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The National Ranching Heritage Center at Texas Tech University 
“The National Ranching Heritage Center is an excellent venue, a three-dimensional education, for anyone interested in learning more about Texas ranching, the historic built environment, and life of early ranchers, cowboys, and their families. Their mettle, against overwhelming odds was what we hope we would have shown, had we been there to settle Texas.”
Steve Chambers, AIA
 Recent addition to Ranching Center at Texas Tech, in process of renovationIn Owen Wister's best-known book, The Virginian, Horseman of the Plains, the lead-up to the story establishes the hero as "a courageous loner who follows his private code of honor while prevailing over the forces of evil." Wister dedicated this Western masterpiece to his friend Teddy Roosevelt. Roosevelt’s friend, Frederic Remington, illustrated later editions of the novel. This one novel set the tradition of the West permanently. What began as fiction, rewrote history and imprinted us with the cowboy as a solitary romantic figure. We continue to be charmed by Western stories, Western movies and dramas, but don't actually understand the hardships and loneliness of the real cowboys and their ranching families.
Home on the Range, an early “cowboy song,” was originally documented and transcribed by noted musicologist, Alan A. Lomax. In the version of this song discovered by Lomax, the cowhand sings of his youth in Texas where he enjoys working on a family ranch and listening to cowboys sing as they travel the old Chisholm Trail. Lomax’s vividly rich collection of cowboy and folk songs helped to further shape the Western frontier as an extraordinarily authentic and unspoiled place in which the adventurer can develop a deep interconnection with nature and find his unique place in the world.
 1904 ranch home relocated from Del Rio, TX, made from the stalks of the yucca-like plant, the sotol."Oh, give me a home where the buffalo roam
Where the deer and the antelope play
Where seldom is heard a discouraging word
And the skies are not cloudy all day
How often at night where the heavens are bright
With the light of the glittering stars
Have I stood there amazed and asked as I gazed
If their glory exceeds that of ours."
The National Ranching Heritage Center, located in West Texas at Texas Tech University, Lubbock, TX, displays the western built environment in a natural setting that communicates the veracity of the early ranchers' lives. It portrays Texas’ ranching history through the successful relocation, preservation, and rehabilitation of many fine homes, barns, bunkhouses, a railway station, and other examples of the rural built environment of 18th, 19th, and 20th century Texas. The Center opened in 1976 during the Bicentennial celebration in the United States and the Visitor’s Entrance and Building was designed to reflect the character of Texas and Southwest architecture. It is a living museum where the texture and detail of the frugal old ranch homes of yesteryear can actually be experienced. It underscores the early Texas ranchers’ inspiring ability to persevere through the punishing Texas sun, floods, hail, brutal windstorms, mercurial conditions for raising crops and livestock. Visitors are at once reminded by each rustic ranching building that this tough mettle is a major element in the Texas DNA. A book that helps to support the center and beautifully illustrates each relocated structure and its provenance, is called Across Time and Territory, A Walk Through The National Ranching Heritage Center by Marsha Pfluger. It can be obtained through the Center's website.
 1888 Dickens County Matador Ranch Half-Dugout, shelter from weather provided by locating half of home below ground in scooped out earth.
 1901 Dugout kitchen for ranch originally located in Whiteface, TX. Below ground stove provided heat for bedroom, located on upper ground level.
 1908 barn and a chuckwagon from the famous Four Sixes Ranch, originally located in King County.
 1780 "Los Corralitos," a fortified ranch with funnel-shaped gun ports in the walls, originally located on the Rio Grande River near Laredo, Texas, was recreated on the Center's site.
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 Original Mansion of Henry D. GrueneArriving in Gruene, Texas, we are met by a stately sprawling Live Oak and houses in various styles--a Victorian cottage, a frame house, mercantile store, cotton gin, dance hall, and saloon—all from the mid to late 19th century. This small town, now incorporated within the city of New Braunfels, Texas, was a thriving community until the town’s founder, Henry D. Gruene, died in 1920.
Things took a turn for the worse when the original cotton gin burned in 1922. Then, the Great Depression and the invasion of the boll weevil were too much for the family businesses and the settlement went under. It was not until 1974 that the Gruene estate was sold. New purchasers arrived, restored the town’s historic buildings, and had them placed on the National Register of Historic Places that it once again flourished. Gruene is a walking museum of Texas’ built history, “gently resisting change since 1872.”
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 Vintage Furoshiki, Steve Chambers Textile CollectionFuroshiki, traditional Japanese wrapping cloths, were frequently used to transport clothes, gifts, and other goods. Dating back as far as the Nara Period (710 to 794 AD), the name means “bath spread,” when they were used to carry clothes in public baths. Eventually, Furoshiki extended to merchant use to transport wares and for personal use to wrap gifts. In a sustainable practice, gifts are still presented in these handmade fabrics and, when a gift is given in return, it is bundled in the same Furoshiki. A family crest or design identifies the original creator. Furoshiki are decorated with traditional hand-stitching, batik, or by a twist-dye method, called Shibori. They range from hand size to larger than bed-sheets. The Furoshiki pictured demonstrate traditional needlework, Sashiko. This artful, sustainable stitchery technique was developed to strengthen, reinforce, and repair workers’ garments and keep these older fabrics in continuous use. Like the Furoshiki, the sustainable design practices of Stephen B. Chambers Architects, Inc. are an artistic, imaginative, practical, and sensitive approach to contemporary issues.
www.youtube.com/watch Make Your Own Furoshiki (Sustainable Gift Wrapping) with A Square Piece of Cloth!
Photography credit: Stephanie Chambers
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 Steve Chambers, AIA, inside You+Media officesAt the fulcrum of Commerce, Pearl, and Central is a fittingly triangular-shaped building that is currently home to the vibrant business, You+Dallas and its parent company, You+Media. Most Dallas residents know 2130 Commerce as the former address of KLIF radio, the Mighty 1190. Years later it housed the Dallas Observer, and more recently the ad agency PowerPact.
 Northeast view of 2130 Commerce The Magnolia Petroleum Co. constructed several memorable pieces of architecture; 2130 Commerce is the smaller of two in downtown Dallas. Magnolia branded its identity with many similar three to five-story configurations in what appears to me to be Spanish Eclectic (the AIA book, Guide to Dallas Architecture, describes this building as “commercial Gothic with Prairie-esque flourishes”) styles. Many examples can still be found across the U.S. Southwest. These commercial ‘blocks’ of brick veneer often incorporated flat roofs, decorative cornices, terra cotta tiles and arched openings for drive-through bays within the building. The standardized corporate designs were multi-story versions that usually included office space on the upper floors for Magnolia employees. Magnolia preferred corner locations, allowing for the drive-through bays to access two streets.
 Southeast view of 2130 Commerce, showing expansive Spanish-style archesDeveloper Reggie Graham, now owns 2130 Commerce and renovated it, along with nine other distinctively rehabilitated commercial spaces in the area. Reggie’s signature aesthetic (Masters in Architecture, Harvard) is deeply appreciative of the ‘bones’ of these historical structures, which used to house what was known as ‘Automobile Row’ in downtown Dallas. In the 1920s and 30s, automobile dealers, repair shops, and gas stations dotted the landscape of the southeastern edge of the city. Mr. Graham’s renovations retain the outer character of the original architecture and reveal the period craftsmanship of the interior construction. With the juxtaposition of modern materials, details, and views to these vintage structures, new spatial relationships are formed and create an entirely contemporary ambiance without sanitizing history. These sensitive treatments show us Dallas’ own ‘Tale of Two Cities:’ the one with an energetic mercantile past; the other a breathtakingly artistic and creative future.
It’s no mystery that the You+Media owners chose this striking piece of geometry for their new home. During Plato’s time, platonic solids like this truncated triangular building were thought to act as a template from which all life springs. Some of the many terms historically associated with the triangle are: creativity, harmony, manifestation, illumination, integration, and culmination. In Platonic Solid Theory, the three-dimensional triangle also represents the dimensions of space, time, and form. The fulcrum is believed to be the agent through which the vital powers of an enterprise converge and reveal themselves.
 Front view, 2130 Commerce looking westYou+Media is a convergence media company, which takes the best parts of traditional media like radio, television, newspapers and magazines then combines them with online and mobile technology to create more powerful media experiences. It is a content company that tells day-to-day stories of life in cities, neighborhoods, and homes. These narratives are about the people, institutions, and culture that define individual cities. You+Media does this by sharing content created by their clients, combined with the resources of their company to create new content, develop and produce events, and share the advertising revenue streams generated by combined projects. Interior 3-story atrium of 2130 Commerce
We welcome this new voice in the Dallas terrain, a business that chronicles who we were, what we are, and where we are going. And it’s singing from the soul of an architectural grande dame!
After viewing these photos, write and let me know what architectural style you think that 2130 Commerce is!
 Terra cotta decorative tile and cornices Decorative magnolia flower detail Interior bridge between 2120 Commerce and 2130 Commerce Visitor seating area at You+Media
 Interior stair to outdoor roof deck Reggie Graham: owner, developer, designer for 2130 Commerce and many commercial buildings at the southeast edge of downtown Dallas...and a spellbinding raconteur!
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 Sketch by Steve Chambers, AIAChurch of Santa Maria Assunta, Monteriggioni, Siena, Tuscany Italy
In Dante’s “Divine Comedy,” the poet describes the Sienese fortress of Monteriggioni as a “crown of towers” and compares the structure to “horrible giants.” Today Monteriggioni, with its fourteen medieval guard-towers and position atop a hillock, allows us to be in one of the most breathtaking landscapes in all of Tuscany. The village surprises and attracts the traveler, who suddenly discovers, at the top of a green balcony, this crown of gray towers that, surrounded by fields, woods, olive groves, and vineyards, form a fairytale setting. On the day we visited the 13th century walled village, a wedding inclusive of medieval attire, was taking place in the main piazza at this Romanesque church, Santa Maria Assunta. This inhabited 800-year old town in the Chianti region provides us with a compelling illustration of how to use and protect our historic built environment. Pictured at left below, is an aerial view of the city of Monteriggioni in the hills of Tuscany.
 MonteriggioniMonteriggioni
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