Parking Landscapes
Mai Okimoto
Parking Landscapes_April 2025
Microcosms of Houston
Mai Okimoto
April 2025
Houston checks all the boxes of the American city: highways, strip malls, parking lots. But it takes driving—seeing its rawness firsthand—to begin to understand what draws people to a place that can seem, at first, so desolate. There’s a harshness to this landscape, its wet heat, endless asphalt, and, above all, its emptiness. It’s easy to imagine that most of the city’s seven million residents are in constant motion—and that the city itself exists within that motion, illuminated and transient.
But Houston is also this: the sun-baked signage lining the roadside; the low, stretched-out buildings they beckon toward, advertising a Washateria here, a bún suông place there, a nail salon, the check cashers. A simple turn off the road, a pause in the flow, reveals something more. Despite their shared vocabulary of unassuming forms, each cluster of buildings is a mikrokosmos of language, texture, and culture. In these spaces, the strip mall becomes not an afterthought, but something closer to a civic core. The photographs that follow are a modest record of this vast, overlooked terrain—a contribution to the many stories told about the American strip mall.
Southwest Freeway, Houston, TX. Photo by Mai Okimoto.
11550 Bellaire Boulevard, Houston, TX. Photo by Mai Okimoto.
6742 Hillcroft Avenue, Houston, TX. Photo by Mai Okimoto.
6742 Hillcroft Avenue, Houston, TX. Photo by Mai Okimoto.
6000 S Gessner Drive, Houston, TX. Photo by Mai Okimoto.
6000 S Gessner Drive, Houston, TX. Photo by Mai Okimoto.
Mai Okimoto edits for the Architecture Writing Workshop. She works in Houston.
Empty
Leonid Furmansky
A Look at the Classroom_March 2023
Learning Space in the COVID Era
Leonid Furmansky
March 2023
Just as there is rarely a definitive, singular answer to the problems we address in our field, there is nothing straightforward or predictable about how and when we develop our architectural knowledge and skills. Learning could take place through our instructors’ sketches and conversations at reviews, or through study models and informal peer feedback exchanged over evening snacks. We often take for granted the classroom spaces where these personal interactions take place.
Architecture schools catalog the chaotic detritus of studio learning: tables covered with scrap material and orphaned model parts, walls of red-lined pin-ups, the burnt smell from laser cutters—alongside pristine final models and drawings from previous semesters. The COVID-19 pandemic turned studio culture on its head, as institutions scrambled to adjust to a new reality of social distancing and virtual learning.
During the Fall semester of 2020, at the height of the pandemic, photographer Leonid Furmansky passed through the University of Houston Gerald D. Hines College of Architecture and Design (by John Burgee and Philip Johnson, 1982), a building that sees nearly 1,000 students today. He captured the unimaginable: a pristine and empty architecture school.
The University of Houston Gerald D. Hines College of Architecture and Design. Photo by Leonid Furmansky.
The University of Houston Gerald D. Hines College of Architecture and Design.
Photo by Leonid Furmansky.
The University of Houston Gerald D. Hines College of Architecture and Design. Photo by Leonid Furmansky.
The University of Houston Gerald D. Hines College of Architecture and Design. Photo by Leonid Furmansky.
The University of Houston Gerald D. Hines College of Architecture and Design. Photo by Leonid Furmansky.