Houston

If Philadelphia is a portal to the past, Houston is a preview of the American future, a vast zoning-free sprawl—the city and its suburbs are larger than Rhode Island—with a kaleidoscope of percolating cultures. Downtown is a bristling arsenal of gleaming office towers connected by a futuristic network of tunnels, and at night, the incessant traffic on the tangle of expressways lends a Blade Runner frisson: I wouldn’t have been surprised to see an alien warship hovering outside the 20th-floor window of my hotel.

Houston is also livable, smart, cool with-out trying and open-hearted: More than 145 languages are spoken and the city is one of the most ethnically diverse in the country. In The Great Good Place, Ray Oldenburg writes about the importance of daily social interaction in the refuge of “third places,” neighborhood grocery stores and other commercial establishments. The markets of Houston, serving Indian, Nigerian and Vietnamese communities, are everyday gathering places that embody the possibilities of this country.

The business center of downtown is a short METRORail jaunt away from the main campus of The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, which has a new plaza by Deborah Nevins & Associates and such green spaces as the BBVA Roof Garden. MFAH also operates two spectacular house museums and gardens, Bayou Bend and Rienzi. Both are in River Oaks, a residential area akin to Beverly Hills with real money.

Houston began along a water system called the Buffalo Bayou, and currently has more than eight parks—including Memorial Park, almost twice the size of New York’s Central Park—now being linked through the trails of Bayou Greenways 2020. At Buffalo Bayou Park, created by the landscape architecture firm SWA, a family takes quinceañera photos near a temporary provocative art installation by the Guerrilla Girls while Houstonians of every variety enjoy picnics and compete on playing fields. Through a periscope, it’s possible to look down into an old underground cistern: The partially drained cistern, built in 1926, is encircled by a quarter-mile-long underground walkway, added in 2016. Inside the cistern, the otherworldly allure is suitable for atmospheric strolls and the current film and sound art installation Time No Longer by Anri Sala. In the past, a hometown conceptual artist—Solange Knowles—also used the cistern for a music video. https://www.americanway.com/public/uploads/Urban-Parks-Menil%20Collection-Credit-Richard-Barnes.jpg View gallery The Menil Collection's Menil Drawing Institute, featuring Ellsworth Kelly's Menil Curve / Credit: Richard Barnes

Montrose—one of Houston’s most bohemian and eclectic neighborhoods—is anchored by the 1987 Menil Collection, Renzo Piano’s first commission in the United States and a universe of intelligence encompassing a landscape design by Michael Van Valkenburgh. The adjacent MenilPark, surrounded by modest bungalows, is the perfect neighborhood green space. In #Republic: Divided Democracy in the Age of Social Media, Cass R. Sunstein examines how the Internet has isolated us all in echo chambers, and yet locals here, seeking community, still turn up for the social rite of twilight walks around the park.

The Menil cultural complex includes the Rothko Chapel, a collaboration between Mark Rothko and Philip Johnson, lined with Rothko paintings and celebrating its 50th anniversary this year. The art space and non-denominational house of worship—listed on the National Register of Historic Places—reopened last September after a $30 million renovation by Architecture Research Office and Nelson Byrd Woltz Landscape Architects.

For Thomas Woltz, the green space around the Rothko Chapel is meant to be “an essay on light and the human need for connectivity, surrounded by everything from Texas redbud flowers to live oaks.” Woltz, who is also recalibrating Memorial Park, sees a new green consciousness in Houston: “The Cultural Landscape Foundation had a conference—‘Leading With Landscape II: The Houston Transformation’—with all the nationally recognized landscape designers working here. All the Houston clichés, the highways and concrete, have yielded to a new identity, the city of parks.”