Texas and Modern Architecture

Architectural historian Stephen Fox writes, “Kathryn E. O’Rourke and Ben Koush have teamed up to produce a lively, provocative, sometimes irreverent look into what might be described as the long mid-twentieth century, using Texan buildings and places to frame their observations.”

Join author Kathryn O’Rourke and architect Ben Koush in conversation as they describe the impetus for and process of creating their new book Home, Heat, Money, God: Texas and Modern Architecture. Conceived as a visual survey highlighting the state’s rich legacy of mid-twentieth-century architecture, the book trains a critical twenty-first-century eye on what it meant to be seen as “modern” in Texas between the 1930s and the 1970s. HHMG includes well-known structures like Houston’s Astrodome (1965, Wilson, Morris, Crane and Anderson) and Dallas’s Temple Emanu-El (1957, Howard R. Meyer and Max Sandfield, William W. Wurster, consulting architect) and presents lesser-known gems such as the 1937 Kraigher House by Richard Neutra in Brownsville.

Kathryn O’Rourke is an architectural historian and professor of art history at Trinity University. She is the author of Modern Architecture in Mexico City and editor of O’Neil Ford on Architecture. Ben Koush is an architect and historian. He has written for Architects’ Newspaper, Cite Magazine, Texas Architect, and houstonmod.org.