Issue link: http://papercitymagazine.uberflip.com/i/1525828
Timeline of Home, Heat, Money, God. Ben Koush: This project has been a long time coming … I joined Rice's MArch program in 1998, where I connected with Stephen Fox. He showed me how to identify and research Houston's significant modern buildings, which were already disappearing. In the age before Google Street View, it was a lot harder to track the city's evolution, so I began my own documentary project, initially with film and then digital cameras in the early 2000s. In 2003, I co-founded Houston Mod, a nonprofit dedicated to preserving the city's modern legacy. For the past 10 years, we have also organized architectural tours of many parts of Texas. In addition, from 2017- 2022, I served on the State Board of Review for the Texas Historical Commission, which met every four months in a different location across the state to review National Register nominations. All this traveling exposed me to the state's amazing amount of great modern architecture, which I felt compelled to share through a dedicated Instagram account. From time to time, people asked whether I was working on a book. But it wasn't until the pandemic freed up a lot of time that I started organizing my photographs and gave serious thought to the idea. I had accumulated over 40,000 images! Of those, 4,000 made the cut, which I re-edited and tracked in a spreadsheet with all the information I had about the buildings such as address, construction date, architect, etc. My friend Barrie Scardino Bradley had published Improbable Metropolis: Houston's Architectural and Urban History in 2020 with UT Press, and she graciously made an introduction. Robert Devens, the Press' director, was enthusiastic about publishing a book but stipulated that the text should be more than my Instagram captions. I immediately thought of Kathryn O'Rourke, then a professor of architecture history at Trinity University, now at Wellesley College. I thought the book's graphic design should match the quality of the text and images. To that end I did a round of fundraising to hire an excellent designer, Ian Searcy. We'd met at Rice and A definitive new architectural book — with a title that reads like a Netflix series — documents modernist buildings of the mid-century and beyond, both residential and commercial, found in post-war Texas' cities, towns, and hamlets. This compelling read for both architectural insiders and the curious public highlights the renowned (Renzo Piano's Menil Collection, Houston, 1987) and the iconic (Texas Centennial Architects' Texas Hall of State, Dallas, 1936, and even Harmon Dobson's Whataburger chain, its first A-frame erected in Odessa, 1961) to the obscure (Bliss and Vaughan's Ding How Chinese Restaurant, Amarillo, 1957) and rarely published (Bruce Goff's Bruce Plunkett First House, Lake Village, Flint, 1970). The architect turned photographer for this project, Ben Koush, and architectural historian Kathryn E. O'Rourke bring forth a volume that tells true tales of our built environment and the kingmakers and forces that forged it. In an exclusive for PaperCity magazine, Koush reveals how the 15-years-in-the-making Home, Heat, Money, God: Texas and Modern Architecture came to be. Top: Renzo Piano and Richard Fitzgerald, The Menil Collection, Houston, 1987. How Architect Ben Koush's Instagram Became the Texas Architectural Volume of the Year As told to Catherine D. Anspon. Photography Ben Koush. MODERNISM TAKES TEXAS From Midland to Marfa, Houston, Dallas, Austin, and San Antonio 92