Houston Architectural Guide

Created for the Houston Chapter of AIA, the world’s largest and most influential network of architects and design professionals, this guide book is a 700-page collection of Houston architecture and mapping. AIA Houston requested an organized, streamlined, and simplified third edition of the guidebook, with an updated binding technique, eliminating the spiral coil of previous editions. This update utilizes strong perfect-binding techniques that prevents spine-cracking, common in long-form books. Houston’s ever-growing urban sprawl required this large format in an effort to create a comprehensive resource of its eclectic architecture. This also created the challenge of mapping scale, determining how best to draft large swaths of an expansive city—some areas dense, some sprawling—in a book no wider than 4-inches wide. This was solved with a four-scale system, where each map is determined by how compact architectural landmarks appear within each geographic area. The book required listing descriptions and photographs of thousands of architectural landmarks. This was accomplished with a four-column system, keeping three of the columns reserved for descriptions and side-columns reserved for photography; whereas, in previous editions, the book was one column mixing text and imagery, resulting in wasted space. This project spanned six months requiring strong time and project management, editing, and research. While an extensive project, this book has been warmly received by Houston’s architectural community, due in part to Historian Stephen Fox’s extensive knowledge of the fourth-largest city in the United States.

Stephen Fox, Author
Barrie Scardino Bradley, Editor
AIA Houston, Client
Minor Design, Agency
Photography by Lucia Delgado, Aggie Forouhideh