Cite 79: The Hidden Machine
Sept. 10 marked the release date of the latest issue of Cite magazine. The issue focused on infrastructure; largely ignored by most but, nonetheless, the bedrock on which all other endeavor— literally and figuratively—rest. Read below the introductory essay in the issue by Cite Editor Raj Mankad
Letter from the Editor
My day normally begins with a bicycle ride through the bungalows near the Menil Collection, across the Dunlavy bridge over the Southwest Freeway, and through Boulevard Oaks and Southhampton to Rice University. The nearly continuous live oak canopy keeps me cool on the hottest of days. I add extra loops and turns to take in the museums and architect-designed homes, many of which have been featured in Rice Design Alliance tours and Cite reviews. If that is what you want to read about—that soothingly coherent world—don’t open this issue.
Cite is no stranger to refinement, but for this issue we sent writers and photographers to chase cell phone towers, pipeline markers, water pumps, and transmission lines. What we found was mostly ugly. We occasioned on the sublime as well. Indeed, with the help of the Citizen’s Transportation Coalition, we organized a tour for RDA members of some of the sites in this issue. It is the alter ego of our annual home tour.
That Cite can review new museums designed by Pritzker winners in one issue and in the next feature a nuclear power plant is a wonderful paradox. Rather than understand architecture and design narrowly, Cite has since its founding centered on Houston in an expansive way. It considers place rather than simply structures. The fringes of the city and in-between spaces are as valid subjects as iconic towers.
Guest Editors Thomas Colbert and Christof Spieler labored for over two years to bring you this special issue. Their approach was beguiling, meant to stir up discussion and debate simply by witnessing the systems we take for granted.
To help readers grasp these complex infrastructures, the issue is punctuated by a series of maps developed by Spieler. They zoom away from the micro view of, say, a photographer and depict different systems—stormwater, water supply, wastewater, electricity, solid waste, and natural gas—on the scale at which they occur. Water supply reaches up into the Trinity River watershed around Dallas. Electrical supply stretches to the Wyoming coal mines.
Though I have not changed my cycling route because of this issue, I feel a stronger sense of place that extends underground to buried cables and sewage lines, and outwards to dumpsites, dams, and reservoirs, along the contours of the bayous and bay and the spidery networks of pipelines stretching into Canada and Mexico. John Lienhard, the voice of The Engines of Our Ingenuity, captures the feeling perfectly in his contribution. He essays that the “flow of material (and of matériel) is blood in our city’s veins, its spiritual as well as its physical nourishment.”
Table of Contents
Citings
News: Rice House Tour, New Rice Dean, New York Tour, Galveston Charrette
Calendar
Letters
Urban Planning: Legalizing Walking
Community: Houston/Karachi
Features
The Hidden Machine: Views from Above, Below, and Within by Thomas Colbert & Christof Spieler
Anatomy of an Intersection: The Extraordinary Infrastructure of Ordinary Places by Zeke Minaya
Standing on Fishes: A History of Houston’s Water Supply
by Martin Melosi
The Architecture of Power: South Texas Nuclear Plant
by Thomas Colbert
Control Rooms: Rooms with a view by Christof Spieler
A Journey into the Great Below: All Pipelines lead to Texas
by Raj Mankad
Gushers, Reservoirs, and Pipelines: Houston’s Rise to Energy Prominence by James McSwain
Edge Conditions: A photo essay by Paul Hester
More than a Sum of Parts: Houston, Infrastructure, and Identity
by John Lienhard
Infrastructure Maps by Christof Spieler
Hindcite
The Heroic Engineer by Christof Spieler
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