtering the sun’s rays. The Texas regionalist ideal is to have a good central air-conditioning system for use several months of the year, but to enjoy a non-air-conditioned existence when the weather turns milder.
REGIONALISM TOOK encouragement from the 1987 publication of For an Architecture of Reality, by Michael Benedikt, an architecture professor at the University of Texas. Benedikt’s is a tiny but illuminating book that tells, among other things, how postmodernism went wrong. Postmodern buildings, Benedikt says, too often demanded to be “read,”as if architecture were simply a language and the public could grasp a building’s message by looking at symbolic shapes (such as Ionic columns made of flat painted plywood) that the architect had deployed almost in billboard fashion. Not only have the shapes and symbols of postmodern buildings generally been difficult to interpret and take pleasure from; they have seemed arbitrary and out of touch with real concerns. Arbitrariness has been the curse of much recent architecture.
Regionalism in most instances has the great virtue of avoiding such arbitrariness. It ties new buildings to the climate, culture, crafts, indigenous materials, and, more often than not, architectural heritage of a place—helping new architecture to seem at home. Some regionalist buildings indulge in nostalgia. Usually they are quite livable, but they’re not the best that regionalism can achieve. The most outstanding regionalist houses, like Speck’s house for himself and Welch’s Morton house, draw from past architecture but go beyond it, to achieve vigor and freshness. Whether the designs being created in central Texas will have a lasting impact is hard to say. But whatever the long-term effect may be, Texas these days is getting some verv fine houses. □