Menil Collection
Ingersoll proposes that this complex fulfilled the idea of Brechtian Architecture. What building is this?
The Menil Collection- A Museum Complex.
What is Houston's main physical characteristic? Define it.
The Gap; The space left after development pulls out and re-locates or the undeveloped space left between projects.
Who created the first expanse of an architectural layout for Houston?
Ralph Adams Cram.
What type of building had not been adopted as a regionalist type up until 1986?
The Courtyard Building.
What "regionalist" is impossible to argue against?
Universal Air-conditioning.
What features are a response to the prairie and local farm?
Horizontality and wooden slats.
What are the unifying elements of Houston that give form to the city's character?
Indigenous Live Oak Trees.
What two elements did Cram use to create a unique language of surface patterns?
Local Brick & Limestone.
What is the only existing example of street life?
The Fourth Ward.
What technologies have caused Houston's displacement?
Air conditioning & the auto-mobile.
What is different about the suburban grid of the Menil Collection?
Instead of Making it Monumental, It is tucked into the suburban Grid.
It Creates a neighborhood instead of replacing one by unifying the banal components
What feature gives Houston a limitless possibility for expansion?
Unrelieved horizontality.
Although not a local vernacular, what Architectural elements of Crams were true to pre-air-conditioning needs?
The exhausted use of local materials and the accommodation to local climate through the provision of Courts and Porticoes.
What Vernacular buildings address the “eyes that do not see” in Houston?
Industrial Buildings
What feature makes up for a lack of pedestrians on sidewalks in downtown Houston?
The 7-mile underground air-conditioned tunnels.
How has the Menil Collection resisted the culture of displacement?
Rooting itself in a familiar but strangely re-contextualized suburban environment.
What is the most complete landscape of displacement? and why?
Houston. Nature has bestowed it with almost no topographic features.
Why is romantic regionalism critical and why is it not?
It is critical because it upsets the expectations of the context without destabilizing the environment. It is not critical with regard to the true dialectical nature of critical theory as it is an affirmation of its historic or exotic originals rather than a denial of them.
What are the principal organizing criteria for new sections of the city? Give an example.
The desire for internally controlled environments such as the Galleria-Post Oak area.
What was the first poetic response to air-conditioning and automobiles?
The creation of the plan and the first two buildings for Rice University.
What features filter and bring light into the Menil Collection? On the Exterior and Interior?
Interior: 20-foot stretches of gracefully curved louvers or "leaves" used like horizontal brises-soleils to filter light in half of the visible interior spaces.
Exterior: The leaves form a peripteral portico that surrounds the museum with a special light, setting it off like the temenos of a primitive temple.
Ingersoll compares Houstins Urban Fabric Pattern to what?
An Airport.
What theory did Ingersoll compare the contradictory condition of critical regionalism to? What is this concept?
Brechtian Theater
Fictional Character vs. Real Actor– “This awareness creates critical distance from reality while remaining a part of reality.”
In the last three decades, what features have disappeared from the streets? And why?
The vernacular solution of deep porticoes and eaves with broad shaded areas.
Due to the failure to effectively protect against Houston's heat and humidity.
Ingersoll uses the term "Pianissimo." What does it mean?
Italian for "performed very softly".