Rothko Chapel

The Rothko Chapel (1971) is named for the American Abstract Expressionist painter Mark Rothko, who produced the suite of 14 large color field paintings the chapel was built to contain. As the only permanent installation carried out to Rothko's exacting specifications, in which the setting, as well as the paintings, were an integral part of the artist's vision, the Rothko Chapel is the primary site for understanding and appreciating Rothko's convictions, intentions, and working methods. The chapel was designed under the direction of Rothko, initially by the architect Philip Johnson (from 1964 to 1967) and, following Johnson's resignation from the commission, by the architects Howard Barnstone & Eugene Aubry (from 1967 to 1971). It was built in 1970 under Eugene Aubry's supervision; Philip Johnson served as a design consultant for the site plan and the design of the entrance portal, paved court, and reflecting pool. The Rothko Chapel is of exceptional national importance because it embodies a complex of tangible and intangible phenomena associated with certain trends in cultural modernism in the United States during the post-World War II period (1945-1970). It possesses a high degree of integrity of location, design, setting, materials, workmanship, feeling, and association, with the chapel, Newman sculpture, and grounds contributing to the significance of the property. Contextually, Rothko Chapel relates to the influence of 20th-century Modernism in the United States, and meets Criterion C at the national level of significance in the area of Art, as the final work of American Abstract Expressionist Mark Rothko, and in the area of Architecture, as a project shaped by Rothko in collaboration with two sets of highly-regarded architects, Philip Johnson of New York and Howard Barnstone & Eugene Aubry of Houston. It also meets Criterion B, at the local level of significance, in the area of Social History for its association with Dominique and John de Menil, the patrons who conceived the project and built and operated the chapel, as the spatial embodiment of their commitment to modernism, art, religious exchange, and social justice. The property also meets Criteria Consideration G as a building of exceptional importance which has gained significance within the past 50 years. The Rothko Chapel is not required to meet Criteria Consideration A (religious properties), because the building is significant as the center of a cultural institution rather than a religious organization.

The postwar 20th century period (1945-1970) was marked by the ascendancy of high modernism. In terms of religious thought, it was marked by the impulse toward ecumenical reconciliation and understanding. In terms of social history, this period in American history is especially associated with the Civil Rights and anti-war movements. The Rothko Chapel is of exceptional national significance because it represents the cultural phenomenon of modernism, which significantly affected broad patterns of mid-20th-century American history in the areas of Art and Architecture.' The Rothko Chapel's exceptional national significance can be evaluated in the context of the modernist "art chapel," a mid-20th-century phenomenon especially associated with the French Dominican priest, Father Marie-Alain Couturier, who was a mentor to Dominique and John de Menil. It can also be evaluated in the context of the career of the artist Mark Rothko, and the architects Philip Johnson, Howard Barnstone, and Eugene Aubry because it represents the work of artistic masters, possesses high artistic values, and embodies distinctive characteristics of a type and period. What sets the Rothko Chapel apart from other exceptionally significant examples of spaces shaped under the guidance of modern artists and modernist patrons is that during the course of its making, the complex acquired associations with two historical trends that significantly contributed to the broad patterns of mid-20th-century history: religious ecumenism and the peace and- justice movement. Therefore, the Rothko Chapel embodies a set of tangible and intangible historical associations that reveal the broad - but not always consistent - ambitions of the proponents of 20th-century modernist culture to liberate human culture from the past yet reconcile with history, and to heal the historical wounds of injustice and intolerance.

Brief Chronological History of the Property

The Rothko Chapel was built in Houston, Texas, a city popularly known for its new wealth, uninhibited entrepreneurism, rejection of city planning, and bravado, rather than for its cultural refinement. During the decade of the 1960s, Houston became home to the Manned Spacecraft Center of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (Apollo Mission Control Center, NHL), the world's first air-conditioned football and baseball stadium (the Astrodome, 1965), and a host of tall downtown office buildings whose striking architectural modernity appeared to symbolize the city's energy and enthusiasm for the new. Beneath the surface of this image of "boom," Houston had high crime and murder rates, low levels of public service, and a tradition of racial inequality stemming from its identity as a Southern city (McComb: 1969, 167-257). In this context, the Rothko Chapel, an introverted space associated with the dark, somber coloration of Mark Rothko's paintings, stands out as anomalous. However, it embodies an attempted reconciliation of Houston's extreme attributes in an expression of the extraordinary catholic, ecumenical vision of the collectors Dominique and John de Menil. The de Menils' vision, judgment, and wealth (which was dependent on the primary source of Houston's economy during the 20th century, oil) led them to commission the New York painter Mark Rothko to realize his vision of shaping a sacred space with his art in 1964. It led them to involve the New York architect Philip Johnson as the initial architect of the chapel, and following Johnson's withdrawal in 1967, the Houston architects Barnstone & Aubry. It also led them to acquire Broken Obelisk, a monumental steel piece by the New York artist Barnett Newman in 1969, and install it adjacent to the chapel as a memorial to the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. in 1970. The Rothko Chapel was not built to function simply as an art museum. Instead, since its dedication it has served as a center of ecumenical exchange, religious dialogue, and as a place to advocate justice and human rights for communities in struggle throughout the world. The wealth, judgment, and demanding standards of Mr. and Mrs. de Menil led them to seek out world figures in religion, philosophy, and human rights endeavors to participate in the chapel's programs.

The Rothko Chapel was conceived, built, and equipped between 1964 and 1971. On 17 April 1964, Dominique de Menil asked Mark Rothko to produce a suite of paintings to be installed in a Roman Catholic collegiate chapel that Philip Johnson would design as a component of his master plan for the University of St. Thomas in Houston. During the fall and winter of 1964, Rothko worked with Johnson to produce a schematic design for the chapel, building a full-scale mock-up of a portion of the interior in his New York studio. There, between December 1964 and April 1967, Rothko produced a series of large format, color field paintings, designating 14 for installation in the chapel. Because of an inability to reach an agreement with Rothko on the design of a skylight to illuminate the chapel, Johnson withdrew from the project in November 1967. The Houston architects Howard Barnstone and Eugene Aubry assumed responsibility for completing the design, producing one to Rothko's satisfaction in 1968 that retained essential elements of Johnson's design. In 1968, the University of St. Thomas withdrew from the project. Mr. and Mrs. de Menil then entered into an arrangement with the Institute for Religion and Human Development, a non-profit pastoral training center based at the Texas Medical Center in Houston, and the chapel acquired its historical identity as a place of ecumenical exchange rather than a Catholic chapel. A new site, near but no longer on the university campus, was selected by Mr. and Mrs. de Menil in 1969. Eugene Aubry consulted with Philip Johnson in siting the chapel at its new location and in designing the entrance portal. Aubry received Rothko's approval of the design two days before Rothko's suicide in February 1970. The chapel was built between May and October 1970 and Rothko's paintings were installed in February 1971. Mr. and Mrs. de Menil bought Barnett Newman's monumental steel sculpture, Broken Obelisk, in November 1969 to dedicate to the memory of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. With Newman's concurrence, they installed it in a reflecting basin designed by Aubry in front of the Rothko Chapel in 1970.

The complex was dedicated on 27-28 February 1971. The interior of the chapel was altered in 1978 when a light-diffusing baffle designed by Eugene Aubry was mounted underneath the skylight to direct natural light onto the walls and paintings. Since 1973, the Rothko Chapel has been the site of eight colloquiums organized by the Rothko Chapel Foundation in which international participants addressed issues of human rights, economic and political development, and religious thought and practices. Since 1981, the chapel has been the setting for the Rothko Chapel Awards for Commitment to Truth and Freedom and the Oscar Romero Awards for human rights, both of which are international in scope. In 1986, it was the setting for the Carter-Menil Human Rights Prize, awarded by former President Jimmy Carter and Mrs. de Menil. The Rothko Chapel is open every day of the year. It is the site of frequent events pertaining to religious exchange, musical performances, human rights, peace, and justice issues, and such private ceremonies as weddings and memorials. In her history of the chapel, Susan J. Barnes summarized its religious and social significance: "The Rothko Chapel...became the world's first broadly ecumenical center, a holy place open to all religions and belonging to none. It became a center for international cultural, religious, and philosophical exchanges, for colloquia and performances. And it became a place of private prayer for individuals of all faiths" (Barnes 1989: 108).

Thematic Context: Modernism

The primary context for evaluating the exceptional national significance of the Rothko Chapel is that of 20th-century modernism in American history. The Rothko Chapel represents a rare, acutely self-conscious attempt to embody at extraordinarily high levels of achievement and consistency certain tenets of modernism as understood in the United States during the postwar period in the areas of art, architecture, religion, and social life. As the anthropologist Pamela Smart deduced in her ethnographic study of Dominique de Menil and her collecting enterprise, the Rothko Chapel can be interpreted as "a materialization of Dominique de Menil's distinctively modernist French Catholic critique of modernity...[I]n this manner, the contradictions of modernity become manifest." (Smart 1998: 209). The art historian Sheldon Nodelman's searching analysis of Rothko's chapel paintings demonstrates that these too can be understood as a critique of modernism, as can Newman's Broken Obelisk, and the chapel's design by Philip Johnson. In its contradictions, the Rothko Chapel represents a particular tension that animated postwar modernist expression: the problematic relationship between modernism and history.

Modernism was a project of the European Enlightenment of the 18th century. It fundamentally challenged received traditions and institutions in politics, religion, economy, science, and art on the basis of rationalist critiques of customary practice and established authority.

Modernism in art and architecture took form in Europe and the United States at the end of the 19th century as a rejection of the authority of academies of art and their power to prescribe normative historical models and standards. In painting and sculpture, there was a progressive movement from the rejection of classical conventions for depicting the human figure in space to the rejection of perspective, figuration, and representation. The Abstract Expressionist movement in postwar American art represented an extreme case of modernist anti-pictorialism. Its most notable exponents (who included Mark Rothko and Barnett Newman) ultimately rejected even the "abstraction" of nature. Their paintings had no subjects. Instead, they sought to evoke unmediated emotional responses from viewers through the application of paint. The liberation of painting from subject matter was treated by mid-20th-century American critics as an epic achievement that involved the passing of vanguard artistic leadership from Paris to New York.

Modernism in architecture took form in Europe and the United States in the late 19th century. As in the fields of painting and sculpture, modernism in architecture rejected the academy and its dependence on historical models as sources of authority. During the 1920s, the Modern Movement in architecture took form in Germany, France, and other European nations around a consensus on the primacy of construction, functional planning, and spatial liberation in the design of buildings. Among the leading figures of the Modern Movement was the German architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. Like other European modern architects and artists, Mies van der Rohe was forced to leave Germany due to the rise of totalitarianism. In 1937, he immigrated to the U.S. and settled in Chicago. Mies's transition to American practice was assisted by an admirer, Philip Johnson, director of design at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. In 1940, Johnson returned to his alma mater, Harvard University, to study architecture. After World War II, he devoted himself to championing the austere and rigorous modern style of Mies van der Rohe by designing buildings that paid homage to Mies's architecture as well as organizing an exhibition at the MOMA on Mies and writing its catalog. In 1949, Johnson was commissioned by a pair of French émigrés, Dominique and John de Menil, to design a house for them in Houston, where the Menils had settled in 1941 when they fled Europe. The Menil House (1950), one of Johnson's earliest works, had a tremendous impact on the development of modern architecture in Houston in the 1950s. In 1956, Mr. and Mrs. de Menil prevailed upon the priests of the Congregation of St. Basil, who had founded a small liberal arts college, the University of St. Thomas, in Houston in 1946, to commission Johnson to design a master plan for the development of the campus.

Johnson's first three buildings for the university were built in 1958-59. A young Houston architect, Howard Barnstone, who had begun to carry out commissions for John de Menil in the mid-1950s, served as Johnson's associate architect for the construction of the three university buildings.

Modernism in 20th-century Western religion had to address a plurality of religious traditions, many historically hostile to each other, the impact of scientific discoveries that challenged traditional beliefs, and pervasive skepticism about the claims of religion, especially among philosophers and scientists. The Ecumenical Movement and the Sacred Art movement were efforts of early 20th-century European origin that sought to promote understanding and reconciliation between different religious traditions and to reconcile aspects of modern culture, such as art and architecture, with settings for worship. Dominique de Menil was strongly attracted to the Ecumenical Movement when it was first introduced by the Roman Catholic priest Father Yves Congar in France in 1936. During the 1940s, Dominique and John de Menil became acquainted with the French Dominican priest, Father Marie-Alain Couturier, also an exile in the U.S. Father Couturier was one of the seminal influences on Mr. and Mrs. de Menil. Upon returning to France after World War II, Father Couturier gained international recognition for his involvement with a series of French Catholic church and chapel projects shaped by artists and architects who were masters of the Modern Movement.

Modernism, with its appeal to liberation from prejudice and oppression, had a dramatic effect on American social history during the middle decades of the 20th century. During the New Deal era of the 1930s, the federal government became actively involved in the administration of social welfare programs, promoting educational, employment, health, and housing opportunities for the poor and elderly. As a result of mass mobilization during World War II, veterans of military service of African-American, Mexican-American, and Asian origin were no longer inclined to endure discriminatory treatment. Beginning in 1955, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., organized a boycott of public transportation by African-Americans in Montgomery, Alabama, to insist on an end to racially segregated seating on buses, a campaign that rapidly escalated to a mass movement to end the entire legal system of racial discrimination that prevailed in the Southern U.S., including Texas. As early as 1944, African-American Houstonians secured a U.S. Supreme Court decision that declared the practice of excluding African-Americans from primary elections unconstitutional. In 1950, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in a case brought by a Houston plaintiff that African-American students had to be admitted to graduate programs at the University of Texas, beginning the chain of legal rulings that culminated in 1954 when the Supreme Court declared the racial segregation of public schools unconstitutional. In 1957, when they played host to the national conference of the American Federation of Arts in Houston, Dominique and John de Menil insisted that the conference hotel, the Shamrock, not prevent African-American conference participants from using its conference facilities. Because of their European origin, Dominique and John de Menil stood outside the American political consensus based on racial segregation. They were not the only members of Houston's postwar elite to oppose segregationist practices but they were more openly critical of such practices and more openly supportive of challenges to them than native-born elites.

The Rothko Chapel derives exceptional national significance from its conception as a place where the emancipatory potential of modernism could be exercised in a systematic, integrated way. It was this commitment to a holistic vision of modernist culture, encompassing art, architecture, politics, and religion, that distinguished Dominique and John de Menil from other historically significant mid-20th-century American modern art collectors and patrons and which distinguished the Rothko Chapel from other more programmatically specific Menil enterprises, such as the Art Department at the University of St. Thomas, the Institute for the Arts at Rice University, the Black Arts Center, the Image of the Black in Western Art Research Project, the Menil Collection art museum, and the Byzantine Fresco Chapel.

The Rothko Chapel derives exceptional national significance from the distinctive approach to modernism it embodies. The mainstream of 20th-century modernism was rooted in dialectical-materialist philosophy, which, though it had a spiritual dimension, was agnostic and anticlerical. With their embrace of religion, Dominique and John de Menil stood apart from this mainstream. Mr. and Mrs. de Menil were formed by the tradition of European humanism. In the 19th and 20th centuries, this tradition had been democratized without adopting the populist understanding of anti-elitism that prevailed in the U.S. Mr. and Mrs. de Menil often encountered conflict with cultural and educational institutions they sought to support in the 1950s and '60s because of their rigorous commitment to excellence. Their liberal tastes and lack of anxiety about living in the presence of history distinguished them from the anti-historicist understanding of modernism that prevailed in the U.S. in the 1940s. Their commitment to modernist culture was intense, critical, and reflective. They sought out connections to and continuity with history, rather than claiming an exceptionalist stance. For them, modernism was spiritual searching, more profoundly involved in posing questions than in prescribing solutions. The modernist vision that impelled Dominique and John de Menil was unusual in its mid-20th-century American context for its combination of a commitment to social justice, demanding standards, openness to history and religion, and lack of formulization. The historian Jackson Lears has examined the process by which modernism, despite its rhetoric of challenging established authority, was assimilated into the cultural mainstream of the U.S. in the 1950s by divorcing "questions of power" from "matters of taste" (Lears 1989:38-57). Dominique and John de Menil sought to maintain the link between power and taste through their modernist patronage. The Rothko Chapel represents the fullest spatial expression of their personal modernist ethic.

The Rothko Chapel constitutes a primary site for understanding and appreciating the patterns associated with 20th-century American modern art and serves as the embodiment of Dominique and John de Menil's commitment to modernism, art, religious ecumenism, and social justice. The Rothko Chapel is exceptionally significant at the national level in the area of Art because Mark Rothko's paintings constitute a culmination of one of the most important trends in 20th-century American art: the color field movement in Abstract Expressionism.

The Art Chapel as a Building Type

The 20th-century phenomenon of the art chapel is significant in the areas of art and religion. It is associated primarily with the French Roman Catholic priest, Father Marie-Alain Couturier, O.P. (1897-1954). In 1937, Father Couturier became the co-publisher of a magazine, L'Art Sacré, which promoted the renewal of French Catholic liturgical and devotional art. In exile in New York during World War II, Father Couturier came into contact with expatriate French modern artists and was persuaded of the necessity of involving the finest artists, irrespective of their religious beliefs, in the production of religious art. After returning to France in 1945, Father Couturier was instrumental in involving outstanding modern artists in a series of church-building projects: the Church of Notre-Dame-de-Tout Grâce, Assy, with paintings by Fernand Léger and sculpture by Jacques Lipchitz (1950), the Dominican Chapel of the Rosary, Venice, containing murals by Henri Matisse (1951), the Church of Sacré-Coeur, Audincourt, with stained glass by Léger (1951), and two buildings completed after Father Couturier's death, the Dominican pilgrimage Church of Notre-Dame-du-Haut at Ronchamp designed by the architect Le Corbusier (1955), and Le Corbusier's Dominican Monastery of Sainte-Marie-de- la-Tourette (1959). Dominique and John de Menil met Father Couturier in New York in 1943. Mrs. de Menil identified him as their first artistic mentor. In 1975 Mrs. de Menil established the Archives Couturier in Paris as a repository for his papers. She also established the Couturier Collection at the Yale Institute of Sacred Music, Worship, and the Arts at Yale University, and published a collection of Father Couturier's essays, Sacred Art (1989).

Mr. and Mrs. de Menil were intermediaries for what seems to have been the first art chapel in the U.S., the Roofless Church in New Harmony, Indiana (1960), built by the Houston art collector, ecumenist, and historic preservationist Jane Blaffer Owen, a friend of Dominique and John de Menil's. Jacques Lipchitz was the artist involved in the Roofless Church, a non-denominational ecumenical temenos designed by Philip Johnson, whom Mrs. Owen had met when Johnson planned the University of St. Thomas campus. The Roofless Church's lack of religious affiliation, its connection to a program of ecumenical exchange, and the extent to which its identity as a spiritual place was invested in its architecture and art, rather than cultic practices, make it more like what the Rothko Chapel would become once its affiliation with the University of St. Thomas ceased than Father Couturier's monastic chapels and parish churches.

The art chapel, by virtue of the emphasis placed on the art it contains, came to be distinguished in its mid-20th-century U.S. context from the installation of works by modern artists in houses of worship designed by modern architects (endorsed by Father Couturier and current in the 1950s), of which Congregation Emanu-El Temple in Dallas (1956, Howard R. Meyer and Max M. Sandfield, architects; William W. Wurster, consulting architect; Gyorgy Kepes and Anni Albers, artists) is an outstanding example. During the interwar era, there had been instances of architect-artist collaborations in the design and outfitting of houses of worship in Texas, such as the Little Chapel in the Woods at Texas Women's University in Denton, Texas (1939, O'Neil Ford & A. B. Swank, Jr., architects; Lynn Ford, Sammy Tate, and Thetis Lemmon, artists) and Sacred Heart Catholic Church, Corpus Christi, Texas (1941, Richard S. Colley, architect; Antonio García, artist). Glen Heim, an art student at the University of St. Thomas, worked with Dominique de Menil and Howard Barnstone to convert the interior of a small, low-ceilinged, concrete-block building into a temporary chapel for the university (1965, dismantled 1997). This represented an artist-designed worship space but contained only one work of art, a medieval French figure of the Virgin and Child lent by Mr. and Mrs. de Menil.

The Rothko Chapel is distinguished from these earlier instances (as is the Roofless Church) by virtue of the primacy accorded Rothko's art as a medium of religious experience, and the instrumental role of the artist in shaping the chapel. The Rothko Chapel can be considered a model for such subsequent examples as the Emmanuel Chapel at Corpus Christi Cathedral, Corpus Christi, Texas (1986, Michael Tracy, artist), and the Byzantine Fresco Chapel near the Rothko Chapel in Houston (1997), built by Dominique de Menil to contain and display two 13th-century Byzantine Cypriot frescoes and dedicated as an Orthodox church. The Rothko Chapel is a primary site for understanding and appreciating the modernist phenomenon of the art chapel, its transmission to and redefinition in the U.S., and its subsequent diffusion.

Mark Rothko (1903-1970)

Mark Rothko is nationally significant in the history of 20th-century American art. The Rothko Chapel is a primary site for understanding and appreciating Rothko's exceptional significance as an artist because it is a setting shaped according to his direction. Rothko was born in Latvia; he immigrated with his family to Portland, Oregon in 1913. Rothko attended, but did not graduate from, Yale University in the early 1920s, then embarked on a career as an artist. During the course of his career, his work went through two periods of transition: first around 1940 in response to the influence of Surrealism and his study of Jung, and again at the end of the 1940s when he commenced working with blocks of color-painted on a contrasting color field. The work of the last period, c. 1949-1970, earned Rothko international recognition and acclaim because of the extraordinary intensity of his color field painting (Clearwater: 1996, 219-223).

Rothko's mature work, of which the Rothko Chapel paintings represent a culmination, is an art of formal essences, revelation, and the absolute, states of being that Rothko insisted were integral to his art. The art historian David Anfam describes this as a "total concentration on color...simultaneously palpable and metaphysical insofar as its total effect transcends analysis.....Encompassing fields of color tended to minimize internal pictorial relations and so invite the onlooker's participation, especially when enlarged to...mural scale." Rothko "essentially lifted the symbolic extremes and states of consciousness depicted in [his] earlier works onto an abstract plane" (Anfam 1996: 86).

The art historian Bonnie Clearwater quotes Rothko on his intentions: "The progression of a painter's work...will be toward clarity; toward the elimination of all obstacles between the painter and the idea, and between the idea and the observer...I'm interested only in expressing basic human emotions--tragedy, ecstasy, doom...and if you...are moved only by [the paintings'] color relationships, then you miss the point." (Clearwater 1996: 221).
During the 1950s Rothko had exhibitions at the Art Institute of Chicago (1954), the Phillips Collection (1960), and the Museum of Modern Art (1961). His second one-person exhibition was organized by Jermayne MacAgy at the Contemporary Arts Museum in Houston (1957).

Rothko wanted his paintings displayed together to make a cumulative impact on viewers. As early as 1962 he expressed the hope that his paintings could be installed in a chapel (Barnes 1989: 44). In 1959 and again in 1962 Rothko produced a series of paintings for specific spaces; the first set of paintings was never installed and the second set was not appropriately cared for and suffered damage. The art curator Douglas MacAgy, the former husband of Jermayne MacAgy, suggested to Dominique and John de Menil in 1960 that they acquire the first set of paintings and install them in a chapel to be built at the University of St. Thomas in Houston. MacAgy facilitated Mr. and Mrs. de Menil's introduction to Rothko and arranged for them to view the paintings (Barnes 1989: 29-40). Not until after Jermayne MacAgy's sudden death in February 1964, (an event that Dominique de Menil seems to link to the origin of the project; Smart 1998: 98) did Mr. and Mrs. de Menil decide to ask Rothko to produce a set of paintings, especially for a new chapel (Barnes 1989: 41- 42).

As Barnes and Nodelman document, Rothko was involved in all aspects of the chapel's planning. He decided that the building should be octagonal in configuration rather than the square plan that Philip Johnson initially proposed. Only when the shape and height of the interior walls had been determined and a partial, full-scale mock-up constructed in Rothko's studio in New York at the end of 1964 did he begin to paint. Rothko organized paintings on the walls of the chapel mock-up to determine what the dimensions and proportions of the stretched canvases should be, how the elements within each painting should be configured, how the paintings should relate to each other, to the wall planes, and to door openings in the walls. Rothko objected to Johnson's designs for a high cone through which the skylight would be filtered down into the interior. Rothko directed that the chapel skylight be modeled the skylight in his studio; the Houston architects Barnstone & Aubry complied with this directive after Johnson withdrew from the project in 1967.

Rothko acquiesced to painting the interior walls of sprayed-on plaster walls (he initially wanted them to be unpainted and for the plaster to be hand-trowelled) and to surfacing the floor with dark asphalt paving blocks (he initially wanted an unfinished concrete slab). He approved the height and placement of the low guard rails that stand in front of the paintings. All aspects of the architectural design of the interior (as well as his wish that the exterior be as anonymous as possible) were subject to Rothko's approval.
As the only permanent installation carried out to Rothko's exacting specifications, in which the setting, as well as the paintings, were an integral part of the artist's vision, the Rothko Chapel is the primary site for understanding and appreciating Rothko's convictions, intentions, and working methods. As demonstrated in Nodelman's analysis of the paintings, the setting, and his speculations about how the meanings of the paintings might be construed, the chapel is the primary site for interpreting Rothko's epic expectations about how he, a single artist, could affect not only viewers' reactions to his art but their spiritual apprehensions as well. Nodelman's estimation that, on the terms set for it in the beginning, the chapel's "failure was inevitable" (Nodelman 1997: 34) also makes the Rothko Chapel a primary site for probing the limits of Abstract Expressionism and its myth of heroic individual revelation. The Rothko Chapel spatially conserves Rothko's effort to recover a sense of tragedy in modern life as well as a sense of transcendence.

Philip Johnson (b. 1906)

Philip Johnson is one of the most influential and best-known American architects of the 20th century. Johnson was born on July 8, 1906, in Cleveland, Ohio. He studied philosophy at Harvard University but changed majors to Art History after reading an article about Modern architects Mies van der Rohe, Le Corbusier, and Walter Gropius. In 1932 he co-directed the Modern Architecture exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) in New York, which introduced European modern architecture to a wide American audience. Building on the MOMA show, Johnson and Henry-Russell Hitchcock published The International Style: Architecture in 1922. During the 1930s, Johnson used his personal wealth to champion the cause of many modern architects, most notably Ludwig Mies van der Rohe.

In 1940 Johnson returned to Harvard's Graduate School of Design, where he trained under Marcel Breuer. He received a B.Arch in 1943 and practiced architecture in Cambridge, Massachusetts until 1946 when he returned to New York to serve as Director of Architecture at MOMA. In 1949, Johnson designed a residence for himself in New Canaan, Connecticut, the internationally-known Glass House. He worked with Richard Foster from 1964 to 1967 and with John Burgee from 1967 until 1991. Johnson formed his own firm in 1992. He became a trustee of MOMA in 1958, received the AIA Gold Medal in 1978, and received the Pritzker Architecture Prize in 1979.

While his early work was greatly influenced by Mies, he defined his later work as "eclectic traditionalism." Johnson is known for designing abstract and aesthetically powerful high-rise buildings. In his partnership with Burgee, he attempted to meet the client's needs by creating skyline identity, seen in his commissions for Pennzoil Place (Houston, 1976), PPG Corporate Headquarters (Pittsburgh, 1984), AT&T Corporate Headquarters (New York, 1984), Republic Bank Center (Houston, 1984), and Transco Tower (1983, Houston) - all of which contrast with (and dominate) the surrounding skyline. The AT&T Building has been called the first "major monument" of Post-Modernism. Some of Johnson's most distinguished buildings are in Texas, once leading him to remark "I should have moved there; it's the only place I have any work!" His numerous Texas projects include many non-skyscraper projects such as the JFK Memorial (Dallas, 1970), Fort Worth Water Garden (Fort Worth, 1975), Thanksgiving Place (Dallas, 1977), and the Chapel of St. Basil (Houston, 1996).

Howard Barnstone (1923-1987)

Howard Barnstone was one of Texas' most influential architects, educators, and architectural writers. A native of Maine, Barnstone attended Amherst College and received a master's degree in architecture from Yale in 1948. While visiting relatives in Houston in the summer of 1948, he was offered a teaching position at the University of Houston and remained in Houston until his death in 1987. His work over four decades exemplifies the development of modern design in postwar Houston.

Barnstone resisted European modernism in his early residences, such as the Hartman House (1949) in Beaumont. It was during his partnership with Preston M. Bolton (1952-61) that he came under the influence of Mies van der Rohe through Philip Johnson's commissions in Houston for the Menil family. A series of strongly-articulated residential designs, including the Blum House (1954), the Winterbotham House (1960), and the Owsley House (1961), thrust Barnstone into the limelight. By the mid-1960s, his work became more expressively articulated in its massing and structural expression, as In the Maher House (1964). Barnstone worked in partnership with Eugene Aubrey, a former student, from 1966 to 1969, and produced work that ranged from the "new brutalism" of the Center for the Retarded (1966), to the warm and intimate spaces of the Bell House (1968). Barnstone's renewed interest in the past is reflected in his 1966 publication The Galveston That Was, while his 1979 study of John Staub marked a conversion to postmodernism. Although Barnstone adopted the eclectic detailing of the movement, his designs still maintained the elegant sequencing of spaces that had characterized his earlier Miesian houses as seen in the Bramlettas House (1982), the De Saligny condominiums (1983) in Austin, and the Peterkin House (1983). Barnstone designed the Schlumberger Austin Systems Center in association with Austin architect Robert Jackson in 1987. Barnstone's work received numerous awards, including the AIA Award of Merit for Vassar Place Apartments (Houston, 1966) and an AIA Honor Award for the Menil-Carpenter Residence (1978) in East Hampton, N.Y. He was named a Fellow of the AIA in 1968.

Eugene Aubrey (b.1935)

Eugene Aubry was born in Galveston, Texas, in 1935. He was a promising student of the 1950s who studied under Howard Barnstone in the College of Architecture at the University of Houston. He received a Bachelor of Architecture degree in 1960, a year after he began working with the firm of Howard Barnstone and Partners. Their collaboration yielded outstanding architecture which received extensive critical attention from the architectural press. In 1969, Aubry dissolved his partnership with Howard Barnstone and began private practice. He then worked for Wilson, Morris, Cram, and Anderson, Houston, and later became a partner in S. I. Morris Associates, Houston. He moved to Maine in the 1980s where he continues his private architectural practice.