Texas Rangers (architectural group)

The Texas Rangers were a group of architects and art historians who all taught at the newly established School of Architecture at the University of Texas at Austin from 1951 to about 1958 . The group was an informal network, the name was only given afterwards.

The origins of the group lie in the appointment of Harwell Hamilton Harris as the first director of the school in 1951. Impressed by the new approaches of the former Bauhaus member Josef Albers , Harris arranged for the appointment of professors whose ideas of design and architecture corresponded to those of Albers to teach his school. Among them were Robert Slutzky , Colin Rowe , John Hejduk , Lee Hodgden , John Shaw, Werner Seligmann and Bernhard Hoesli . Together, at the university and individually, they developed a new concept of architecture or training that stood out from the functionalism of post-war modernism that was customary at the time by integrating new approaches, especially the influence of architectural history, into the course.

literature

• Federica Soletta: The Texas Rangers. School of Architecture, University of Texas Austin. In: Radical Pedagogies: Reconstructing Architectural Education. Muzeum Sztuki Nowoczesnej, Warsaw, 2015, accessed on February 3, 2017 . 
• Arthur Drexel, Colin Rowe and Kenneth Frampton: Five Architects. New York 1972