The Charlottesville Tapes is a transcript book from a conference hosted at the University of Virginia School of Architecture on November 12th-13th of 1982. It is a collection of architectural proposals from 24 different architects from around the world, including Cesar Pelli, Henry Cobb, Frank Gehry and Richard Meier among others. Within the pages, Michael Graves gives details about his proposal for the redevelopment of the former Texas Theater downtown, which is today mostly gone save for its Houston Street facade. I was very surprised to find this snippet here and to my knowledge it has never been posted here, so enjoy!
Michael Graves: This scheme is a problematic one. I would love to show you something that I was enthusiastic about, something that was about to be built, but this is not going to be. I have to tell you the circumstances under which we were hurd. A very good architect in San Antonio, O'Neil Ford, of Ford, Powell and Carson, was hired in 1981 by the Republic Bank of Dallas to do a build. ing in San Antonio. The site is marvelous; it's along the San Antonio River: The heart of San Antonio's district along the river is just to the south. Ford, Powell and Carson in making their proposal, which included a building for the Republic Bank of Dallas plus speculative office building, made a skewed courtyard facing the river. Because they were so intent on having this court. yard, they proposed tearing down the Texas Theater. The Texas Theater was built in 1927 by the Bollar brothers of St. Louis; it has been called a lot of things in terms of style, but one of the most interesting things about it is that inside it has a tent, actually a plaster tent roof, which is magnificent.
O'Neil Ford said that the building was not worth saving. The Conservation Society of San Antonio prevailed upon him to save the facade at least, which he did. The Society then decided they should go fur-ther, and got a court injunction against the architects and the clients. The court asked for an alternative proposal to be presented within sixty days to show the bank that the theater could be saved, provided it cost no more to the client and did not slow the process of design and construction. That was our charge; we were hired by the Conservation Society through a federal court order. I caution all of you to avoid any endeavor like this. The end of the story is that although the bank was required to look at what we did, they did not have to consider it seriously. We thought that by saving the theater and maintaining the budget and square footage we would convince them to take a good look at it. They did not. The day after we presented our scheme, they began demolition of the theater. We had thought that public pressure to save the theater would be so great that we would have some persuasiveness, but we didn't. I will show you the scheme nevertheless.
The entire complex consists of one million square feet of bank-ing, office, and retail space. There are three primary elements to our scheme: first, the preservation of the theater; second, the incremental building of sections of the complex around the theater; third, a garden on the roof of the theater (technically the eighth floor of our scheme) surrounded by compatible activities. It could take ten years to complete the entire complex, so according to our strategy, any single element of the complex could be built at any time without a significant appearance of incompletion before the next element went up. The first increment was to consist of 400,000 square feet and would contain the bank building, which is organized as follows.
The bank is on the corner of Travis Street and Riverwalk, with the river curving around it toward the theater. The executive suites are on the eighth floor, oriented toward the river. They share the floor with a terrace, a pool, dining facilities, racquetball court, health club, and banqueting halls, so that the whole floor becomes a garden on the top of the theater, which acts as a plinth. A grand staircase cascades down from the pool to the top of the banking floor. Elevators take you to the ground floor, and a bridge gives access to the other side of the river. Along St.
Mary's Street, which is a major yet very narrow street, we proposed to build as a second phase a twenty-three story building, which would be a real blockbuster. There would be additional executive suites and conference rooms at the top of this build-ing. The restriction of light down to the street is a major prob-lem, however. That is the most difficult part of the scheme to ac-cept. To reduce the visual girth of each of the towers, at least visually, we articulated a columnar section in the center of each one and clad it in tile.
The roof plan shows the pavilions on the roof, the roof of the bank building, and then our courtyard, eight stories in the air looking down at the river, trying to hold the line of the river. One of the things that is so wonderful about San Antonio is that about fifteen years ago the buildings were reorganized so that their front doors were turned to the river. People now enter the buildings from the river, and those of you who have been to San Antonio know how lovely the activity on the river is. For this reason we were anxious to maintain that edge at the base of the site.
Robert Stern: What happened to the theater in terms of the conception of the design? Since you were obliged to save it and were brought in as part of a preservation effort, wouldn't the strategy more appropriately have been to elaborate on the theater?
Michael Graves: We went too far, as a matter of fact. We elaborated on the theater's polychromy, and it is probably the most vulgar thing we've done. We misjudged the coloration. It seems to work on the spandrels of the theater, where that rather bright, Moorish color is engaged in Texas limestone, but it works much less well on the towers and large-scale elements. If you are talking about making use of the theater's style, we did so only insofar as we made a colonnade in the shopping gallery that is similar to the gallery of the theater.
Kevin Roche: I would like to hear you talk about the problem of scale. If I am reading this scheme correctly, it is on an absolutely gigantic, elephantine scale. Can you give me some idea of how high the human figure would be?
Michael Graves: This is the door, so to that point...
Kevin Roche: Let me say, as someone who has been involved in large-scale building, I take my hat off to you. (laughter)
Rem Koolhaas: I question this at the level of type. Basically this project looks as if it's a kind of a slab, an L-shaped slab.
Michael Graves: That's right.
Rem Koolhaas: So what does that really mean? Does it mean that from now on every L-shaped slab should be cut out or articulated to look like towers? What does that imply in terms of a general or prototypical tactic? It implies a very disturbing idea of multiplication.
Michael Graves: The strategy of building in increments is of value. This building will be built incrementally. What happens here, Rem, which is superior to the construction of separate tower blocks on a site, is that you can rent a very large area on one floor. Then, as the building increases in size, you can rent more floors in the body of the same building. Or you can rent the entire structure. In other words, your organization can be horizontal or vertical.
Rem Koolhaas: But you could also build a slab in increments. It has the same advantages.
Michael Graves: Yes, that's true, if you knew that the complex would be built lin-early. We, however, could not predict the order in which any of the portions would be built after the completion of the bank. We also had no guarantee that the entire complex would ever be built, so each increment had to stand on its own.
Rem Koolhaas: I don't think you are answering my question. Why articulate and build what is essentially an L-shaped slab as if it were four skyscrapers? Your recent skyscrapers in a way represent the skyscraper; now you take your idea one step further, and the skyscraper itself becomes a motif or appliqué.
Michael Graves: I see this strategy as organizational, not as appliqué. I can only repeat that parts of the building would be skyscrapers for a while. But building could stop at any point, Rem. In fact, the owners could build one tower or two towers and no more. Yes, you could build a slab in increments, but I thought it was a preferable strategy to build towers that could connect.
Jaquelin Robertson: This idea of increments is very interesting as a possible urban design strategy. But let us assume that this building is going to be built in increments. Then it seems that the architectural expression is inappropriate because it should have been more gen-eralized. This scheme depends very much on the specific detailing of these individual towers, which are in fact all part of the same building.
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Out of all the proposals featured this ironically was the best one despite it's own creator not seemingly liking it too much. If it was constructed as designed I think a majority of people would dislike it, but I think the quadruplet tower feature is quite charming and there certainly isn't anything comparable to it in the modern San Antonio. At the very least the implication that the Texas Theater would continue to be operating in some capacity (although perhaps it was always doomed to close at some point like other theaters of yesteryear) is certainly a plus over just the small stonework and ticket booth being kept (which has no identifier as to it's former self when you walk past, no placard or sign or commemoration) What do you think?
Linear Mode
