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DESIGNDIARY Louis XV–style clock suite; estimate $700 to $1,400 THE AUCTION BLOCK M orton Kuehnert hosts an auction of the Proctor family estate on Sunday, January 22. Judge Frederick C. Proctor, general counsel for the Gulf Oil Companies from 1905 to 1919, built his final home at 2950 Lazy Lane, next door to Bayou Bend, the home of Houston philanthropist Ima Hogg. The Proctor home, built by renowned architect Birdsall P. Briscoe, was dubbed Dogwoods by the next owners, Alice and Mike Hogg (Ima's brother). To the dismay of many in the community, it was demolished in 2005 to make way for new construction. But the furniture, sterling, crystal, toys, books, paintings and personal items of the Proctor family live on — and you can take home a piece of Houston history at Morton Kuehnert's Fine Antiques and Decorative Art Auction, which will also feature hunt and safari trophies, decorative art and fine antiques from other prominent Houston and Austin estates. View the catalog online at auction.mortonkuehnert.com. Kate Allen Stukenberg WORKAC MUSEUM TIMES TWO Cover for the journal Azulejos (Mexico City), Vol. I, No. 2 (September, 1921) Xul Solar's Jefa (Patroness), 1923 ARCHIVE OF THE AVANT-GARDE I t's been 10 years and multi-millions of dollars in the making, evidencing a big budget and single-minded focus on a world a continent away that few museums could muster — and none ever before have attempted. So it's no surprise that all eyes in the international art world will be on the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and logging onto icaadocs.mfah.org when the MFAH's ground-breaking, truly game-changing digital Latin American archive launches Thursday, January 19. The landmark resource — which, most significantly, will be free — is a decade-long, ongoing scholarly initiative of the museum's highly lauded Latin American department's research arm, the International Center for the Arts of the Americas (ICAA). The project brought together 10 teams totaling more than 100 researchers in 16 cities, from Buenos Aires and Bogota to São Paulo and Lima, to scan 10,000 rare documents including magazines, exhibition catalogs, treatises, pamphlets, photographs and other endangered ephemera. The goal: to preserve for posterity a history of the art of the Southern continent and its Latino neighbors. An upcoming series of 13 volumes will publish the teams' finds, with the first book's release coinciding with the launch of the digital archive. "No editorial project of this scope currently exists or has ever been attempted in the field of Latin American art," says Mari Carmen Ramírez, founder/curator of the MFAH's department of Latin American art, which has received $50 million to date toward initiatives in 20th-century Latin American and Latino art, including the ICAA Documents project as well as building its collection. "It is not about new movements and artists that have been discovered so much as artists who have been reassessed … The Documents Project will have a decisive impact on the long-term development of the field." The project's greatest champion was late MFAH director Peter Marzio, who called the endeavor "catalytic." Ramirez recalls, "He envisioned students stumbling upon the archive while surfing the Internet ... and thereby discovering a brand-new world in Latin America that would shape the rest of their lives." icaadocs. mfah.org. Catherine D. Anspon HORIZON ITALIAN TILE Big art news this spring swirls around two brick-and-mortar Rendering of Blaffer Art Museum stories — or glass and concrete, addition, opening April 2012 as it were. The Blaffer Art Museum at the University of Houston gets a new addition. The original 14,000-squarefoot structure, designed by Caudill Rowlett Scott and dedicated on March 13, 1973, was originally intended to hold benefactress Sarah Campbell Blaffer's Foundation Collection of Renaissance and Baroque Asia Society Texas Center, masters (many of which opening April 2012 are currently on view at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston), as well as temporary and traveling exhibitions. Flash forward 30 years. After a call for proposals, Blaffer director Claudia Schmuckli, a specially charged Blaffer board subcommittee and the UH facilities team tapped New York City–based WORKac to design the museum's fresh look. Months after the firm began plans for the Blaffer redux, they were awarded another plum: the New Holland commission for Roman Abramovich and Dasha Zhukova's reported $400 million arts complex on the historic manmade island in St. Petersburg that once served the Russian navy. While the Blaffer's modest $2.25 million budget is no match for the Russians' deep pockets, this jewel-box commission will be closely watched internationally for evidence of WORKac's prowess. The Blaffer's unveiling will be celebrated at its gala on Friday, April 13. Meanwhile, Asia Society Texas Center has scored its own architectural coup, with a grand-opening reveal planned for April 12 through 15. Grand patroness Nancy Allen and fellow board members have coaxed starchitect Yoshio Taniguchi (of the famed MoMA expansion) to create his first freestanding building in America: a 39,000-square-foot, $48.4 million project in the Houston Museum District. Watch these pages in April for our exclusive preview of both projects, from the gleaming translucency of the Blaffer's re-imagined facade and interior spaces to the exquisite, contemplative perfection of Asia Society Texas Center's new home, complete with oh-so-Zen water elements. It's a whole new chapter in the saga of Texas architecture. Catherine D. Anspon PAUL HESTER COLL. INSTITUTO DE INVESTIGACIONES BIBLIOGRÁFICAS, MCDF All hail 2012 — and burrowing inside until the champagne fuzzies have passed. Until then, some happy new news, and all the creature comforts you'll need to prevail. 2702 W. ALABAMA 713.523.4500; horizontile.com Keys to the Door: Owner Olivia Boone; manager Bryan Dye. Stocked Goods: For the last 16 years, architects and designers from all over the state have sought out Olivia Boone's expansive Italian tile showroom in Dallas for their commercial and residential projects. In an industry where experience and relationships parlay into perks — like being first in line at the quarry for their pick of premier-grade slabs — Boone and her staff are rewarded with the best natural stone, from basalt to gorgeous Carrara marble. Now they've expanded to Houston with a sleek showroom that opened last month to both retail and the trade. Boone recruited Bryan Dye and Ed Gonzales, whom many remember from their days at Waterworks. With access to some of the oldest and largest Italian porcelain-tile manufacturers, Horizon's old-world artisan suppliers are embracing new technologies to develop porcelain tiles that will have you doing a double-take. There's pebble leather, not to mention glazed croc tiles so glamorous that your admiring fingertip will be shocked to find porcelain tile, not skin beneath. For those who enjoy a little trick of the eye, compare a piece of Calacatta marble tile (matte or glossy) alongside natural Calacatta marble, and your eyes will dart back and forth, trying to detect which is which. And for those who remember when wood-grain-looking porcelain tiles were nothing but badly stamped repetitive patterns, discover 24- to 40-inch "planks" of red and white oak, maple, ash, teak and more with miniscule grout joints, their surfaces rendered with sophisticated ink-jet prints in countless wood-grain configurations. Find those plus Japanese porcelain varieties, wall tiles of ceramic and glass, and loads of high-tech solutions that let you lay good tile over existing tile you might have inherited in your home or office. Laurann Claridge