Constructs, Making Houston Modern Review, 2021
Book review
Fall 2021
Adam Yarinsky
Making Houston Modern: The Life and Architecture of Howard Barnstone
Edited by Barrie Scardino Bradley, Stephen Fox, and Michelangelo Sabatino
University of Texas Press, 2020
Making Houston Modern is an engaging and highly readable monograph about Howard Barnstone (1923-1987; Yale School of Architecture ’48), an architect and educator who helped define Houston’s culture, growth, and prosperity in the wake of World War II yet is not widely known. As a practitioner, academic, and author, he was a complex individual who strived to create architecture that was rooted in yet transcended his milieu. The book is organized in three sections focusing on his contributions to architecture, relationships with clients, and personal life. Extensive documentary information and insightful analysis situate Barnstone within the web of relationships and context in which he lived and worked.
In the introduction, “Why Howard Barnstone Why,” Fox and Sabatino portray a life of tension between seemingly incongruent qualities. Barnstone was an award-winning, widely published architect who was not proficient at drawing. Like his friend Philip Johnson, he choreographed his design process through draftspeople. While many of his projects were in the idiom of Miesian Modernism, his diverse, inventive body of work transcended any particular style. Barnstone detested regionalism as provincial, yet he was a preservationist and wrote the acclaimed book The Galveston That Was, about the city’s historic architecture, with photographs by Henri Cartier-Bresson and Ezra Stoller. Transplanted from the East Coast, he was a politically liberal Jew who sought to create (and belong to) a particular kind of patrician elitism in Houston. Following his divorce after 14 years of marriage to Gertrude Levy, with whom he had three children, Barnstone was a closeted homosexual in the final years of his life. He suffered from bipolar disorder, requiring hospitalization on several occasions, and committed suicide at 64. The foreword by Carlos Jimenez, an interview with Barnstone’s business partner Eugene Aubry and a chapter written by Barnstone’s nephew and his wife, Robert Barnstone and Deborah Ascher Barnstone, both architects, provide firsthand recollections conveying his dynamic personality. Through these perspectives I came to understand that Barnstone sought to achieve something ephemeral and elusive.
The concluding chapter, “Magical Modernism,” explains the stakes for Barnstone. As the editors write, “The most profound way that Barnstone and his cohorts sought to forge the consensus on their practices and legitimize their claims to cultural authority and leadership was by constructing sensations of ‘magic’.” Barnstone used the word magic to invoke architecture’s potential to generate intensely ethereal experiences. He described the sensation of being in a Miesian space, for example, as the “divine float.” (What a beautiful expression!) Beyond shaping immediate perception, Barnstone’s aspiration to conjure deeper revelations—unanticipated, perspective-altering experiences that elevate the spirit—was perhaps the ultimate objective of his brilliant, restless humanity.
The Rothko Chapel is on the cover of Making Houston Modern, although Barnstone eschewed personal credit for the design. In fact, I had not known of him before our firm, ARO, began work on the chapel’s renovation and expansion in 2016. The book describes how, through patrons John and Dominique de Menil and at the request of Mark Rothko, Barnstone and Aubry completed the project after Johnson withdrew from the commission. They worked closely with Rothko and the Menils to resolve numerous architectural issues to create the singular, deeply moving interior space and exterior plaza. Barnstone’s suggestion to paint the surrounding 1920s bungalows owned by the Menils gray with white trim was important to the experience of the chapel and the nearby Menil Collection, constructed years later. We learn that he was inspired by an exhibition on grisaille painting organized by the Menils at the Rice University Gallery. Actualizing an unusual institutional ambition grounded in dialogue with the residential context, the paint scheme embodies the intertwined themes of spirituality and social justice at the heart of the Rothko Chapel’s mission. This simple, decisive intervention—a coating just a few millimeters thick—made the residential neighborhood a place that embodies reciprocal relationships between the sacred and the everyday, the individual and the collective. For those who experience the neighborhood, the effect is both modest and incomparable. Who but Barnstone could have conceived this transformational concept? “Magic” indeed!