Paul Jacques Grillo. Three Cities: Aquila, Poseidon, Aegea : A Research Project. — Houston, 1963

Three Cities: Aquila, Poseidon, Aegea: A Research Project Sponsored by the Texas Architectural Foundation / by Paul Jacques Grillo (Professor of Architecture) and Student Associates. — Houston, Texas : Rice University, 1963. — 62, [5] p. : ill. — (Architecture at Rice ; 10 ; September 1963)

Three Cities: Aquila, Poseidon, Aegea: A Research Project Sponsored by the Texas Architectural Foundation / by Paul Jacques Grillo (Professor of Architecture) and Student Associates. — Houston, Texas : Rice University, 1963. — 62, [5] p. : ill. — (Architecture at Rice ; 10 ; September 1963).

A Research Project Sponsored by THE TEXAS ARCHITECTURAL FOUNDATION

PAUL JACQUES GRILLO

Professor of Architecture

and

Howard E. Eilenberger 5th year

Stephen Bernhardt Engberg 4th year

Chalmers Garold Long, Jr. 4th year

Charles Franklin Redmon 3rd year

Frank Stratton Kelly 3rd year

Frederick Conrad Gardner 2nd year

David Jefferson Morris 2nd year

Cecil Harold Craft 1st year

John Charles Rowlett 1st year

Student Associates

ARCHITECTURE AT RICE UNIVERSITY

DESIGNATES A SERIES OF REPORTS ON THOUGHTS AND INVESTIGATIONS FROM THE DEPARTMENT OF ARCHITECTURE. IT IS PUBLISHED IN THE BELIEF THAT THE EDUCATION OF ARCHITECTS CAN BEST BE ADVANCED IF TEACHERS, STUDENTS, PRACTITIONERS, AND INTERESTED LAYMEN SHARE IN WHAT THEY ARE THINKING AND DOING.

FOREWORD

This project was started as a proposal I made to Chairman William W. Caudill to try to put together in a research project the ideas which have occupied my mind for the last two years on the design of new cities. The Texas Architectural Foundation backed my proposal with an M. D. Anderson Grant which covered the most urgent expenses in furthering this project. A group of students — a vertical cross-section of all the classes in architecture at Rice, from freshman through fifth year — were given the opportunity to work with me on this project in lieu of working on their regular school project. We started work February 4th, 1963, and closed shop on March 23rd.

This brochure records the work to date in the hopes that the ideas and solutions we offer will seem of enough interest to promote further this research with the final purpose of actually working toward their realization.

After all, with the trillion dollar and ten cent budget put at my disposal by the State Republic of Texas — as witnessed by the attached document — this should be feasible.

I was most thankful to the Texas Architectural Foundation for having made our venture financially possible, and to the group of students who helped me in putting it in its present shape. Selected on a voluntary basis from among the best students from all the classes, their role in this was more than just putting together the conceptual ideas I sketched throughout the study. Each one expressed his personal artistry and thought in designing his own share of this undertaking. The upper classmen acted as job captains of the various projects, while the others helped in model-making and drafting. Each of the job captains brought into his share of the design his characteristic personality as an artist: as revealed in the interplay of dynamic and static forms carried to an extreme detail as exquisite as a lace in the design of POSEIDON by Gary Long — as in the bold and forceful pattern carved into the plain in an abstract, man-made geography in the design of AQUILA by Chuck Redmon — as the playful interplay of land and water, residences, schools and industry expressed by Frank Kelly in AEGEA — as the realistic and practical solution of MIDTOWN precised by Steve Engberg. Surely, I uncompromisingly sketched the concepts throughout this study without any possible misunderstanding, but without this dedicated team of enthusiastic and eager young designers, I would have been stopped short in the final realizations for lack of time, and the project would not have been carried out with the same freshness, nor with the same variety without their help. I might also have lost control of the research as a whole, as I would have been forced to lose myself in details.

Even though each of the students credited above carried a full responsibility on one of the cities, they also shifted along from one to the other, and exchanged at times their wits and work with others. Thus, Howie Eilenberger played an important part both in the study of Poseidon at the start, and Aquila at the end. In between, he composed a musical rhapsody which can be considered as a definite contribution to art. Steve Engberg had also his part in the study of Aegea, as he was given to develop the concept of what I call the "Corporative Village," which is expressed in the interplay of business and residence in the design of the shore area of the town. Gary Long teamed for a while with Frank Kelly on this same project and analyzed with him the other sites that could exist in Texas under similar conditions.

As for the two freshmen, Cecil Craft and Jack Rowlett, were responsible for making the models. The model of Aquila (page 31) shows the professional quality of their work on such a large and intricate design. The model measures 4 by 8 feet. This achievement is mostly due to the evening hours of work which Cecil Craft spent in the shop, carrying at the same time his full school load which, as we all know, is particularly heavy on a freshman's shoulders.

I must also thank the administration for giving us unlimited space in the basement of Fondren Library where the students in their spare time could freely use the shop facilities for model-making and other diversions.

The immediate vicinity of the library was most welcome, and our shelves became rapidly stocked with books on botany, natural morphology, zoology, etc. However, architectural literature of any kind was purposely ignored to keep intact our mistakes. After all, our job was not to compile the results of experts, but to offer something different, no matter how way-out in the margin we had to go from things already accepted and done. I strongly believe this to be our most valid contribution to this fantastically hard and baffling problem of designing a city from scratch. Upon these few original and basic ideas — original because they go back to the origin of things and meet thus with already well-known and successful natural solutions — basic because they may serve as some kind of a base to go further in the study of the problem — we hope to be given the opportunity, in a second phase of this game, to build documented and convincing evidence to show with facts and figures the immediate feasability and the practicality of these solutions. The first step would be to expose these ideas in a film aimed at the man in the street, to help win his interest and cooperation, because without his support, we can never hope to make a success of city planning. Thanks to Anderson Todd, who gallantly filmed a first reel on Aegea, we are already started on this venture.

We are not apologizing for having limited ourselves in this first phase to a decidedly romantic approach by skirting figures and statistics from a safe distance, although never quite losing track of their gross value. I think it is mostly due to the blithe simplicity of our intuitive confidence — together with our willfully ignoring the obsolete Victorian straight-jacket of ordinances, laws, codes and regulations which constitute the bible of contemporary city planning — that we may have to offer with our work anything of value at all.

Houston, 20 May 1963