Because Houston is so fully invested in the mainstream economic characteristics of the late twentieth century -- global markets, multinational conglomerates, massive government subsidies of selected industries, a weakened labor force, "flexible accumulation" -- the growth and development of Houston as a whole mirrors recent patterns of growth in outlying areas of older cities. Houston, specifically, is how most American cities are growing today.

"The post-war collapse of Elm Street and Main Street," writes Albert Pope, "is followed by 'Houston,' the production of an endless and anonymous sprawl of freeways, office parks, subdivisions, and malls. This is the city that unchecked consumer capital really wants to make. . . . the truth of the matter, like it or not, is that by now 'Houston' is everywhere."

How could we possibly consider Houston -- or, for that matter, any location -- to be the hometown of a universal, generic form of development that is distinctly divorced from "place"?

Such a city would have to devote itself to the enterprise of making life possible where it otherwise might not obviously be. In Houston, this idea predates the founding of NASA, the building of the giant air-conditioned expanse of the Astrodome, even the discovery of oil. It was present at the cityıs founding: Houston, a real-estate scam, an artificial, instant capital of an invented republic. A booming metropolis -- a great international port -- just where it would seem most unlikely: in the middle of a sweltering, soggy coastal plain.

This project, Houston Wet, paints a picture of this city as a giant war zone and laboratory. Over a period of more than 150 years, Houstonians have fought steadily escalating battles against nature -- just to be able to live here, in this difficult environment. In the course of battle, we have learned from our mistakes, developing and appropriating successively more complex techniques with which to isolate ourselves not only from the particular hazards of this soggy land, but from the hazards of any environment anywhere.

Ironically, in other locations, parallel battles have yielded building practices that we might term "appropriate," or even "indigenous," because they inscribe the particular qualities of the region into the architecture itself.

In Houston, locally developed, regional technologies have always been eagerly abandoned when more powerful, more generic solutions developed elsewhere could be imported: thus ceiling fans and the siting of buildings for ventilation have given way to air conditioning; the paving of streets with shells has given way to asphalt; and local diners have given way to fast food franchises.

The major strategies Houston has appropriated and made its own -- which I call translation, insulation, maintenance, and flexibility -- are the same strategies employed in similar, generic developments in other cities.

In Houston, generic solutions have been applied so persistently that they have established themselves as a significant aspect of the local culture. In Houston, the attempt to insulate human life from any hazards anywhere has staked a strong claim as an appropriate, if not quite indigenous, way of life.

I've attempted to present these ideas in this project in a manner that to a limited extent mirrors the strategies I identify in Houston -- to take ideas obtained locally about a specific place and seat them in a seemingly universal, certainly placeless medium available almost anywhere: the Internet. Here, I hope, the ideas themselves can gain circulation, be debated and contradicted and attacked and discussed.

I am interested, particularly, in how ideas and narratives connect: how tiny details, if you look at them a certain way, embody the larger battles in which they are situated. The stories I use to illustrate this phenomenon make better myths than evidence. I retell them not to prove, but to suggest . . .