Hugo V. Neuhaus. Jr.: Residential Architecture 1948-1966

The February 1954 issue of House & Garden magazine featured recent domestic architecture in Texas. The section began with a two-page photograph showing the wide steps leading up the patio of Hugo V. Neuhaus's own house completed four years earlier with a banner headline proclaiming Texas has taste. The introductory description went on to explain that the editors were presenting the Texas that lives with taste mixing old and new with a free hand and a light heart. Seventeen years later in 1971 when Hugo Neuhaus was nominated for Fellowship in the American Institute of Architects his colleagues Houston architects Howard Barnstone and Anderson Todd wrote that his work inspired by the austere and rigorous modern architecture of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe was immaculate precise beautifully spacious and consistent from the beginning until now. Nowhere was this more apparent than in the houses where Neuhaus mobilized Mies s deceptively simple post and lintel construction method brick walls plate glass and terrazzo paving and an unerring sense of proportion to create buildings with an exhilarating sense of spatial richness. These houses represent Neuhaus's dialectical struggle to reconcile the most demanding modern architecture of its time with the requirements of everyday life in Houston. Through the subtle regional inflection of an established architectural language Neuhaus produced a personal interpretation that tied his work to its locale and its place in Houston's social history. The tectonic economy and strict discipline exhibited in these houses remind us today of an era that seems almost impossible to recall as Houston goes about obliterating its legacy of modern buildings from the New Deal and postwar years. Careful examination of a limited number of Neuhaus s projects reveals characteristics that both distinguished and problematized his work. Because of Hugo Neuhaus's patrician family connections and his education at the Harvard Graduate School of Design his architectural practice and Miesian design became intimately associated with Houston s cultural elite in the 1950s. Neuhaus and his clients used Miesian architecture to assert their cultural superiority to the adherents of historical eclecticism as well as the more formally expressive and populist variants of postwar modernism in Houston the Usonian and the Contemporary. The critic Colin Rowe and the authors of articles about the Neuhaus House in national magazines expressed ambivalence about the ways that Miesian modern architecture was coded through oblique classicizing allusions trabeated construction symmetry in plan and elevation and formal refinement as superior despite the modern movement's anti-historical and egalitarian origins. Neuhaus s modern designs were not doctrinaire. Through the use of specific materials planning devices and interior furnishings he sought to reconcile modern architecture with regional elements that had special resonance for his Texas clients. Many of Neuhaus s Houston houses were built in River Oaks the city's foremost residential community. Several of Neuhaus's River Oaks houses were built on sloping sites along the wooded banks of Buffalo Bayou. These topographically varied sites in a city known for its unrelentingly flat terrain lent themselves to an integration of landscape design and architecture. Asymmetrical patios shaded porches swimming pools and dense native and subtropical vegetation were used to invoke a Texas Gulf coast version of casual outdoor living in a hot humid climate. Houston Mod's third architectural exhibition will present the work of Hugo V. Neuhaus Jr. The exhibition will be held at Architecture Center Houston at 315 Capitol Suite 120 in downtown Houston. It will be on view from 2 August through 28 September 2007. Foreword by Stephen Fox and coda by Gwendolyn Wright.

Paperback: 96 pages

Publisher: Houston Mod; 1st edition (August 2 2007)

Language: English

ISBN-10: 1604028637

ISBN-13: 978-1604028638

Package Dimensions: 11.3 x 7.8 x 0.2 inches

Shipping Weight: 11.2 ounces