Bad designs, decisions in Austin
Narrator of ‘My Beautiful City Austin’ offers witty profiles of Texans and Texas
Austin architect David Heymann has written a delightfully odd little book he calls “fiction,” though it reads like a diary and feels like a conversation you’d have over drinks with your wittiest, bitchiest architect friend who knows Texas — and Texans — all too well.
“My Beautiful City Austin” is narrated by an architect suffering the usual ethical turmoil: He doesn’t want to design megaTuscan villas yet he needs to make a living, so he’s forced to relax his ideals about space and environment. Each chapter offers a series of achingly bad ideas clients bring to him in the hopes that their Austin dream home will become a reality. To the narrator, these tacky fantasy homes are “shrap,” a mashup of two common vulgarities.
In one chapter, the narrator strolls a Tom Miller Dam neighborhood with his cousin, Kyle, and Kyle’s wife, Janice, who have hired him to design their new home there:
“The new houses in the neighborhood were mostly all over-large neo-historic pastiche,” the narrator observes. “It was like someone had given a group of super-sized drag queens the keys to the wardrobe of a historical society.”
Another chapter finds the narrator on a house tour, incredulous when he wanders into a “vaguely Italianate stucco” featuring a Shaker master bedroom tricked out with modern bells and whistles, including a TV hidden in a chest and outlets under the cherry floorboards. No one else on the tour understands the irony of a slick master bedroom in the style of a celibate religious sect that didn’t believe in appearances. The narrator tries to set them straight, explaining that people move to Austin because of “the hills, the springs, live oaks,” and asks “why would you want to undercut that with this fantasy inside a fantasy?” His appeal is met with laughter and silence.
But it’s wrong to suggest that Heymann’s bitingly funny book is only about the decline of architecture and charm in Austin. That’s just the siding. “My Beautiful City Austin” is built around Texas and Texans, around the newly rich and the long rich, around the personalities of the cities that define our rapidly changing state. In short, Heymann’s powers of observation aren’t limited to people building houses; set him loose in a mall and he’d surely come back with sharp words about the humanity lurking around the food court.
Architects and their peculiarities aren’t spared in the book, either; they’re part of the comic tableau. In one chapter, the narrator describes a young architect’s pretentious accessory: “It wasn’t enough for Tom to just wear glasses. The glasses had to be the evident product of design, and his were a fine clinical steel ... perched on his face like a sort of mechanical praying mantis. ... I suppose the glasses were extraordinary. But I just couldn’t relax in their presence. I’d be looking at Tom, my focus shifting from face to glasses and back again. The whole time I was worrying: is he looking at me looking at his glasses?”
Heymann’s book is particularly rich for its mini-portraits of Texans and their cities. Of Dallas, the narrator observes: “I don’t know if you have ever been to Dallas, or been out in Dallas, but no one ever relaxes there. Dallasites work hard, and they are ever vigilant to convey seamless outward control. To their credit, they appear to believe this quality arises from the superior organization of their own private belongings ... Carrying the secret knowledge of their orderly closets at home, people in Dallas are publicly enabled, as others are by wearing erotic underwear under business attire.”
Heymann’s descriptions of Austin have nothing to do with keeping the city weird: “Actually, no one in Texas thinks of Austin as a real city,” he writes, “and as a city it’s a model of nothing. Invented almost from scratch as the capital, its consequent slight grandeur of scale has never been matched by its industry, and so it has long had a vague, pleasant lithium quietness.”
And Houston? The city that is “constantly metastasizing unchecked and un-zoned” gets a back-handed compliment as the narrator floats around Hamilton Pool — west of Austin — with Janice: “No one should live there [Houston]. The relentless torpor — the heat, the humidity — starts rotting everything before it’s even finished being built. No one expects anything to last — I think even pets die prematurely — so there is no real sense of a lost past. ... When you talk to people in Houston, the conversation is always about waiting for their lives to happen. So instead we talked about our mutual desire to live in Austin. Janice said, ‘What I like here is you can do what you want.’ On the surface that made sense, but later on it struck me as wrong. Houston was where you could do what you wanted.”
In the book’s acknowledgements, Heymann, who also teaches at the University of Texas, assures his “beloved clients” that they do not appear in the stories. Maybe not, but the people who walk through these pages are exceedingly real to anyone who’s ever spent time in Texas. I swear I’ve met the retired couple building a “honey trap” mansion — outfitted with everything their grandchildren don’t get at home — at least half a dozen times.