With 36 full-color photographs and 124 black-and-white pictures, this volume lavishly illustrates his vision and his legacy.

O'Neil Ford (1905-1982) was the most influential Texas architect of the twentieth century. A technological innovator who bridged Texas' rural past and urban future, he taught three generations of architects how to adapt vernacular forms and materials to modern conditions. Widely known for his many projects in San Antonio and Dallas, Ford also designed buildings from Laredo, Texas, to Saratoga Springs, New York, over the course of a sixty-year career. In this book, David Dillon undertakes the first critical study of Ford's architecture in both its regional and national contexts. In particular, Dillon explores Ford's links to the regional and eclectic movements of the 1920s and 1930s, his use of postwar technology and materials (lift-slab, pre-stressed concrete shells, new metals), and his influence on other architects in Texas and the Southwest. Quotes from the author's wide-ranging interviews with O'Neil Ford in the last years of his life, as well as with his partners, relatives, friends, and critics, give the text firsthand vividness.

In this contribution to the ongoing debates over theorizing state power, the author draws on her fieldwork in Mexico to examine the ways in which local agrarian communities negotiate with the state and with local bureaucracies in an apparently hopeless round of mismanagement and corruption - which yet contains a self-correcting stability. While the ethnography focuses on a particular community at a time of transition, the author draws out the wider implications in ways that should be of interest not only to anthropologists concerned with Mexican ethnography, but also to students of political anthropology, more generally, and development studies.

Acclaimed for his designs of the Trinity University campus, the Little Chapel in the Woods, the Texas Instruments Semiconductor Components Division Building, and numerous private houses, O’Neil Ford (1905–1982) was an important twentieth-century architect and a pioneer of modernism in Texas. Collaborating with artists, landscape architects, and engineers, Ford created diverse and enduringly rich works that embodied and informed international developments in modern architecture. His buildings, lectures, and teaching influenced a generation of Texas architects. O’Neil Ford on Architecture brings together Ford’s major professional writings and speeches for the first time. Revealing the intellectual and theoretical underpinnings of his distinctive modernism, they illuminate his fascination with architectural history, his pioneering uses of new technologies and construction systems, his deep concerns for the landscape and environment, and his passionate commitments to education and civil rights. An interlocutor with titans of the twentieth century, including Louis Kahn and J. Robert Oppenheimer, Ford understood architecture as inseparable from the social, political, and scientific developments of his day. An introductory essay by Kathryn E. O’Rourke provides a critical assessment of Ford’s essays and lectures and repositions him in the history of US architectural modernism. As some of his most important buildings turn fifty, O’Neil Ford on Architecture demonstrates that this Texas modernist deserves to be ranked among the leading midcentury American architects.

Many of the historic houses in and around the town of Victoria, Texas, were built between 1875 and 1910 by immigrant owners. From 1973 to 1975, with the support of a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, Rick Gardner traveled throughout the region, taking photographs of these historic homes. Gardner relied on his own instincts and guidance from knowledgeable locals as to where he should aim his lens. This book is an appreciative glimpse at what these vernacular houses looked like a century after their construction. Gardner has teamed up with Victoria historian and preservationist Gary Dunnam to present these rich images along with brief historical sketches of the houses and, where possible, the persons who occupied them when they were newly constructed. The result is an understated and elegant suggestion of what life may have been like for the merchants, bankers, agriculturalists, and others who built and lived in these homes during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Designed to appeal to those with a love for old houses and especially for the preservation of historic structures, All the Houses Were Painted White offers its readers a stately appreciation of these homes and their place in the South Texas landscape. It is also a tribute to the architects, owners, and anonymous craftspeople who built the houses—to their vision, skill, ingenuity, imagination, creativity, and endurance.

"Architecture is a social art. If the practice of architecture is the art of what you can make happen, then I believe that you are only as good as your bullpenthe builders, the engineers, the artisans, the colleagues, the staffwho collaborate with you; those who become possessed by the same urge to build, by the same belief that we are working on something exceptional together." Brian MacKay-Lyons For two weeks each summer, architect Brian MacKay-Lyons uses his family farm on the east coast of Nova Scotia for aspecial event. Among the stone ruins of a village almost four hundred years old, he assembles a community of architects,professors, and students for a design-build internship and educational initiative called Ghost Research Lab. The twoweek projectone week of design and one week of constructionrests on the idea that architecture is not only about building but also about the landscape, its history, and the community. Based on the apprenticeship environment of ancient guilds, where architectural knowledge was transferred through direct experience, Ghost redefines the architectas a builder who cultivates and contributes to the quality of the native landscape. Published to celebrate the event's tenth anniversary, Ghost offers a thorough documentation of the past decade's design-build events including drawings, models, and final photographs of completed structures. Organized chronologically and interwoven with MacKay-Lyons's simple and accessible personal narratives, Ghost also features essays by some of the most eminent figures in architectural criticism, including Christine Macy, Brian Carter, Karl Habermann, Robert Ivy, Kenneth Frampton, Thomas Fisher, Juhani Pallasmaa, Peter Buchanan, and Robert McCarter. In an architectural climatefull of trends and egos, Ghost is the rare manifesto that does not preach but rather inspires quietly with simple ideas that unexpectedly unsettle and arouse.

The first major look at the renowned industrial designer and architect, who helped to shape the look of American modernism from the 1920s through the early 1950s For German-born Kem Weber (1889-1963), design was not about finding a new expression; it was about responding to "structural, economic, and social requirements . . . characteristic of our daily routine of living." He sought to ensure that each design he produced--whether a piece of furniture or a building or an interior--was an improvement that responded to modern needs and modern life. Weber was a leading figure of modernism on the West Coast from the 1920s through the early 1950s, and his work greatly influenced the California style of the time. His most iconic designs were his Bentlock line, the Air Line chair, the interiors for the Bixby House, and his tubular-steel furniture for Lloyd. This book, a result of significant new primary research in the Weber family's archives, represents the first major study of the life and career of this important designer. Christopher Long details the full range of Weber's contributions, focusing particularly on the part he played in the advancement of American modernism, and his role in heralding a new way of making and living.