Back to the Futurist

If Michels has failed to convince many of his students and colleagues that he's the architect of tomorrow, he's doing a modestly better job in the community. He has already hooked his first client. Jim Mousner, 29-year-old founder of the hip graphics firm Origin Design, has commissioned Michels to design the interior of his company's new Montrose studio. He considers the design itself a marketing tool. "It's going to be electric, fluid, round," Mousner says. "It's going to look like Doug Michels."

---

It's not unusual for an architect, particularly an academic architect, to enjoy a long, respected career without building anything at all. Yet the one question on everyone's mind when it comes to Doug Michels is, what has he done lately?

The answer is -- not a lot that has been built. "You're only as good as your last big hit," Michels admits. But "at least I had a last big hit."

That may be one of the reasons why Michels seems to be held up to a higher standard. But there are others: disappointment by those who view the '60s as a failure; envy that he's the focus of so much attention; or even resentment that he might be having fun in a field that takes itself very seriously.

It's not that he hasn't won recent accolades or excited the public imagination. In 1993 he and partner Peter Bollinger won a competition to build Hyperion, an Epcot-style space theme park in Japan, with a design that put the whole structure under a giant stylized version of a samurai helmet. But the bottom dropped out of the economy, and Hyperion was scuttled.

If some of Michels's projects are the city-in-a-bubble, retro-future variety, others call for truly innovative building techniques. Le Sabre, a $10 million house on a cliff that Michels and Bollinger designed for Arts & Architecture magazine, features a glass pool suspended in Kevlar micronet and cantilevered out over the crashing surf.

Still other designs reflect Michels's subversive, yet still perky, brand of patriotism. In the mid-'90s, when the National Parks Service closed off Pennsylvania Avenue in front of the White House, it asked for ideas on what to do with the space. Michels and partner James Allegro proposed "The National Sofa," a giant curving bench with a pop-up video screen that would allow citizens to watch Congress in action or interact with the first family. Esquire tagged it "The Spectatorship of the Proletariat."

No matter how good Michels's ideas are, he still has to deal with the disappointment that most of them have remained exactly that -- ideas. They can be appreciated as lyrical metaphors, or points of departure, but not as concrete reality. Being too far ahead of your time is the curse of the visionary, and Michels doesn't doubt that he is one. The Teleport would seem to confirm that. So would an early Ant Farm idea -- inflatable buildings -- that once seemed destined for the scrap heap. NASA, it appears, is in the process of designing its newest space environment for humans. It's called Transhab. And it's inflatable.

E-mail Shaila Dewan at shaila.dewan@houstonpress.com.