In mid-December, the third Day for Night festival took place at PostHTX, the former Barbara Jordan Post Office downtown. The three-day event showcased experiential art alongside a well-curated musical line-up that leaned electronic. At Day for Night, sensations of sound and light were blended to create an immersive, exploratory world.[1]
When considered with an architectural gaze, the festival offered lessons for how to repurpose the building complex, as it was sold in 2015 and is slated for redevelopment. The festival was a master class in engagement through attitude. The pop-up event made no attempt to “blend in” with its environment—instead it was a spatial operation that radically re-made its surroundings. But it did so within a mode that complemented the existing structure, thereby making it more unique and more enigmatic. In its sensorial renovation, the architecture was fully altered, but made better as a result. The Post Office was totally changed, but through this transformation its essential qualities were rendered more perceptible, a contortion that brought to mind an aphoristic t-shirt a friend once made: The haze doesn’t obscure the view, it just makes it tangible.
Day for Night, in its dark, post-industrial way, created a new place within the shell of a previous one, and did so with an authentic spirit. Of course, it would be hard for an actual building renovation—with its attendant ossifying real-world requirements of profit margins, building codes, and marketing teams—to do this exactly, but a parallel spirit would go a long way toward making something that could only happen here. It is no mistake that the currency of the authentic still rules the contemporary marketplace of public space. Its buzzy shock is what makes citizens venture out into the city, and the memory of that shock is what impels them to return.
“Liminal Scope,” by Hovver Studio, is a series of three vibrating rings where rotating lights create traces and reflections. Photo by Dan Gentile.
I went to Day for Night on Sunday, its third and final day. The festival utilized the grounds of the post office campus and the two floors of the sorting warehouse facility. The two main stages were outside on opposite sides of the building, with two smaller ones inside. A few installations were located on the first floor, but most were on the second. The post office’s tower was not accessible, but at night projections on its exterior concrete façade transformed its face into a pulsing cyberpunk billboard of red and blue, punctuated with scenes of scattered pixels, reminiscent of the advertising facades of Blade Runner—an appropriate feeling given that the original 1982 film was set in the fast-approaching year of 2019.[2]
The façade of the post office with a rippling surface of lighting effects. Photos by author.
Upon entry, one was quickly in darkness, but soon rescued by gradients of red and blue light that blend ultraviolet (a hue that suggests the “mysteries of the cosmos,” according to 2018’s Pantone Color of the Year write-up). Red light dominated, but this felt deliberate: red, at the upper visible end of the radiation spectrum, preserves ocular sensitivity in low-light contexts. In the dark interior, one wandered between pools of colored light, encountering others as they traversed in the opposite direction. Wayfinding signage was minimal, limited to factory-like stickers on the floor and projected texts. The light cast shadows onto the ceiling, so looking up at the concrete columns, drop panels, and ductwork was interesting, but also made one notice the network of monitoring galleries—enclosed metal catwalks with regular medieval viewports where postmasters would secretly observe the sorting floor workers—that added an element of Big Brother surveillance. The crowd was stylish and youngish, with some decked out in rave gear. Seventy percent of presale tickets, I later learned, were sold to out-of-towners. I only saw one stroller, and it was lit up with Christmas lights like a tiny Burning Man float as it sailed through the darkness.
Day for Nights’ red-shifted interior. Photo by author.
The pleasant gloom summoned the full history of party culture, where events regularly took—and take—place in post-industrial venues: garages, warehouses, factories, tunnels, among others. New York’s Paradise Garage was literally a parking garage. Berghain in Berlin, one of the world’s most well-known (and notorious) nightclubs, is in a former East German power plant. Fabric, in London, is in the basement of what was previously a cold storage facility. In an era of music festivals that cater to more mainstream tastes and therefore adopt friendly personas of branded engagement, Day for Night is a welcome pill of sharp dystopian attitude.
A detail of the “Light Leaks” installation that turned one realm into a pixelated mesh. Photo by Dan Gentile.
As an attendee, I drifted between stages and installations, using each to balance out the other without becoming overwhelmed or bored. The light-based installations were relaxation zones, where spacing out was encouraged. Artworks in the light and space tradition operate through bodily experience, where one’s attentive presence is enough for stimulation. One inhabited the works, whose alternated visual states immediately prompted photo opportunities, making for trippy selfies or abstract blurs of color and shadow. Screens are now an unavoidable part of musical performance, and sets were seen fly-eyed through the mosaic of phone screens raised high, in addition to the big ones flanking the stages. Day for Night itself stressed that its performers “specialized in an inventive and highly visual approach to performing.” Some, like Ryoji Ikeda, lived up to the claim. Other artists performed with their own lighting collaborators, as visuals are important components of musical experiences in an era when performance can be condensed into a potentially motionless pressing of buttons and turning of knobs.
Another photographic moment in a mobile piece by Félicie D’Estienne D’Orves. Photo by Dan Gentile.
A user reclines underneath Matthew Schreiber’s laser pyramid. Photo by Dan Gentile.
Day for Night’s music was defined by eclectic curation. At times the only connecting thread was just good taste. For example: On Sunday, the post-rock orchestra of Godspeed You! Black Emperor was followed by 90s R&B supergroup En Vogue. Cardi B, whose anthem “Bodak Yellow” was named 2017’s best song by Pitchfork, performed on Saturday. You’ve probably heard this track, but if not, an afternoon of listening to 97.9 The Box is a worthwhile corrective. Nina Kraviz, a Russian DJ, headlined Sunday’s Yellow Stage bill, mixing tribal techno in a feeling she later christened “acidic voodoo.”
In both homecoming spirit and sheer musicality, Sunday’s stand-out performance was given by Solange. Born and raised in Houston’s Third Ward, the singer, Beyoncé’s younger sister, has in recent years become a star in her own right. Her band, dressed in red and bathed in red and blue lights, performed hits from 2016’s A Seat at the Table in front of a postmodern backdrop of columns, a pyramid, and a floating disc. For two numbers, the band was supported by a brass choir, whose musicians are from Texas Southern University; they have appeared with Solange on recent gigs, including a Chinati Weekend performance this past October. In a concluding monologue, Solange described her prior day’s schedule of visiting the Rothko Chapel, eating at a not-to-be-named “bougie restaurant,” dining at Frenchy’s, and going to Ninfa’s. She closed by lamenting the gentrification of the Tre and encouraged the audience to resist its displacing effects.
Solange and her band. Courtesy photo by Rick Kern via Getty Images.
Solange’s comments echo the larger political tone of the festival. Day for Night is leftist at heart, organized with the anti-government spirit of its founder Omar Afra, who previously founded Free Press Houston in direct opposition to the Iraq War. The messaging isn’t subtle, and fed the fest’s happy nihilist vibe. At one point the large screens flanking the Red Stage flashed “F*** Trump,” a proclamation answered with an enthusiastic roar from the crowd. Another slide added “F*** Harvey,” applicable to both the hurricane and the Weinstein versions, eliciting another round of (well-deserved) applause. A discussion panel on Friday included activist Chelsea Manning, Nadya from the Russian activist group Pussy Riot (who performed on Saturday), performance artist Laurie Anderson and artist Lauren McCarthy.
Afra in an interview described Day for Night as a “modular not malleable” event, “with the concurrent theme of marrying art and music also with transforming spaces.” In creating a self-directed environment of exploration, Day for Night summoned the theatrical possibilities of Cedric Price’s mid-1960s Fun Palace. But here the palace was smaller and cast in reverse: Instead of a scaffolding that supports spontaneous performance, the event created its own architectural zone inside an existing shell, sensationally inflating to fill the cavernous interior. The Fun Palace is a useful precedent, as it “was conceived as a cultural and event venue that would provide the spatial and technical tools for active participation in cultural life.”[3] But, like PostHTX, it was made possible by urban reclamation. In locating the Fun Palace, Joan Littlewood, the influential theatre director and instigating client of the structure, initially landed on the de-industrialized wharves of London’s East End, vacant after World War II but zoned for public use.[4] The unrealized vision of collectivity through self-directed enjoyment is an early example of the countercultural importance of ephemeral event as cultural experience.The mood was soundtracked with exploratory music, as psychedelic bands like Pink Floyd or The Soft Machine gained popularity.
Archigram’s ideas like Instant City were percolating as the era’s music festivals and be-ins took place. After the tumult of 1968, Woodstock happened in 1969, and Britain’s Isle of Wight festival followed in 1970, with at least 600,000 and many as 700,000 people in attendance.[5] While music festivals were not new, events like these set precedents for their ability to offer transformative, temporal experiences to young people in search of meaning. As Littlewood herself said, she hoped the Fun Palace would be a “place […] where millions who search ‘for something to do’ will find it here and compound it with that something that comes with self accomplishment.”[6] Half a century later, the sentiment lingers, with American festivals like Bonnaroo or Coachella or any number of activity-oriented museums as current examples. The Fun Palace has already made a mark on downtown Houston: Its ideas inspired Renzo Piano and Richard Roger’s 1970 Centre Pompidou in Paris, whose shapes in turn inspired local architects in their design of our George R. Brown Convention Center in the 1980s. Price’s Fun Palace is a remarkably durable precedent of urban activation.
Cedric Price’s Fun Palace: Interior perspective, 1964, black and white ink over gelatin silver print. Image courtesy of the Canadian Centre for Architecture.
There are of course more contemporary references, as light-based installations—permanent or temporary—are ways for architects to test out ideas and become part of festival culture, sometimes simultaneously. Lebbeus Woods’s sole built work, The Light Pavilion, realized posthumously with the assistance of Christoph a. Kumpusch, is a knot of lit pylons and platforms within a void of Steven Holl’s Sliced Porosity Block in Chengdu. At Coachella in 2016, Bureau Spectacular’s Tower of Twelve Stories was part of the chaos, at night lit in bright rave-ready colors. These two works blur the line between the architectural avant garde and EDM festival folly. This is not a slight, as both offer “new experiences” to their users. As Kumpusch writes, the newness of this exploration, beyond any aspect of intended experiential quality, is the point; “we—its transient inhabitants—are experimentalists.” Temporary festivals make good on the promise of the Instant City, so it is no surprise that Kumpusch, a professor at Columbia GSAPP, led a group of students to Burning Man last year.
Left, the interior of Woods’s Light Pavilion. Right, Bureau Spectacular’s Tower of Twelve Stories. Photos courtesy of Iwan Baan (l) and via The Architect’s Newspaper (r).
Back in Houston, PostHTX’s emptiness is temporary, and only the result of the time it has taken to plan for the site’s reuse. Before becoming the downtown post office, the land was first Houston’s Grand Central Depot and then the Southern Pacific Grand Central Station; though the tracks are gone, their traces still remain in back of the complex. The post office, designed by the architecture office of Wilson, Morris, Crane, and Anderson, was built in 1962, and renamed to honor Barbara Jordan in 1984, a native of Houston’s Fifth Ward. Citing contractions in federal post office budgets, the building was sold in 2015 to Lovett Commercial, who is now researching how best to redevelop the campus. PostHTX already has its acronym-based rebranding, an early indicator of the redevelopment that is to come: The duality of post references the building while hinting at its future. What was a techno playground for three days will, in a few years’ time and if all goes according to the advertising, be “transformed into a fully immersive destination featuring a variety of office, retail, and culinary experiences.”
View of the post office. Image courtesy The Houston Chronicle.
Post office interior. Image courtesy The Houston Chronicle.
Lovett Commercial has consulted many architects, including local ones, to understand how to renovate the post office complex. Rem Koolhaas’s OMA was engaged at some point but is no longer working on the project. In 2012, Koolhaas lectured at Rice, discussing his current research project of preservation and articulating a position of “history without preservation.” The idea embraces material engagement with the past, not “preserving history” but instead “revealing history,” in a manner that invites newness. Buildings are not renovated or preserved, but instead remixed. Since then, OMA’s built work in projects like Garage Museum of Contemporary Art or the Fondazione Prada campus in Milan have shown that this theory can be translated into cultural buildings with successful results.
Garage Museum of Contemporary Art. Photo courtesy OMA.
But development and authenticity aren’t usually cozy bedmates. In earlier conversations with curator Hans Ulrich Obrist published in Lives of the Artists, Lives of the Architects, Koolhaas spoke of the gap between architecture and the everyday: “Architects are King Midas in reverse—when they look at something which is authentically from everyday life; the moment they look at it, it loses its integrity. Or at least it loses its spontaneity and authenticity.”[7] He later concludes that “if you want spontaneity or everyday life, you should keep architects as far away as possible.”[8] It’s true that street life in new developments typically falls short of street life in existing neighborhoods, but these comments, couched in Koolhaas’s eternal cynicism, predate the wave of successful public spaces realized in the subsequent decade. And, too, the architectural interest in public interest design and more collaborative design arrangements. In this case, it might not be the architect who is cause for concern. In Houston the real gatekeeper to authenticity is the developer, as this is the entity that establishes the economic superstructure in which architecture—good, bad, mediocre—exists.
Ideas for PostHTX were briefly seen when, one month after Hurricane Harvey, a series of renderings of unknown architectural provenance were leaked on Swamplot. Though the images were removed, the captions still convey a sense of the sectional slicing and millennial-friendly keyword salad at work: There would be roof gardens, live-work studios, shopping, a makerspace, and a “flagship food hall” that serves “roof-to-table organic produce.” The roof, in addition to supporting farming, would have occupiable spaces for day and night activities. This alone would be a powerful place to experience Houston’s skyline—it is already impressive, even when accessed thanks to a plank of weathered timber left in the stairwell door during an electronic music festival.
The vacated post office sorting floor. Photo by Atessa Nicole courtesy of Frank Liu Jr. via The Houston Chronicle.
Much like temporary venues for electronic music repurpose industrial spaces, contemporary food culture plays a similar role of reclaiming vacant carapaces for new uses, as food halls anchor adaptive reuse projects around the country. Boston’s Quincy Market, an early example, was slated for demolition in the 1970s and saved through its conversion into a marketplace. More recently, Union Market in Washington D.C. set in motion a whole wave of warehouse redevelopment, and New York’s Chelsea Market, a former Nabisco factory, is bustling, among many other precedents. Austin’s downtown market opened last month. PostHTX may likely lose its competitive edge, as last month the Houston Chronicle reported that downtown Houston is due to receive two more food markets soon, bringing the total to four.
PostHTX is ambitious. Its main challenge appears to be securing financing. Because the space is large, it takes vision to divide the space up well, and then to sell this vision to investors. In this mode, developer turns curator, and the task, from a distance, seems to be in selecting, sequencing, and managing the designed tenant environments.[9] Until more information is available, the project should be met with healthy skepticism. It could be an expensive pipe dream, as some have speculated that the food hall trend may have already jumped the shark. In 2016, OMA worked on a foodport for Louisville to be built from an old tobacco factory, only to see it canceled due to lack of funding. In many cases, it’s not an architectural problem, but one of speculative investment visioning.
But this doesn’t have to be the case here. In a kind of generous orthodoxy, PostHTX is poised to be both traditional, as seen within the city’s cyclical history of large-scale redevelopment and novel, as the effort will (hopefully) engage with a historic structure without bulldozing it or freezing it in time. Here, the promise of the space itself is too attractive to ignore, too full of potential to already write off how cool it could be—with the pre-emptive critic’s caveat of if it is done well. The work should also have urban implications, as extensions of its site could improve access between downtown and the First Ward, Near Northside, and Fifth Ward to the north, all neighborhoods with rich histories and ongoing redevelopment. If Houston uses an influx of Harvey recovery money to preserve and expand affordable housing, PostHTX could be a meeting place for Houston’s diverse, but highly segregated, population. The site’s build-out could also have a major effect on housing downtown. There are so many opportunities.
The empty shell awaits its new life. Photo courtesy PostHTX.
2017’s Day for Night established that, in case there was any doubt, vibe matters.[10] Further: If shopping is entertainment, then PostHTX has the capacity to become the twenty-first-century analogue of Price’s Fun Palace. The festival also offered more specific lessons about how to intervene in the post office complex: Design matters. Have an attitude. A light touch that honors the dirt of time goes a long way. Good lighting sets the right mood. Don’t skimp on the details that communicate integrity. Art-forward projects create spontaneity. (Maybe Santa Fe’s Meow Wolf is looking for a Houston location?) Here, at least, think Berlin, not Buc-ees. The success of PostHTX rests with how Lovett Commercial proceeds. Happenings like Day for Night heighten the anticipation of what this space will become, of how this place’s authenticity can be evolved. My excitement arrives with a common plea issued to most adaptive reuse schemes: Please. Don’t mess this up. Make it cool.
Notes
[1] The term “day for night” comes from the film technique of shooting night scenes during daytime hours and underexposing the film to replicate blue, low-light nocturnal conditions, usually done for reasons of cost or shoot difficulty. In Houston, the festival operates under a similar premise, occupying a closed industrial interior without light leaks, creating a new optic landscape in which the installations worked their magic.
[2] The overlap between science fiction and architecture is vast, but it has already made contributions to Houston urbanism. Lars Lerup, in his ekphrastic theorization of Houston, defined the term “stim,” of his stim and dross terminology, in part as “stimulation,” a shortening lifted from the William Gibson novel Mona Lisa Overdrive. See: Lars Lerup, “Stim & Dross: Rethinking the Metropolis,” Assemblage No. 25 (Dec., 1994), 82-101.
[3] Tanya Herdt, The City and the Architecture of Change: The Work and Radical Visions of Cedric Price, (Zurich: Park Books, 2017), 27.
[4] Stanley Matthews, From Agit-Prop to Free Space: The Architecture of Cedric Price, (London: Black Dog Publishing, 2007), 83. See the full “The Isle of Dogs” section, pgs. 82-99, for a full description of their attempt to receive approval for the project on this site.
[5] If you have an extra thirty-seven minutes in your day, Miles Davis’s set at the festival is worth your consideration.
[6] Herdt, 27.
[7] Hans Ulrich Obrich, Lives of the Artists, Lives of the Architects, (London: Allen Lane, 2015), 407-8.
[8] Ibid.
[9] The reframing of the developer’s charge opens the door into another realm of art-led precedents like MassMOCA, Miami’s Design District, London’s Tate Modern, or Dia:Beacon as fantasy “comps.” Imagine Dia:Houston with a food court and an office tower…
[10] Other events held at PostHTX also emphasize this point, including the 2017 AIA Houston Celebrate Architecture Gala, which commissioned a site-specific installation by Shawn Lutz for the occasion.