Houston Skyline

I was driving on one of our insufferable freeways Thursday morning, within spitting distance of downtown Houston, at the hour the Enron verdicts were being announced somewhere in that maze of concrete, glass and steel to my left. I was on my way to the M.D. Anderson Library at the University of Houston, and that helped buoy my spirits. It feels as though summer arrived in Houston months ago. Already the air is thick with ozone, petroleum fumes, humidity, pollen and mendacity. I dimly remembered some lines from a Kingsley Amis poem but I had to wait until I returned home to check them (I once had a better memory for invective). The lines are from a 12-poem cycle set in Wales, “The Evans Country,” that Amis wrote in the 1960s:

“The journal of some bunch of architects
Named this the worst town center they could find;
But how disparage what so well reflects
Permanent tendencies of heart and mind?”

Downtown Houston is inhumanly ugly and oppressive. Decades of architects, city planners and politicians have turned it into a social experiment with all the charm of a petri dish – a glitzy hybrid of Stalinist design and Las Vegas. In addition, Houston is the largest city in the United States without zoning laws. This cowboy approach to planning has created monstrosities and widespread vulgarity though, on occasion, the results are amusing: One mile from where I am sitting stands a former gas station that has been turned into a funeral home, with the pump islands retained. At night, the hearses park beside them. Across the street is a dollar store and yet another taqueria. Amis’ point is that ugliness on such a scale is not random but inevitable, given the values we embrace. Ruskin was railing against the same values 150 years ago. In his notebooks he wrote:

"The real reason of it is this -- that for more than a couple of centuries we have been studiously surrounding ourselves with every form of vapidness and monotony in architecture. It has been our aim to make all our houses and churches, alike; we have squared our windows -- smoothed our walls; straightened our roofs -- put away nearly all ornament, inequality, evidence of effort, and ambiguity, and all variety of colour. It has been our aim to make every house look as if it had been built yesterday; and to make all the parts of it symmetrical, similar and colourless. ... All this is done directly in opposition to the laws of nature and truth."

Amis, I suspect, would have detested Ruskin – all that visionary proto-socialism and convoluted prose. But they shared a detestation of collective ugliness, and understood that such tawdriness has a debilitating impact on the lives of ordinary people. I’m no utopian, but neither was the late Jane Jacobs, author of the still remarkable The Death and Life of Great American Cities. In it she wrote:

“There is a quality even meaner than outright ugliness or disorder, and this meaner quality is the dishonest mask of pretended order, achieved by ignoring or suppressing the real order that is struggling to exist and to be served.”