Houston, Untitled
September 25–December 5, 2026
Houston Archive Project
Rice School of Architecture
Houston, Untitled presents Rory Gardiner’s contribution to the Houston Archive Project, a body of photographs that examines two of the city’s defining landmarks: Rice Stadium and the Astrodome. Known for their remarkable structural and material qualities, these monuments are also important sites of collective memory, carrying the traces of significant sporting performances, political events and cultural moments that have shaped Houston and the nation. Today, as their futures remain uncertain, they also stand at the centre of broader questions about preservation, heritage and the changing identity of the city.
Gardiner’s photographs capture these landmarks as spaces devoid of people yet full of atmosphere — from fog to diffused sunlight moving through Houston’s thick, humid air. While no human figure appears directly, the signs of the collective body are everywhere: rows of stadium seats, stairs and ramps, shadows cast across asphalt, lines marked on playing fields, commentator boxes, construction trailers and materials staged by workers who are just out of view. These varied forms of human presence speak to the resilience of these monuments, adapting to changing functions while retaining the iconic appearance that is so emblematic of Houston’s skyline.
Gardiner’s lens never sees these buildings as complete, self-fulfilling icons. Instead, they are encountered in fleeting fragments, beautifully cropped, or seen from a distance, piercing above a fence, truck or tree canopy — just as ordinary Houstonians see them every day. His focus gently shifts to the adjacent urban spaces from which these monuments emerge, revealing a city continually rebuilt and weathered, where even empty streets and parking lots remain an expression of implied collectivity.
Quiet though they may be, the muffled roar of fans or construction equipment seems to hover in these images, reminding us that Houston’s intermittent urbanity lives on in bursts of gathering and in our collective memory long after the crowds have disappeared.
Houston Archive Project
An ongoing initiative of the Rice School of Architecture, the Houston Archive Project aims to generate and collect a visual repository of Houston imagery, focusing on the urban and environmental transformation of what is today one of the largest — and fastest-growing — metropolitan areas in the United States.
Published in our annual publication Sphere, this evolving set of viewpoints asks: What urban conditions call for our attention today? Which sites, temporal events and shifting climates demand to be a part of Houston’s public record?
Embracing these questions, the Houston Archive Project serves as a form of preservation of the city’s ever-changing environment and an augur of larger, planetary futures that are yet to come.
Exhibitions at Rice
As the curatorial programme of the Rice School of Architecture, Exhibitions at Rice uses the lens of design research to look at the world differently. Mobilising a full spectrum of architectural representation — including drawing, imaging, making and prototyping — this programme weaves together scholarly inquiry, visual experimentation and public engagement.
Across all scales, from objects to buildings, cities and the planet, Exhibitions at Rice engages the discipline of architecture as a cultural practice with a civic mandate, creating new discourses for both local and global audiences.
Rory Gardiner Artist Statement, 2026
From ground level, Houston resists legible form. The rigidity of the grid and its painted rules denote something I can’t quite follow. Flatness dominates as scale repeats itself.
The original commission for this exhibition was for two middle-aged stadiums. Sites of ritual with only signs of ritual. At a plain distance, the city appears to resolve into a single interior. The stadiums read as empty rooms and the streets as corridors of similar proportion.
The twenty-one photographs in this exhibition look at the found condition of Houston in February 2026. They are not grouped by typology, programme or site. Each work is titled by its coordinates on Street View. Revisited from my studio, each site returns an alternate version of events, recalibrating my read.
Artist: Rory Gardiner
Graphic Design: Experimental Jetset
Exhibition Design: clovisbaronian
Exhibition Manager: Bryan Miller
Editor, Sphere: Nathan Friedman
