Two Lectures: Lerup and Machado (2012) Lars Lerup at Wurster Hall
Playing to a big, friendly crowd, Rice Professor Lars Lerup acknowledged his Berkeley roots in a lecture on Wednesday night, 7 March 2012, centered on his new book on the Houston cityscape, One Million Acres & No Zoning (Architectural Association, 2011). Stanley Saitowitz, a self-described “Lerupean,” introduced the speaker by noting his impact at Berkeley as a teacher and mentor. Indeed, the hall was packed with his ex-students, Saitowitz among them. Like him, many are now fixtures in the architecture community in the Bay Area and elsewhere. Lecturing semi-extemporaneously, using book excerpts as a guide, Lerup walked the audience through his understanding of Houston as “neither a city nor a suburb,” best viewed and understood while moving through it. This reflects the perspective of time geography advocated by Torsten Hagerstand, he added, expressing his debt to the geographers. Polycentric and driven by what Lerup called "agglomeration economics"—location theory by another name—and subject to unwritten rules that have led inexorably to sprawl, Houston is nonetheless ripe for rethinking. Among its defects are the paving of its bayous (by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers), its developers’ affection for the cul-de-sac, and the voracious nature of its urban centers, which as they expand constantly pressure the lower-density residential areas that surround them. Among Houston’s virtues are the tree canopy that shades many neighborhoods and helps the city breathe, and the dynamism that, with the addition of high-speed rail, it should increasingly share with other cities in the Texas triangle like Austin, Dallas/Fort Worth, and San Antonio. Dynamism is a theme for Lerup. Swedish by birth but American by choice, he still has the successful immigrant’s optimism about his adopted country, now coupled with a genuine love for Houston. A “city apart,” it is best understood in a metabolomic sense, he argued. The way forward for Houston is to think of it as an organic whole, embracing its un-zoned self-management as a better means than zoning to build on its strengths and undo its defects.
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