| Abstract: | Cullinan Hall, an addition to the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, by Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, demonstrates how technology was transformed through social construction. The construction technology embedded in Mies's architectural practices became a symbol that materialized a cultural politics in Houston in the 1950s. It provided a segment of the city's elite with an identity as they sought to assert cultural authority. It was constitutive of exhilirating spaces that supported emancipatory modernist narratives, but also sustained interior narratives that exerted a contradictory appeal. |
