Texas Places

This publication, a special double issue of Cite, the architecture and design review of Houston, sets out to explore the places in between the mighty icons of Texas. Between the prairies punctuated by wizened cowpokes, beefy steers, and oil derricks and the urban sprawl spiked with skyscrapers and crawling with cars and their hurried drivers lies a different territory. In this place, time moves sluggishly as the past gently collides with the future, and hopes and daily struggles are miniaturized in little dramas. Illustrated with high-contrast black-and-white images, Texas Places offers a unique combination of perspectives on the images of Texas, both real and imagined. Interviews with Larry McMurtry and Horton Foote reveal the writers' sense of Texas, such as McMurtry's view of "trophy ranches" and Foote's memories of how it could take five hours to drive fifty miles to Houston. In other features, John Graves writes about his ranch, Rosellen Brown writes about leaving Texas, and Jon Schwartz muses on Texas movie landscapes. Other pieces discuss McMurtry's Houston, Highway 59, the Gulf Coast from Sabine Pass to Boca Chica, the architecture of oil, and the tragic "toxic tour" of Texas' hazardous waste sites. Also included are a photographic view of a High Plains farm and essays on riding the Sunset Limited through West Texas, architecture in High-Tech Austin, and the calm, bookish charm of the Texas Room and its once mundane, now valuable resources in the Houston Metropolitan Research Center. John Hejduk's poem "Cicada" concludes the volume.