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.

Winner, Publication Award, Southeastern Chapter of the Society of Architectural Historians (SESAH), 2019 Acclaimed for his designs of the Trinity University campus, the Little Chapel in the Woods, the Texas Instruments Semiconductor Components Division Building, and numerous private houses, O’Neil Ford (1905–1982) was an important twentieth-century architect and a pioneer of modernism in Texas. Collaborating with artists, landscape architects, and engineers, Ford created diverse and enduringly rich works that embodied and informed international developments in modern architecture. His buildings, lectures, and teaching influenced a generation of Texas architects. O’Neil Ford on Architecture brings together Ford’s major professional writings and speeches for the first time. Revealing the intellectual and theoretical underpinnings of his distinctive modernism, they illuminate his fascination with architectural history, his pioneering uses of new technologies and construction systems, his deep concerns for the landscape and environment, and his passionate commitments to education and civil rights. An interlocutor with titans of the twentieth century, including Louis Kahn and J. Robert Oppenheimer, Ford understood architecture as inseparable from the social, political, and scientific developments of his day. An introductory essay by Kathryn E. O’Rourke provides a critical assessment of Ford’s essays and lectures and repositions him in the history of US architectural modernism. As some of his most important buildings turn sixty, O’Neil Ford on Architecture demonstrates that this Texas modernist deserves to be ranked among the leading midcentury American architects.

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.".

Mexico City became one of the centers of architectural modernism in the Americas in the first half of the twentieth century. Invigorated by insights drawn from the first published histories of Mexican colonial architecture, which suggested that Mexico possessed a distinctive architecture and culture, beginning in the 1920s a new generation of architects created profoundly visual modern buildings intended to convey Mexico's unique cultural character. By midcentury these architects and their students had rewritten the country's architectural history and transformed the capital into a metropolis where new buildings that evoked pre-conquest, colonial, and International Style architecture coexisted. Through an exploration of schools, a university campus, a government ministry, a workers' park, and houses for Diego Rivera and Luis Barragan, Kathryn O'Rourke offers a new interpretation of modern architecture in the Mexican capital, showing close links between design, evolving understandings of national architectural history, folk art, and social reform. This book demonstrates why creating a distinctively Mexican architecture captivated architects whose work was formally dissimilar, and how that concern became central to the profession.