The Architecture of Birdsall P. Briscoe by Stephen Fox (review)

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• The Architecture of Birdsall P. Briscoe by Stephen Fox
• Kathryn E. Holliday

The Architecture of Birdsall P. Briscoe. By Stephen Fox. Photographs by Paul Hester. ( College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2022. Pp, 456. 308 color, 36 b&w photos, 6 line art; appendix, bibliography, index.)

While for historians of Texas the last name "Briscoe" is instantly recognizable, Birdsall P. Briscoe is certainly not a well-known figure. Great-grandson of John Richardson Harris, namesake of Houston's Harris County, and grandson of Andrew Briscoe, officer in the Texas war of independence, Birdsall Briscoe eschewed the politics and military roles of his more famous forbears and became an architect who practiced in Houston for 50 years, between 1912 and 1962. His family's intimate, multigenerational connections with Houston's elite provided an instant clientele for Briscoe's elegant, stately city and country houses that continue to define the look and feel of luxury in the city today. Briscoe's designs for River Oaks, for Ima Hogg's Bayou Bend, for the Kappa Kappa Gamma House at the University of Texas at Austin, for ranch houses in East Texas, and dozens of other private commissions, represent the pinnacle of stylish good taste in Texas domestic architecture in the first half of the 20th century.

Stephen Fox's painstakingly researched and beautiful new monograph argues that Birdsall Briscoe's designs for these luxurious houses should be understood as integral to the larger social and political history of Houston and Texas, evidence of the ways that Houston's elite used their social and financial capital to create tasteful neighborhoods and domestic settings that reflected their sense of appropriate urban order. Briscoe's designs, Fox writes, "enabled their owners to be identified as patrician leaders as well as the symbolic capital that constructed collective landscapes of power that nonelite Houstonians experienced as authoritative and beautiful rather than exclusionary and oppressive." (p. 12) Fox draws on the cultural theory of sociologist Pierre Bourdieu to provide the foundations for this analytical framework, which contextualizes Fox's painstaking examination of Briscoe's designs.

Fox has written extensively across his long career about architecture in Texas, especially in Houston, Galveston, and Brownsville, and this book shows the depth of his understanding of architecture as formal and visual, as well as reflective of complex social dynamics. The book is arranged both thematically and chronologically, and while its title emphasizes Birdsall Briscoe as a designer, the chapter titles show that the book is equally about Houston itself, from Chapter Three "Progressive Houston," to Chapter Seven, "The City That Never Knew the Depression." Briscoe's biography is outlined in Chapter Two, allowing the rest of the book to focus on clients, houses, and neighborhoods. The photographs by Paul Hester are beautiful and largely in color, and especially shine when focused on [End Page 368] design details and intimate interior spaces. Fox points out that Briscoe designed particularly lovely formal stairs that were both functional in the ways the facilitated movement and air circulation, and joyful in the ways that the provided settings for formal social events. Hester's photographs of these stairs, especially, seem to capture the larger argument about the intersection of public and private purposes for these designs that consolidated an elite community's sense of who they were and how they should behave (see the Davis House, p. 212; Hutcheson House, p. 231; and Clemens House, p. 272).

This book should be rewarding for any scholar interested in the interplay between urban history, material culture, and class dynamics, especially for scholars studying young cities that invented localized patrician traditions during the twentieth century. For advocates of historic preservation, it also provides a fine template for arguments about the significance of pre-World War II luxury houses, which today often fall to the wrecking ball to clear the way for ever grander, larger, and more obviously ostentatious expressions of wealth. Fox's description of the Anderson House in Country Club Estates in Houston as having "a sense of generosity, simplicity, and superiority that are the more beguiling because they seem natural and unaffected" (p. 203), blends his ability to write lucidly and descriptively about design and...