The Works: Recent Episodes
Brantley Hightower
In each episode we tell a different story about the built environment through interviews, observations and first-person reflections. Of interest to both architects and those who are interested in architecture, each month we bring you a different story about the world we build around us.
Each episode of the “San Antonio Storybook” will tell a different story about the Alamo City. The stories will be about the sounds you hear and the places you see as you drive around San Antonio.
Most people who visit Alamo Plaza are there to see the Alamo but some are there to sell snow cones. Their story is not what you might expect: it is a song of ice and fire and government-sponsored lotteries.
Plenty of people have seen the "Come And Take It" flag and think they know what it means. In Gonzales, Texas they know the story of how and why it was first created and it's not what you might imagine.
There is a lot on the side of Austin Highway in San Antonio that sits empty for most of the year. But about a month before Christmas every year, it is transformed into a special place where memories are made.
In a small building on the side of US Highway 90, a woman works tirelessly to make sure her community is able to stay connected with the outside world. This is the story of the postmaster of Valentine, Texas.
What a city chooses to build speaks volumes about its past – or at least about the past it wants to remember. What it chooses to tear down can tell us just as much about who they want to be in the future.
A planetarium is a very special place designed for a very special purpose. Even though most people have ay some point sat under a planetarium’s dome, few know the story of how they came to be or how scientists have come to use them today.
The International Space Station is technically the most expensive building ever built. A few hundred people have lived there. But only twelve people have lived on the Moon making the architecture they inhabited there the most exclusive in (or off) the world.
Most sports are played in featureless rectangles with little connection between the sport and the field on which it is played. This is not the case with the rodeo, or at least not the Mexican rodeo also known as the charreada.
Although movies rarely feature what architects do, movies often feature characters who are architects. So what does it mean when a character is identified as an architect?
Of course, San Antonio is known for the Alamo but the most popular tourist attraction in the city is its River Walk. Its an integral part of the city, but it wasn't always that way.
The saying goes that everything is bigger in Texas. When it comes to hamburgers and the buildings one company built to sell them, that saying turns out to be absolutely true.
Lee Hoy is a bearded man who moved out west of the Pecos River to start a new life working at the Judge Roy Bean Visitor Center that memorializes another bearded man who also moved west of the Pecos to start a new life.
Barney Smith has been both a preacher and a plumber but he is best known as the creator of the Toilet Seat Art Museum in Alamo Heights, Texas. It wasn’t the legacy he set out to create, but it’s one he is proud to own.
On paper, the B-24 was a better aircraft than the B-17. But as is the case with architecture, function alone does not determine what aircraft we choose to remember. That is why we remember the Flying Fortress and not the Flying Boxcar. This is also why we like some types of architecture better than others.
At the corner of Summit Avenue and West Abram Street in Arlington, Texas sits a single story brick house. Built in 1950, it has four bedrooms and two baths. Form the outside it looks like a normal suburban home but it is actually a container of memories.
Overland Partners was established in San Antonio in 1987. They thought they were going to design cool architecture in Texas but nearly three decades later, they're designing much more than buildings much further from home.
In the early decades of the 20th Century, Dallas city leaders sought to build a plaza to memorialize their founder, John Neely Bryan. They succeeded in doing this, but then something happened that forever changed what the plaza was understood to mean.
Alamo Architects is a 50-person firm in San Antonio. Its mission is to change the world through design – one project at a time. Some of their projects have been quite large but one project was truly Biblical in proportions.
Near the intersection of Broadway and Mulberry in San Antonio sits a small children's amusement park. Established in 1925, the park is billed as "the perfect way for children and adults to enjoy a nostalgic day of old-fashioned fun." However, the experience of going there is something else entirely.
Most of us know the story of the Alamo and the role it played in the Texas Revolution. But there is another Alamo with a completely different story that is no less compelling. Both Alamos were populated by larger-than-life characters and played important roles in the lives of those who spent time within their respective walls.
Although we often associate fireworks, flags, and parades and with the Fourth of July, we rarely think about architecture. But fireworks - or more specifically the selling of fireworks - has created its own unique architecture. Fireworks themselves also have the ability to transform the architecture around us if only for a brief time every July.
The lawn in front of the Museum of Science and industry in Chicago is today mostly empty. In 1893, however, the site was part of the vast World’s Columbian Exposition and upon it sat a building constructed to represent the state of Texas. At the time Texas was a very poor, rural state but it had aspirations to be something more. It was designed by a Texas architect who also had aspirations to be something more.
Every year in late April, a remarkable thing happens underneath a highway interchange near downtown San Antonio. For a little over a week a normally deserted part of the city is transformed into an unlikely community that thrives in the shadow of the highway overpasses. In this episode I tell the story of what life is like under the bridge and the history, customs and cultures that can be found there.
Where does good design begin? Does it begin with a flash of artistic inspiration? Does it begin with the designer's first hand-drawn sketch? Or does it begin well before the pencil ever meets the proverbial paper with an effort to understand the needs of the client and analyze the problem the proposed building is intended to solve? In this episode I try to answer those questions as well as the ultimate question of life itself. The answers may surprise you.
About an hour and a half south of San Antonio is the town of Cotulla, Texas. For a small town, it has an incredibly interesting layout and an even more fascinating history. Outlaws, oilmen, and presidents have all walked its streets and in this episode, we attempt to tell some of their stories.
There is a Winston Churchill quote we remember from our time in architecture school. It's a really great quote and even though architects reference it often, we actually knew very little about it other than what we were told. And so we started asking some questions, we found out some answers, and learned some unexpected things along the way.