THROUGH MUCH TRIAL AND MUCH ERROR, this city has assembled a series of distinct strategies for living in less-than-welcoming environments. Implementing and refining these strategies, to mitigate the inevitable and neverending conflicts between manmade implants and the rough natural environment they're seated in, has become the engine of Houston's economy.

Many of these experiments are well integrated into the course of everyday life -- perhaps most obviously if your job happens to be in building maintenance. In two institutions, however, Houston's experimental project has gained mythic proportions.

The Johnson Space Center and the Astrodome are more than simply colossal caricatures of Houstonians' grand schemes to seat imported ideas where they don't belong. They help prove the worthwhileness of the enterprise: that techniques developed in Houston's regional battle -- with its own very particular environment -- can yield strategies applicable to the development of settlements anywhere.

Both sites generalize Houston itself. They are monuments to the Idea of Houston: where settling the neighborhood and developing techniques to settle the universe are both part of the same effort.