Old Habits Die Hard

“There is something so terrifying, but also provocative in Houston as a patchwork,” said Brittany Utting, to a small crowd upstairs at the Cooper Union on a Thursday evening as she and her partner (in life and work) Daniel Jacobs presented a series of speculative projects inspired in part by their Texan hometown. The two teach at the architecture school at Rice and the University of Houston, respectively, and they co-founded the research and design collaborative HOME-OFFICE. The audience had lots of questions. “There’s a Palladian thing happening…” someone pointed out, possibly in reference to their proposal for 138 different residences, each one designed for an improbably specific purpose. (No. 131: “House for an average sized household.”) “It’s probably because we were indoctrinated by Palladio—our school made us this way,” said Utting, alluding to the one-time dominance of formal analysis at their alma mater, the Yale School of Architecture. (As a former classmate of Utting and Jacobs’s, I can attest to this point.) Yet at the same time, the duo’s work evinced an obsessive attention toward decidedly non-formal elements—for example, the detailing of solar panels. Their host and interlocutor, Elisa Iturbe, asked if they were mindful of “a danger of fetishizing the mechanical.” Replied Utting, “To address the techno-positive element in the room…we want to make sure the systems are visible, because so much architecture hides the vast mobilization of land, resources, tools and technologies that makes it possible.” They have not, however, entirely renounced their roots. “Have you ever felt frustrated working in axonometric?” asked Architectural Lobby cofounder Peggy Deamer. “We feel frustrated working in perspective,” answered Jacobs.