Improbable Metropolis: Houston's Architectural and Urban History by Barrie Scardino Bradley (review)

In the literature of architectural history, Houston appears most often as an example of the formal chaos that occurs in a city without zoning. This exceptional aspect of Houston's modern growth leads to skyscrapers neighboring shotgun houses, liquor stores next to elementary schools, and other juxtapositions improbable in other cities. But Houston is more than a story of zoning exceptionalism. A small but insightful literature rooted in the expertise of faculty at Rice and Texas Southern Universities and the University of Houston has opened up more complex and nuanced avenues for thinking about the role of architecture and planning in Houston's rapid late twentieth-century growth. Cite Magazine, monographs issued by the Rice Design Alliance, and an organized preservation community working together with academics have created a literature that, in the words of Gwendolyn Wright, "proves that local concerns need not be parochial while national or global trends have multiple variations."¹

Improbable Metropolis draws on this tradition, documenting the architects, patrons, industries, and city plans that dominated the construction of Houston since its beginnings in the nineteenth century and synthesizes them into the first narrative that focuses on the built environment as a protagonist in the narrative of the city's history. Rigidly chronological, the book traces Houston's origins from its roots as a speculative real estate development in the 1830s to the sprawling metropolis of the twenty-first century, with a brief coda on the potential impact of the disastrous Hurricane Harvey in 2017. While framed by the history of Houston as a city, it is most directly an architectural history. Bradley largely focuses on landmark buildings and buildings by known architects as reflections of larger trends in the city's mainstream development.

When Houston's architecture is the subject of scholarly investigation, it is more often than not as an exemplar of modern and postmodern design.² Bradley consciously chose to cover the city's nearly two hundred years in one volume, linking its early small scale as a trading center before the Civil War to later developments driven by the automobile and regional scale. This is a daunting challenge, and the book is best read not as a singular analytical narrative, but as a kind of encyclopedia, with a series of short essays on a variety of themes (like the pivotal influence of the petroleum industry or changing attitudes toward the bayou system) and protagonists (architects, developers, philanthropists, and politicians) that recur from chapter to chapter. The book's chapter titles borrow nicknames from the changing focus of civic booster playbooks, from the "Bayou City" nickname of the nineteenth century to "Magnolia City" of the City Beautiful era, "Energy Capitol of the World" during the first oil boom of the 1920s, the "Golden Buckle of the Sun Belt" during the postwar decades, "Space City" during the decades of the space race, "H-Town" in the years of the oil bust, and "Petro Metro" in the first decades of the twenty-first century, as Houston cemented its status as an international melting pot. These thematic elements maintain the focus on connecting architecture in Houston to the city's institutions and economic development.

Beyond these broad themes, each chapter ends with a sidebar that looks closely at a particular place or idea, positioning the history of Houston as relevant to its future. Bradley uses these sidebars to take clear activist positions about contemporary planning and design issues. Public housing, for example, receives a two-page essay, focused on an extended preservation battle over the San Felipe Courts (1940–44, Associated Housing Architects of Houston), also known as the Allen Parkway Village, and Houston's racist history of segregated housing. Bradley ends the discussion by taking a strong critical position: "If Houstonians want to raise the levels of education and opportunity and lower crime rates, building...