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Architecture 360: Architecture Off the Page: Buildings of Texas

There are pretty places on these pages
By Margaux Anbouba |
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BOT CoverThis April we’re celebrating Architecture Month with AIA Dallas and the Dallas Center for Architecture. Every Wednesday and Friday I’ll be introducing you to a guest blogger who will tell us all about what’s happening in the Dallas architecture world. Today, Gerald Moorhead, AIA, author and editor of Buildings of Texas is going to tell us about his one-of-kind book.

Tonight the Dallas Center for Architecture will be hosting a book signing and presentation of Buildings of Texas, a book I co-authored with James Steely, W. Dwayne Jones, Anna Mod, Jim Ferguson, Cheryl Ferguson, Mario Sanchez and Stephen Fox. Anna Mod and Willis Winters, AIA will be at the DCFA tonight to talk more about this distinctive book.

The book itself has a unique background, as it is part of the Buildings of the United States series published by the Society of Architectural Historians. The series started in 1999 and Texas is the 19th book published so far. Volume one, which includes the central, south, and gulf coast regions of the state, was published last April. Volume two, covering the east, north, and west regions, is well under way and planned for publication in 2016.

Buildings of Texas is the first scholarly work to comprehensively document and analyze the built environment of the state. Like the state itself, this is a vast project, fourteen years in the works so far. I assembled a team of ten scholars to contribute the various regions. Within each region, the book covers not only the high design architecture of commerce, government, religion, and houses but also the vernacular of barns, bridges, and grain silos. Public art and folk art, along with urban and cultural history entries give context for the individual buildings and reveal a rich cross section of the built environment of Texas across several centuries of great and small buildings.

I am proud to say that it is the first and only book to document the entire history of the built environment of Texas, from the earliest native rock art over 10,000 years ago to the most recent skyscrapers in Houston and Dallas.

Join my colleagues tonight at the Dallas Center for Architecture to learn more about this historical project for Texas architecture and get a copy of your book signed! We hope the book inspires historians, architects and the general public to look at Texas architecture in a new way.

The book signing is part of Architecture360, a month’s worth of public architecture-related activities presented by AIA Dallas and Dallas Center for Architecture to celebrate Architecture Month in Dallas. The full slate of Architecture360 events is found here.

Gerald Moorhead, FAIA, is an architect from Houston, Texas. He has over 40 years of comprehensive architectural experience in residential, commercial, institutional, historic restoration, liturgical, and urban design projects. His architectural work has received numerous design awards and has been published in national and international journals.

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