Metropolitan man
Departing architecture dean Lars Lerup takes a hard look at Houston’s future

BY MIKE WILLIAMS
Rice News staff

When Lars Lerup is on a roll, you’d best just sit quietly and let him go.

And on the subject of life in Houston and the city’s future, there’s a long way to go.

Lerup, who is stepping down as dean of the Rice School of Architecture (RSA) and the William Ward Watkin Professor of Architecture but will return as a professor in 2010, took a break from packing boxes in his Anderson Hall office recently to talk about his 16 years at the helm, and the conversation quickly turned to Houston.

LARS LERUP

He’s seen many changes in the city he has called home since coming to Rice in 1993. Some are good, some not so good, and he sees a lot that needs fixing. He also sees a role Rice can play in that process, if the city and its academic community can find ways to collaborate.

“Universities have been, in some sense, carefully excluded from the agenda for all kinds of reasons, and in some ways have excluded themselves,” Lerup said. He suggested the city needs the expertise offered by academia as it plans for the future.

Moving up, moving out

Pushing Rice-bred architects to think less about individual buildings and more about the urban landscape has been a cornerstone of Lerup’s time as dean, and signs of his success dot the city. At the same time, the school’s internal structure changed dramatically as Lerup instituted a more rigorous focus on design research, prototyping and material advancements in fabrication and construction. He also introduced computer technology to every part of the curriculum.

“Lars successfully steered the school away from a limited preoccupation with architecture as profession to a much broader vision of the natural and built environment, attending to the wide range of issues defined as the discipline of architecture,” said longtime Associate Dean John Casbarian ’69. “His fascination with the city of Houston encouraged faculty and students to engage in rigorous speculations on its urban (and suburban) environment.”

Casbarian named RSA dean John Casbarian has been named dean of the Rice School of Architecture through the end of the calendar year, and he’s hitting the ground running. FULL STORY

In the new millennium, Lerup and Casbarian put international studies on the agenda, establishing programs in Mexico, Brazil, China and Puerto Rico. Notably, they founded the Rice School of Architecture, Paris, of which Casbarian is director. The study-abroad program gives select architecture students the opportunity to experience Paris as a rich, urban lab.

Rice had already earned the respect of architects, but gained new praise from ranking agencies that have consistently put the school among the nation’s top 10 over the last decade. The undergraduate program was second behind Cornell in the 2007 ranking by the Design Futures Council, which has also given high marks to the graduate program.

Lerup expanded the school’s Preceptorship Program, which gives fourth-year students a year of practical experience at architectural firms and provides feedback from those same firms on the quality of their education. He also established the Rice Building Institute in 2005 to serve as a bridge between academia, architects and the construction industry.

President David Leebron noted national and regional surveys of architecture firms have consistently ranked the architecture school high for preparing students for real-world practice. “In addition to national prominence, the architecture school has also had a significant impact on its home city. Anywhere you look, you will see buildings and spaces created by Rice-trained architects,” he said. “We’re grateful to Lars for developing a highly respected program that attracts such gifted students and faculty to Rice and to Houston.”

“Lars leaves the RSA admirably positioned, both today and for the kind of continued growth that will serve future generations of Rice architecture students and architecture faculty,” Provost Eugene Levy said.

The consequence of exuberance

Lerup is passionate about life in the metropolis, a theme that runs throughout his career as an architect and an academic. He believes fundamental change must come to cities as the American dream of owning a home in the suburbs comes into question.

“If you reflect on the exuberance that has made this city bloated in every sense of the word — bloated cars, bloated houses, bloated distances — you’ll see the chickens have come home to roost,” he said.

Empty nesters who bought homes in quickly raised subdivisions far from the city center — “housy-houses,” Lerup calls them — are realizing “these overblown houses that truly are on steroids are no longer viable, particularly since they’re poorly built most of the time.

“It’s not just simply a question of changing lifestyle. It takes considerable economic energy and commitment to hang onto those hard-won things we have, which we call the American dream. So we are in an interesting position. We need to reconsider the way we dwell, and that may mean we restructure the subdivision completely.

“The cul-de-sac world is a stupid world, as far as I’m concerned.”

Small is beautiful and practical

Busting out of an addiction to space doesn’t necessarily mean living with less. It means needing less to live well, according to Lerup.

Making good use of small spaces has been a subject of inquiry under Lerup’s guidance, via such initiatives as Project Row Houses in Houston’s Third Ward and more recently the 99K House competition, which challenged architects to design an eco-friendly house to sell for less than $100,000. The winning design has been built and is on the market in Houston’s Fifth Ward. Add to that the drive to make homes energy-efficient, and you wind up with the Zerow House, Rice’s entry in the Department of Energy’s Solar Decathlon that will soon move from campus to Washington, D.C. He said all were made possible by the commitment of Rice’s Danny Samuels, the Harry K. Smith Visiting Professor of Architecture and director of the Rice Building Workshop, and Nonya Grenader, professor in the practice of architecture and former president of the Rice Design Alliance.

The move toward small spaces has to happen, Lerup said. Houston’s far-flung suburbs may prove unsustainable in a tough economy as empty nesters move inside the Loop and high-priced real estate forces the working class out — ironically to mini-mansions they can’t afford either.

“What do you do with those big houses? In some sense, building a new suburbia is easy. But to retrofit the old suburbia, that’s tough. There’s so much manifested gluttony out there that it’s going to take some real reconsideration.

“Can we divide those big houses into two-families? Can we build in the backyard? Turn the next lot into open space? Open the cul-de-sacs to rebuild a grid open to all and end our obsession with gating ourselves?

“There are so many things one could potentially do, but there’s enormous resistance to any of those changes. I don’t foresee a change that’s based on social consciousness. I think it’ll be driven by the economy or a natural calamity like a 500-year hurricane.”

Progress in the metropolis

He’s more encouraged by what he sees happening inside the Loop. “The middle ground has become the new frontier,” he wrote in a recent essay, and while he reviles all the forces that contribute to Houston’s sprawl, he appreciates those who bring new life to its center.

“The city is dominated by what I call ‘oil thinking,'” said Lerup, who means it as a compliment when he calls Houston a “maverick city.”

“Oil thinking is everywhere — people who say, ‘I’ll take risks; if I screw it up, I pay for it.’ That attitude is really driving the city, and I have a lot of respect for it. I think it’s a fascinating way of looking at life, and it has benefited a lot of people and a large segment of our society.”

He said those risk takers have helped Houston’s downtown, which has in recent years become a worthy competitor to the Galleria and Greenway Plaza as an urban center.

“It’s a city that is, in a sense, self-organizing,” he said. “It’s like a biological system; there’s very little interference from regulators. And if you talk to developers, you realize they’re the real princes of the city. They take more of the risks — much more than the design professions, for example. I have considerable admiration for developers. … It’s very easy to look at them as villains, but they are much like the wildcatters of old.

“They’re operating within a tight economic system, and yes, they make decent money when they’re lucky. But they also have a lot at stake.”

Houston as a testing ground

Lerup considers calls for zoning to cure Houston’s ills a “knee-jerk idea” and said the city must be willing to experiment with new ideas “as a celebration of its own intelligence.”

“You really have to be a Texan when it comes to zoning and — I hate this word — incentivize. You have to make incentives that will be useful to everyone, both for the environment and the developers.”

It would be interesting, he said, to put up a growth boundary. “See what it would do. Test it for 10 years.” Or streamline public transportation, a problem that grows greater with every new subdivision. “When you have a line, with exits and entries as dots on that line in an evenly spaced city, you have trouble,” he said. “You still have to get to those points by other forms of transportation.

“There may be ways of solving this, but we need to have a research organization that looks at this particular city and attempts to do some experiments. Let’s make something experimental and test it.”

Lerup said he’d like to see Rice more involved in planning Houston’s future, “but it takes two to tango. There must be an interest on the faculty’s part to be involved in these real issues.” He cited as good examples Rice professors and “real city insiders” Stephen Klineberg, who directs the Houston Area Survey; Robert Stein, the Lena Gohlman Fox Professor of Political Science, and Philip Bedient, director of the SSPEED Center for severe storm research.

“There must also be seed money to do the research, and it requires a mayor who has ambitions for the city,” he said. “I think we’ve had an improvement in this, but we’re still very far from what I would think the city needs and deserves.”

The big red book

As it happens, Rice faculty and students have put a lot of thought into those issues and more, and they have condensed it all into a new book.

Much of Lerup’s philosophy flows through “Everything Must Move,” a very thick, very red compendium of essays and photos that document a decade-and-a-half of thought and action at RSA. The book, the latest in the prolific Architecture at Rice publication series he revived upon his arrival, includes pieces by Lerup, Casbarian and many of their colleagues and students who offer “propositions about the suburban city in general and Houston in particular.”

Lerup demurs when asked if the book represents his legacy as dean. “I’m but the gargoyle on the enterprise. You can’t make a school without a faculty and a group of students — and we’ve been very lucky in that way — and plenty of resources.”

Besides, with that book now on the street, he’s got others to worry about. Lerup’s next book, “One Million Acres — and No Zoning,” which focuses on the complex aspects of a self-organizing city, is scheduled for publication in the near future. Sooner than that, the Rice Building Institute, of which he is a senior fellow, will publish what he expects to be a highly provocative manifesto by California architect David Chambers on “how to revolutionize the modern hospital.”

Lerup, who emigrated from Sweden to attend the University of California-Berkeley in the ’60s, will spend nearly a year in Italy beginning this fall as the recipient of the Bruner Rome Prize in the 113th annual Rome Prize Competition, awarded by the American Academy in Rome. The fellowship will give him time to further his study of the Pantheon, which was a starting point for his far-reaching look at the metropolis in modern society in his 2001 book, “After the City.”

It will also give him time to decompress. “I haven’t had a break for a long time,” Lerup said. “As a dean, although you can be on a nice vacation somewhere, the cell phone is always there asking you to react. So it’s going to be very nice to spend a lot of time reflecting on all this and rejuvenating myself.

“I don’t intend to pack it in,” he said. “I’ll be 70 when I come back to Rice. Many of my contemporaries seem to be playing golf somewhere … but that’s not the particular legacy I’m interested in. So I’ll be here until they wheel me out.”