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 …