With 36 full-color photographs and 124 black-and-white pictures, this volume lavishly illustrates his vision and his legacy.

O'Neil Ford (1905-1982) was the most influential Texas architect of the twentieth century. A technological innovator who bridged Texas' rural past and urban future, he taught three generations of architects how to adapt vernacular forms and materials to modern conditions. Widely known for his many projects in San Antonio and Dallas, Ford also designed buildings from Laredo, Texas, to Saratoga Springs, New York, over the course of a sixty-year career. In this book, David Dillon undertakes the first critical study of Ford's architecture in both its regional and national contexts. In particular, Dillon explores Ford's links to the regional and eclectic movements of the 1920s and 1930s, his use of postwar technology and materials (lift-slab, pre-stressed concrete shells, new metals), and his influence on other architects in Texas and the Southwest. Quotes from the author's wide-ranging interviews with O'Neil Ford in the last years of his life, as well as with his partners, relatives, friends, and critics, give the text firsthand vividness.

In this contribution to the ongoing debates over theorizing state power, the author draws on her fieldwork in Mexico to examine the ways in which local agrarian communities negotiate with the state and with local bureaucracies in an apparently hopeless round of mismanagement and corruption - which yet contains a self-correcting stability. While the ethnography focuses on a particular community at a time of transition, the author draws out the wider implications in ways that should be of interest not only to anthropologists concerned with Mexican ethnography, but also to students of political anthropology, more generally, and development studies.

Written in an accessible style, Henry's work places Texas architecture in the wider context of American architectural history by tracing the development of building in the state from late Victorian styles, and the rise of neoclassicism, to the advent of the International Style.... His work provides a welter of new facts, both about the era's buildings and the architects who designed them, and he has catalogued and described most of the important landmarks of the period. -- Southwestern Historical Quarterly ., .a significant contribution to the study of Texas architecture.... -- Drury Blakeley Alexander, author of Texas Homes of the Nineteenth Century Texas architecture of the twentieth century encompasses a wide range of building styles, from an internationally inspired modernism to the Spanish Colonial Revival that recalls Texas' earliest European heritage. This book is the first comprehensive survey of Texas architecture of the first half of the twentieth century. More than just a catalog of buildings and styles, the book is a social history of Texas architecture. Jay C. Henry discusses and illustrates buildings from around the state, drawing a majority of his examples from the ten to twelve largest cities and from the work of major architects and firms, including C. H. Page and Brother, Trost and Trost, Lang and Witchell, Sanguinet and Staats, Atlee B. and Robert M. Ayres, David Williams, and O'Neil Ford. The majority of buildings he considers are public ones, but a separate chapter traces the evolution of private housing from late-Victorian styles through the regional and international modernism of the 1930s. Nearly 400 black-and-white photographs complement thetext. Written to be accessible to general readers interested in architecture, as well as to architectural professionals, this work shows how Texas both participated in and differed from prevailing American architectural traditions.

During the three decades Coote examines, Ayres designed nearly two hundred homes in the fashionable San Antonio suburbs of Monte Vista, Olmos Park, and Terrell Hills, homes that even now rank among the most charming in the area.".

From his boyhood in Sherman, Texas, through his education at Texas A&M in the 1950s and his first professional ventures, Welch's story is a remarkable memoir of how he became one of the Southwest's most important architects. Welch's postgraduate years on the Continent and his professional career in Texas are beautifully rendered in a volume richly illustrated with sketches, photographs, and floor plans of some of the most intriguing architectural gems in the region.

The first major look at the renowned industrial designer and architect, who helped to shape the look of American modernism from the 1920s through the early 1950s For German-born Kem Weber (1889-1963), design was not about finding a new expression; it was about responding to "structural, economic, and social requirements . . . characteristic of our daily routine of living." He sought to ensure that each design he produced--whether a piece of furniture or a building or an interior--was an improvement that responded to modern needs and modern life. Weber was a leading figure of modernism on the West Coast from the 1920s through the early 1950s, and his work greatly influenced the California style of the time. His most iconic designs were his Bentlock line, the Air Line chair, the interiors for the Bixby House, and his tubular-steel furniture for Lloyd. This book, a result of significant new primary research in the Weber family's archives, represents the first major study of the life and career of this important designer. Christopher Long details the full range of Weber's contributions, focusing particularly on the part he played in the advancement of American modernism, and his role in heralding a new way of making and living.