Austin: A good town for modern architecture

When we were still living in Mountain View, I would often watch Dwell magazine on TV on the Fine Living channel. I was consistently surprised by how many modern homes were being built in Austin and the surrounding area.

It’s funny where modern design pops up, while I wasn’t surprised to hear about the Annie House conversion in South Austin, the other day Lauren and I had a run-in with modern design quite by accident.

We had gone to La Feria on South Lamar for dinner and afterwards drove through a neighborhood that I had never visited before. Ok, in truth, I thought that the road would go through and be a shortcut back home, which it was not.

We came across a very modern, and very interesting Episcopal church, St. Mark’s, which was built in a very modern way, but which also embraced the Texas landscape and let it’s deep, broad, blue sky and fierce, golden light act as the architectural enhancers they were meant to be. Check out the architects’ portfolio’s pictures of the site (for all that good architectural design, I might have suggested they look into the HTML “named anchor” so that I could link directly to the church mumble).

I checked out the architects, Jackson and McElhaney and they have done a number of commercial and residential properties that embrace the modern, the open, and the native flora and vistas of the area.