Case Studies Region: Southwest

At first glance, the wooden wares offered by Houston-based Building Products Plus (BPP) might not seem like the stuff of glossy magazine spreads. Yet, you’ll see them on a golf course in Da Nang, Vietnam, supporting sand-trap embankments and water-retaining walls to the tune of 2,000 linear feet. They withstand the traffic of thousands of […]

The grass is only greener over the septic system if it’s been designed and installed properly, which is why a lot of lawns are lush in and around the community of Canyon Lake in the foothills of Texas Hill Country. Since 1981, many homeowners and small businesses in the area have come to rely upon […]

When Jerry Merriman first got word that Merriman Anderson Architects (MAA) had been awarded a contract to restore the iconic Statler Hotel—a building which his firm had already been working on for close to a decade—he knew his firm would be resurrecting a once-proud downtown Dallas treasure. Actually finding treasure? That was never part of […]

At 1.2 million square feet, Toyota’s new North American headquarters isn’t so much a campus as a construction colossus. Located just outside of Dallas, Texas, the 11-building complex—an amalgam of hyper-modernist architecture and go-green accoutrement—took three years to complete. Its $1 billion price tag is more than the GDP of 21 countries. But while eye-catching […]

When Chris Hartley was hosting a recent get-together at the site of what will be an age-restricted housing community in north Texas, a young woman sounded ready to flash-forward the calendar a couple of decades. “She was saying ‘I can’t wait until we’re old enough to live here,’” says Hartley, who was recently promoted to […]

It’s the cornerstone of Shell Global’s Deep Water strategy, anticipated to be sucking 175,000 barrels of crude daily from beneath the Gulf of Mexico, by decade’s end. Built in South Korea and having arrived in Ingleside, Texas, last year for final construction, the four-column Appomattox platform will be 16 stories high and two football fields […]

On a Friday or Saturday night, the boardwalk buzzes with a town-fair vibe, as families bustle about shops and restaurants and the Caribbean-tinged vistas of the nearby docks. Less than a quarter-mile away, hundreds gather for a concert at an outdoor amphitheater, where the next day’s plans—a trip to the water park, a day of […]

The steel is all but covered up now, except for a few stairway rails and partially exposed beams. But it’s there, sturdy as your body’s bones, buttressing the brick and wood that give San Antonio’s Cornerstone Christian School its distinctly neoclassical form. Opened this past fall, the grades 2-12 school looks both lost in time […]

As company monikers go, “the eagle that carried Zeus’ thunderbolts” is pretty tough to top—particularly so when the title in question is cast in all uppercase letters. However, the firm’s management says the name AQUILA has less to do with Greek mythology, and more to do with eagles’ keen eyes. “We’ve always prided ourselves on […]

The flood waters having long since receded, life was pretty much back to normal on the Texas Gulf Coast by mid-autumn. The Astros had even given the good folks of Houston a morale boost, finally winning it all, and among those cheering them on every night of that memorable World Series was Norbert Mueller. But […]