Michelangelo Sabatino and Stephen Fox discuss and sign copies of Making Houston Modern
Cocktails and Illustrated Talk: The Late Great Architect Howard Barnstone, Followed by a Book Signing
STREET CRED: Michelangelo Sabatino is an architectural historian, curator, and preservationist; he is Professor of Architectural History and Preservation at IIT’s College of Architecture where he directs the PhD program. Stephen Fox is an architectural historian and lecturer at Rice School of Architecture and at the Gerald D. Hines College of Architecture at the University of Houston; he is a Fellow of the Anchorage Foundation of Texas. Fox’s work is focused on architecture of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, especially that of Houston and Texas.
TALKING POINTS: Complex, controversial, and prolific, Howard Barnstone was a central figure in the world of twentieth-century modern architecture. Recognized as Houston’s foremost modern architect in the 1950s, Barnstone came to prominence for his designs with partner Preston M. Bolton, which transposed the rigorous and austere architectural practices of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe to the hot, steamy coastal plain of Texas.
PUBLISHED: Michelangelo Sabatino: Modern in the Middle: Chicago Houses 1929-1975; Carlo Mollino Architect and Storyteller; Avant-Garde in the Cornfields: Architecture, Landscape, and Preservation in New Harmony; Architectural Portraits: The MIES Project; Modern Architectures in History; Layered Landscapes – Drawings from the Canadian Architectural Archives; Modern Architecture and the Mediterranean: Vernacular Dialogues and Contested Identities; Pride in Modesty: Modernist Architecture and the Vernacular Tradition in Italy. Stephen Fox: AIA Houston Architectural Guide (2012); Country Houses of John F. Staub; contributor to the Society of Architectural Historians’ The Buildings of Texas: Central, South, and Gulf Coast; contributed chapters to The Open-Ended City: David Dillon on Texas Architecture; Victor Lundy: Artist Architect; Avant-Garde in the Cornfields: Architecture, Landscape, and Preservation in New Harmony.
WHY YOU CAN’T MISS: Howard Barnstone was a man of contradictions — charming and witty but also self-centered, caustic, and abusive — who shaped new settings that were imbued, at once, with spatial calm and emotional intensity. Making Houston Modern explores the provocative architect’s life and work, not only through the lens of his architectural practice but also by delving into his personal life, class identity, and connections to the artists, critics, collectors, and museum directors who forged Houston’s distinctive culture in the postwar era
TXDW Sponsors: CAM Studio, Monogram, Decorative Center Houston, New Orleans Auction Galleries