Author Description

The February 1954 issue of House & Garden magazine featured recent domestic architecture in Texas. The section began with a two-page photograph showing the wide steps leading up the patio of Hugo V. Neuhaus's own house, completed four years earlier, with a banner headline proclaiming Texas has taste. The introductory description went on to explain that the editors were presenting the Texas that lives with taste, mixing old and new with a free hand and a light heart. Seventeen years later, in 1971 when Hugo Neuhaus was nominated for Fellowship in the American Institute of Architects, his colleagues, Houston architects Howard Barnstone and Anderson Todd, wrote that his work, inspired by the austere and rigorous modern architecture of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, was immaculate, precise, beautifully spacious and consistent from the beginning until now. Nowhere was this more apparent than in the houses where Neuhaus mobilized Mies s deceptively simple post and lintel construction method, brick walls, plate glass, and terrazzo paving, and an unerring sense of proportion to create buildings with an exhilarating sense of spatial richness. These houses represent Neuhaus's dialectical struggle to reconcile the most demanding modern architecture of its time with the requirements of everyday life in Houston. Through the subtle regional inflection of an established architectural language Neuhaus produced a personal interpretation that tied his work to its locale and its place in Houston's social history. The tectonic economy and strict discipline exhibited in these houses remind us today of an era that seems almost impossible to recall as Houston goes about obliterating its legacy of modern buildings from the New Deal and postwar years. Careful examination of a limited number of Neuhaus s projects reveals characteristics that both distinguished and problematized his work. Because of Hugo Neuhaus's patrician family connections and his education at the Harvard Graduate School of