Great Houses of Texas

Great Houses of Texas by Germany, Lisa. hardcover edition. ISBN: 9780810993938.

In Great Houses of Texas, author Lisa Germany takes the reader on a tour of twenty-five Texas houses—some are lavish and monumental, others more diminutive and intimate, but taken together they relay the story of residential architecture in the Lone Star State. Dating from the mid-nineteenth century to the present day and scattered across the state from the East Texas town of Jefferson to El Paso, from the cosmopolitan cities of Houston and Dallas to the grasslands of South Texas, many of these houses are marked by their response to the Texas landscape. It is this landscape—combined with the larger-than-life personalities who were drawn to it, the brutal hardships of the frontier, and the architects—that is the unifying theme at work in Great Houses of Texas. When world-renowned architects like Philip Johnson, Maurice Fatio, Steven Holl, and Paul Rudolph add their voices to Texas’s own homegrown talents, such as O’Neil Ford, Ted Flato, David Lake, and Chester Nagel, the state becomes the locus of an extraordinary residential architecture. Photographer Grant Mudford has captured it all in his exciting images, commissioned especially for this book.