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only a 10-minute drive from the office, The Jamaican, an exotic Polynesian- style garden apartment complex with tropical plantings by the landscape firm who designed Disneyland. The location at 2400 McCue Street, across Westheimer from the recently opened Galleria (now Galleria I) and the old Sakowitz parking lot, enabled me to easily drive home for lunch and back. Houston then was the size that San Antonio is now, and in order to get the lay of the land, I easily motored around Space City in my new red VW convertible. I often drove, unimpeded, completely around Loop 610 to see how the rather sparse urban fabric was developing at the periphery. Inside the Loop, I discovered several modern buildings, such as the new crisp, modern 1972 Contemporary Arts Museum by Gunnar Birkerts & Associates and the organic 1968 Alley Theatre by Ulrich Franzen & Associates. Also, there were a few very unusual older buildings like nothing else I saw anywhere in town. They were timeless in the sense that they had no recognizable period style. For years, I wondered who the architect or architects were, until I saw one of the buildings in Stephen Fox's first edition of the AIA Houston Architectural Guide. It was the Penguin Arms Apartments, built in 1949-1950 by Arthur Moss. THE AMERICAN SCHOOL Moss was working during the post- World War II zeitgeist of mid-century modernism of the 1950s and '60s in the United States, where two separate modes developed for architecture and design. One mode was influenced by the Bauhaus School founded in Germany by Walter Gropius in 1919 and, simultaneously, by the work of the Swiss/Frenchman, Charles-Edouard Jeanneret, known as Le Corbusier. When the Nazis closed the famous Bauhaus in 1933, many of the prominent teachers and practitioners immigrated to the United States, finding teaching positions on the East Coast with Harvard (Gropius and Marcel Breuer), Black Mountain College (Josef Albers), and Chicago (Mies van der Rohe and Lásló Moholy-Nagy). The other mode was influenced by the fin-de-siècle organic school of American Frank Lloyd Wright. On the West Coast of Southern California and the plains of Oklahoma, a few young individualistic architects and designers were thinking of alternatives to the formalized Bauhaus aesthetic. Many had apprenticed or were influenced by Frank Lloyd Wright and were concerned with a design mode more appropriate to the post-war American culture, which would eventually become known as The American School. The American School of architecture was founded by Bruce Goff, Herb Greene, and others at the University of Oklahoma in the 1950s and '60s and emphasized individual creativity, organic forms, and experimentation. It should be noted that simultaneously in Southern California, the Bauhaus influence was manifest in the Case Study Houses, built in the late 1940s through the early 1960s. Thomas Hine's 1987 book, Populuxe, a synthetic word created by the author, is a historical/ psychological analysis of the evolution of the post- war American Dream and the ensuing popular culture and design. From tailfins and TV dinners to Barbie dolls and fallout shelters, a new consumer style began on the West Coast known as Googie. Googie was the name of a popular coffee shop designed by the young architect John Lautner in 1949 on the Sunset Strip in Los Angeles. The moniker was coined by Douglas Haskell in his article in the February 1952 House & Home magazine referencing the post- World War II futuristic design movement in Southern California. The prominent practitioners of this so-called Populuxe/Googie aesthetic, now known as The American School, were John Lautner in Los Angeles and Bruce Goff in Norman and Bartlesville, Oklahoma. Lautner, who apprenticed with Frank Lloyd Wright in the 1930s, opened his own practice in the City of Angels in 1938. Most of Lautner's buildings are in California, and some of his houses have been used as sets for films and television, including the Chemosphere House and the Sheats- Goldstein House. Bruce Goff, a best friend of the older Frank Lloyd Wright, only had a high school education and, after teaching Arthur Moss and Ann Abshire, at the DeLafosse House, circa 1957-1958 Arthur Moss' best known building: Houston's Penguin Arms, 1949-1950, now owned, and soon to be restored, by Kuhl-Linscomb. COURTESY THE MOSS FAMILY ARCHIVES, HOUSTON