Through photographs, Architecture of the Lower Rio Grande Valley: An Introduction, celebrates the architecture of the Texas-Mexico border region, its craftsmen, its cultures and its climate. The architectural images by Pino Shah provide a journey through 160 years of history and heritage, revealing the border’s built environment as filtered through diverse cultures: Mexican, Spanish, American, German, and French. The photographs highlight the distinctive styles -- Spanish and Mexican Colonial, border brick, Mid-century Modern, Pan American and 21st Century – found in the southernmost region of Texas. These architecturally significant buildings are often culturally and historically significant as well. Pino Shah is a world heritage photographer based in McAllen, Texas and Ahmedabad, India. Stephen Fox is an architectural historian and Fellow of the Anchorage Foundation of Texas provided the narratives for photographs and is as an architectural advisor to the project.

Brownsville Architecture: A Visual History reveals the heritage and history of Texas’s southernmost city as told by its buildings. Outstanding architectural images by Pino Shah show the influence of diverse cultures and regional styles that have shaped the border city’s built environment since 1841. Eileen Mattei weaves architectural details and Brownsville history into a narrative that illustrates how buildings mirror the people, the place and the times. Here is a new perspective for looking at more than 100 architecturally significant buildings that are often also historically and culturally important.

McAllen Architecture: A Visual Journey reveals the heritage and history of Texas's southernmost industrial hub city as told by its buildings. Outstanding architectural images by Pino Shah show the influence of diverse cultures and regional styles that have shaped the border city's built environment since the early 1900s. Geoff Alger provides the narratives accompanying the buildings.

Bookmark showing the top 40 architecture in the Lower Rio Grande Valley organized by city. Taken from the book 'Architecture of the Lower Rio Grande Valley' by Pino Shah and Stephen Fox

Quinta Mazatlan: A Visual Journey, is a celebration of the architectural and cultural wonders of McAllen’s most distinctive mansion and landscape. Photographer Deval Pino Shah and writer Eileen Mattei collaborated on this book filled with stunning images by Shah. Mattei presents new artistic and historical perspectives of one of Texas’ largest adobe homes and its surrounding environment. Quinta Mazatlan is one of the nine World Birding Centers in the Rio Grande Valley. More than 250 species of birds are attracted to the native habitat, and that brings in birders to see exotic residents such as Kiskadees, Groove-billed Anis and Red-crowned Parrots.

In 1865, Heinrich Portscheller emigrated to Mexico from his native Germany, perhaps motivated by a desire to avoid compulsory military service in the Austro-Prussian War. The scion of a well-known family of masons and master builders, he had the misfortune to disembark at Veracruz during the Franco-Mexican War. Portscheller and his traveling companion were impressed into the imperialist forces and sent to northern Mexico. Sometime following the Battle of Santa Gertrudis in1866, Portscheller deserted the army and eventually made a place for himself in Roma, a small town in Starr County, Texas. Over the next decades, Portscheller acquired a reputation as a master builder and architect. He brought to the Lower Rio Grande Valley his long heritage of Old World building knowledge and skills and integrated them with the practices of local Mexican construction and vernacular architecture. However, despite his many contributions to the distinctive architecture of Roma and surrounding places, by the mid-twentieth century he was largely forgotten. During nearly fifty years of historical sleuthing in South Texas and Germany, W. Eugene George reconstructed many of the details of the life and career of this important South Texas craftsman. Containing editorial contributions by Mary Carolyn Hollers George and featuring a foreword by Mariá Eugenia Guerra and a concluding assessment by noted architectural historian Stephen Fox, Master Builder of the Lower Rio Grande: Heinrich Portscheller at last permits a long-overdue appreciation of the legacy of this influential architect and builder of the Texas-Mexico borderlands.