Architecture’s Lerup addresses Houston area in new book

Architecture’s Lerup addresses Houston area in new book

BY B.J. ALMOND
Rice News staff

School of Architecture Dean Lars Lerup worries about Houston.

So much so that he’s written a book about the problems and opportunities facing the nation’s fourth-largest city at the apex of its growth.

Lars Lerup

Titled “Journeys in Alphabet City,” the forthcoming semiautobiographical book calls attention to the opportunity to make Houston a great city by looking closely at the “dark side” of mobility, the driving force behind suburbanization.

Discussing an early draft of the book at a colloquium hosted by Rice’s Center for the Study of Environment and Society, Lars compared two ways of seeing the city – from a car and from the air.

Drivers experience the “juxtaposition of stillness in the suburbs and the speed on the freeway,” he said, but much of what they see while speeding down the freeway is “just a blur in a peripheral view.”

The sky offers a different perspective, allowing travelers in airplanes to look out at the “vague terrain of a horizontal city,” Lerup said. “From the airplane it seems very wonderful.”

Lerup, the William Ward Watkin Professor of Architecture, is able to look out on Houston every day from his 18th-floor apartment near Hermann Park. The years he’s spent pondering the city from above inspired him to write about the changes he has observed, such as the “proliferation of monocultures and destruction of biodiversity.”

As greenery has been overtaken by pavement and concrete everywhere, Lerup has concluded that Houston is “an alphabet city that lacks grammar,” adding that “the only grammar is the freeway.”

The unforeseen consequences of this voracious consumption of land are showing up as high ozone levels, severe flooding, epidemic sickness and rising stress levels.

“We have no way of dealing with the sprawl,” Lerup said. “The advocates of suburban mobilization have no tools to deal with this ‘negative surplus.’”

Lerup explained that “by extrapolating along the disastrous trajectory of this toxic ecology,” his book tries to chart and direct alternative opportunities.

“The first step is to refuse to see suburbia as a complete project — literally as a cul-de-sac on Western civilization — and to see it instead in evolutionary terms, as a project in the making,” Lerup wrote. “This shift from project to process requires a movement away from relying entirely on buildings and roads in our understanding of the city to a metabolic view of urbanization.”

Some people consider the cul-de-sac to be the American dream, but Lerup said he does not want to end up in a cul-de-sac.

“We have isolated ourselves in our monoculture. We have to communicate. We have to get out of our isolation. We need public space that we can bike in, walk in, swim in. The open city, the democratic city, the public domain is the fundamental solution to where we are heading.”

In the first part of his book, Lerup argues that “the side effects of diffuse suburban conurbations are rapidly reaching a saturation point: they threaten to form a toxic ecology that, if not dealt with, will result in a collateral tragedy.” He points out that all entrepreneurial cities have the potential for similar disaster scenarios.

The second part of his book consists of six essays exploring the forensics of such issues as American distance, open cities and freeway speed zones.

Lerup blames the inability to reconnect with nature on the “alphabetization of material.”

“We must look back and reconnect with the landscape — the immense petri dish in which we live — because our experiment with creating cities totally driven by privacy and self-interest is about to fail,” he wrote. “The entrepreneurial alphabet city must turn into the syntactic city — or, better yet, the metabolic city.”