Art & Architecture Walking Tours

If you're looking for something low cost, informative and active to do to learn more about different areas of Houston, the AIA (American Institute of Architects) leads guided tours from September to May.

Some of the tours are walking, some are actually biking tours. They are led by knowledgable, passionate individuals, and it gives you the opportunity to play tourist in your own town, or if you're an actual tourist, to learn more about the rich often under appreciated history of Houston.

For more information on the these walking tours and reserving space, visit the ArCH Walking Tours website.

The Walking Tour that Started It All

Just to be clear, I’m in storytelling mode now, the story spans 7 years now, and wherever you think it’s going, I would bet money that guess is wrong. To quote one of my favorite sayings of the good Doctor, things are about to get all “wibbly-wobbly-timey-wimey.”

If you would have told me almost four years ago in May of 2014 when I went on a walking tour downtown, that I would be where I am today, and that the blog that I wanted to write about culture and the cool stuff I did in Houston in the naive hopes of scoring good seats to Rockets games (Go Rockets, by the way) and getting media badges to all the cool concerts and events (R.I.P. FPSF, but Long Live Day For Night!), would take me four years to concentrate on, I wouldn't have believed you.

If you told me that I would have the goals I have today and the plans I have for the future, I might have laughed. Slowly but surely, the new story will begin to emerge, but this is nothing like a Serial podcast. No one dies, at least I hope they don’t, and there’s no big mystery to solve. Simply a story that needs unravelling in order to be tied back up again neatly so that it can be put away.

I miss downtown. I worked there for five years, and I never took it for granted. I would walk everywhere. The bars, the restaurants, and Discovery Green. I loved the rainbow lights along Main and the skyscrapers with their checkerboards of office lights at dusk. The city sounds of the metro and the start and stop of traffic on the perfectly square grid. Being able to walk to the farmers market on Wednesdays or blanket bingo some days. The strange characters that you run into and that run into you, and for the purposes of this post the under-appreciated hidden art and architecture scattered between buildings. Ahhhh. I really do miss it.

The American Institute of Architecture (AIA) Houston chapter does these different walking tours around town, and as I was working downtown and also wanted to know all that I could about Houston at the time, I thought that the walking tour would be an interesting activity and it was. In fact, I highly recommend the AIA walking tours. I'm adding that to my list of resolutions of things I need to do more often. This year I did a walking tour of Glenwood cemetery right around Halloween time. I'll probably get to that later.

Anyway, as I was about to embark on this tour, I told my friend that I wanted to start a blog about my life in Houston because I was so cool, and I was doing all the trendy things, and I wanted to be a part of the see and be seen crowd, and I thought maybe, just maybe, if I could write good enough accounts of what I’d done, where I’d been, and what I’d eaten, that I’d start getting invitations to restaurants and the music and cultural events that I was pouring money into at the time and going to anyway.

They say (Harvard researchers) that money doesn’t buy you happiness when it's applied to things, that you also derive more happiness from experiences. I wanted all the experiences. I was steady to determined to carpe the fuck out of every diem. And not to toot my own horn, but I was pretty damn good at it. Serendipitously being introduced to well-connected and successful people, and then additionally running into some by happenstance and my own weird personality. The last 7 (*gulp, I can’t believe I’ve been in Houston for almost a decade now) years have been amazing, but now it’s time to get to work.

After almost four years I honestly can’t tell you what all the installations are about any longer, except for a few. Impressively, we have a fountain/sculpture monument in Market Square to remember the Houstonians who were lost to the tragic events of 9/11. It’s quite beautiful and layered with symbolism in the forms of rocks, water, and bonsai. Also, the big red metal sculpture is actually a dead mouse on its side. Not be be confused with Deadmau5.

Other than that the stories escape me, and I couldn’t tell you who most of them are by, except for the Joan Miro piece because it used to be out of my window view when I was working from the Houston Club building before it was imploded, and I love Spain, and I’d been exposed to Miro’s work before. There are disappearing gnomes in the courtyard at One Allen Square. There’s a ballerina statue outside of Jone’s Hall if I’m remembering correctly, and the metal columns that line the bridge with the air bubble button are actually cut outs of children’s artwork. The heads of the sands of time blowing away in the wind remind me of a Coldplay album cover, and that’s about it. For the rest, too much time has passed and the memories are blurry and the details out of focus, but luckily for you we have the Internet, and this woman has laboriously detailed all of the stops for your learning pleasure.

And this Houston History Magazine article was also conveniently published in March of 2014 right before I went on this walking tour, so it covers some of the other things I saw, not all, but it doesn’t cover the cool stuff that went up before the Super Bowl last year, but this article from the Houston Arts Blog did get everything.

While this is the walking tour where I distinctly remember wanting to start this blog, which it took me a year to publish one post, and not even a really good one, as I reflect back, this actually isn’t the walking tour that started it all. For that story we have to go back even further, two year earlier to spring of 2012. That’s when I fell in love with Houston and that’s the real walking tour (not an actual walking tour) that started off this crazy adventure. Well maybe it was getting hired at Zap-lok? Now I’m going to have to go back and examine both.