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(Photograph by Gerald Moorhead )
Art dealer Hiram Butler assembled a group of collectors to assist Houston's Quaker meeting, the Live Oak Friends, in building a meetinghouse around a “skyspace” donated by artist James Turrell. Located in what was a lower-income neighborhood when construction began, one of many in Houston that seem more rural than urban, the meetinghouse is a one-story, steel-framed, gable-roofed, wood-clapboard-surfaced building whose shed like look was entirely at home in its rustic surrounds. Houston architect Elkins made an aesthetic virtue of plainness with her understated design. Turrell's skyspace is a void in the center of the roof above the meeting room that can be opened with a sliding panel, so that the sky becomes the ceiling. On Fridays near sunset, when it is not raining, the meeting opens their house and their roof to visitors, who watch the colors of the sky change as the sun drops below the horizon.