AI Slop
The phrase “AI Slop” is already commonplace, and it inspires me to invent more neologisms like “Cry me a data center” or “Grok willing and the creek don’t pop-up”. I have written all 670 blogs over the last two decades without AI, or have I? I am a late-adopter with Post Technology Stress Disorder and you can see that in my blogs from the aughty-aughts. Heck, you can see it from a couple of months ago when I ranted about how real retail service companies cannot ever, ever change an old email or recognize a different phone number, no matter who is dead. And they are willing to give up months of revenue just to carry that rotting corpse further.
So what do I think of AI? My first reaction to AI writing was that it was like a 14-year-old who has been asked to turn in a three-page essay but only has one page of material. Repetitive. You see it in tons of social media posts which look like proper long-form discussions but hammer the emotional hinge of the story like six times in 400 words. That is the written version of the AI image that has the wrong number of fingers or arms. Of course, both of those examples are a year old so I suppose by now AI is like 15 and knows how to draw hands better.
This is a real life photo from 12 years ago no AI.
I have attended one workshop and one training in AI in the last 24 hours so here is what I learned, mostly from Huy Pham and Paul Kim, whom I first saw present on this issue almost a year ago in Arkansas.
AI is a marketing term for the latest iterations of pattern recognition technology. Basically it looks at large amounts of data and identifies patterns and recurring themes. So, like you learned in computer science 40 years ago – GIGO. Garbage in, garbage out. Huy and Paul work for APIAHiP (Asian and Pacific Islander Americans in Historic Preservation) and if they ask AI about Asian sites in the National Register of Historic Places and if AI looks at all 100,000 nominations and sees less than 1% it will tell you basically NO. There aren’t any. Not significant. Not important.
Since AI is basically pattern recognition, everything it produces will tend toward the mean, the median, the average and ordinary. It is not a place to look for exceptionalism or new ideas. Culturally, it has a flattening effect. What is new about it in the last few years – as opposed to the pattern recognition software of 20 and 30 years ago – is the Large Language Model. Basically you give it tonnes more examples. So it gets even meaner. It cannot provide conclusions, only predictions. It reflects what is common, not what is true. Garbage in, garbage out.
I guess I’m not a big fan
If you want the National Register of Historic Places to identify underrepresented stories, you need to do it yourself, because it requires not lots and lots of old data, but a new approach. You need to reconceptualize the process, which is not something in AI’s wheelhouse. Garbage in, garbage out.
“Hallucinations,” however, are in AI’s wheelhouse. They will confidently answer a nonsense question like “Who won the Nobel Prize in Economics in 1956?” and even provide fake citations from nonexistent journals, as we have seen recently. It seems the AI doesn’t know how to say “I don’t know” which is a prerequisite of real intelligence. It eagerly answers queries because – like the 14 year old – it can’t not. Even if it is hallucinating.
If you get the “Nobel Prize in Economics,” you will get it here, in Stockholm, but it will actually say Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel, and it only began in 1969. Four of the five original Nobel prizes are also delivered in Stockholm under the terms of Alfred Nobel’s 1895 will, with the Peace Prize awarded in Oslo.
Presents predictions as conclusions. Repeats what is common rather than what is true. Hallucinates.
No wonder the predator class and the oligarchy are so enamored of it.
More microdosing and unlocked tranches than Sand Hill Road.
So, does AI work with historic preservation? I have always said that the beauty of historic preservation is that it treats every resource as an individual, with individual characteristics and individual significance that cannot be commodified. Zoning treats properties as a category, like grain being graded and loaded into a silo. It becomes a commodity sans terroir. Pattern recognition technology might be suited for zoning or other commodifying tasks, but telling the story of a place is specific and nonfungible.
Terroir.
So, to answer the question: AI can help if you need to find out how many 1926-29 Tudor Revival houses in the Monte Vista district have casement windows or how many National Historic Landmarks are shaped like elephants.
But if you are nominating a site with a story that has not been heard before – AI doesn’t know. Because it hasn’t been told. And it doesn’t know what it doesn’t know.
Why doesn’t someone get AI to do the dishes or wash the floor? Something useful, you know?
America 250 One Nation Under Roofs
This is the title of our new exhibit in Villa Finale Museum & Gardens Mathis Gallery building, which features items from the permanent collection that relate to the history of the United States. As the nation attempts to meet this milestone, our museum, under the direction of Curator Sylvia Gonzalez-Pizaña, has pulled both fine art and patriotic artifacts from the house. Some of my favorites include a collection of memorabilia from the Centennial Exposition held in Philadelphia in 1876. It is nice to view these items – normally arrayed on the second floor of the house – with more room to breathe and be seen.
There are also artifacts from the 1904 World’s Fair in St. Louis and 19C Stafforshire flatback porcelains that purport to be Abraham Lincoln and George Washington. They look a bit more like Prince Albert and Benjamin Franklin, but hey.
The founder of our museum, Walter Mathis, was a genuine World War 11 hero, flying 65 missions in the European theater – primarily B-25s, and earning a series of medals, some of which are on display in the gallery and some of which are still on display in the house. He also collected Currier prints of the Mexican War 1846-48, some of which are now on display in our America 250 exhibit, along with examples of his excellent collection of early maps of New Spain, Mexico and Texas.
Not all of the artifacts are antique – Among a collection of busts of U S Presidents is one of Abraham Lincoln from the 1970s – manufactured by Avon to contain aftershave!
One item I encouraged Sylvia to include was a signed portrait of William Howard Taft, the only person to serve as both US President and Supreme Court Justice. It is a family heirloom given to Walter Mathis’ grandfather who founded the Coleman Pasture Company along with the Taft family. Taft’s brother had a ranch house called La Quinta where the President stayed in 1909. The photo of Taft was signed in 1924 when Walter Mathis’ aunt was wife of the La Quinta superintendent.
Some of my favorite artworks from the collection are also in the Mathis Gallery for the America 250 show, including the stunning Julian Onderdonk painting of Matagorda Bay, which is my favorite of the several Onderdonks in the collection. My top favorite artist is Mary Bonner, and some of her amazing graphic prints are visible in the show. She had a knack for creating dynamic motion out of line and contour that reminds me of Windsor McCay among others.
You can tour the exhibit for FREE during normal hours (10-4 Tuesday-Saturday) and also of course see “the rest of the story” in the museum for the price of admission. Or, if you are a Friend of Villa Finale, the house is free! While 250 years is no Han Dynasty or Roman Empire, it is still a major achievement, and it might go on even longer!
Harvey Page
I was prepping for a King William walking tour for the 65th Nationales Saengerfest (Nord-Amerikanischer Saengerbund) and I noted that the Berman/Kinder House of 1906 on Madison Street was by the architect Harvey Page. The name sounded familiar and I realized I had been in another of his buildings less than a year ago – but it was in Washington, D.C. The Metropolitan Club, a veritable master class in Renaissance Revival.
Page practiced in his hometown of Washington, D.C. from 1880 to 1897, spent a couple of years in Chicago, and settled in San Antonio about 1900, where he practiced and lived until his death in 1934. In addition to that house in King William (which has been altered since his original design) he did several notable buildings here, including the stunning Temple Beth-El (1927) which I see every day in the neighborhood.
I have visited Washington, D.C. a lot, and have run into some of his work there, including the landmarked Harvey L. Page Block near DuPont Circle. His career, like William Carbys Zimmerman in Chicago, spanned the period between Queen Anne (below), the various Classical Revivals of the turn of the century, and the emergence of the modern as seen at Temple Beth-El. Page did a Craftsman Style house in 1906 that hinted at modern, just as Zimmerman was completing the Joseph Downey House in Chicago.
Downey House, Chicago, 1906. I took this picture in 1998.
In San Antonio, Harvey Page contributed some major buildings in addition to Temple Beth-El, like the Great Northern Railway Depot (1907) with its deliberately Mission-inspired campanulate facade and towers, the Mausolus-worthy Greco-Roman Scottish Rite Cathedral (1924) and several houses, including the quirky Clegg House (1902), which is surrounded by San Antonio College.
Despite the one Craftsman Bungalow and Temple Beth-El, Page never did venture too far into Modernism. Most of his mid-1920s houses in rapidly growing Monte Vista and Alamo Heights tended to stick to the historical styles popular at that time. Even our Frank Lloyd Wright-trained George Willis shifted from Prairie Style to historicism by 1921, as detailed in my blog a few years back.
Even in this stone Craftsman from 1906, Page could not resist a little Mission Style flare with the campanulate dormer. He did do a stucco Craftsman at 210 Encino, but it is impossible to photograph. Page died here in 1934 after a productive career. Six of his houses, including the Berman/Kinder, Clegg and his own home at 331 W Woodlawn are including in the San Antonio House Registry.
Ease of movement
One could argue that the whole of human history is a journey toward ease of commerce and communication with hydraulics on the side. Roman roads and aqueducts remain two millennia later to underscore their importance to that empire. Endless layers of burnt and polished lime forming walkways still snake through the Guatemalan jungle as testimony to the communications link of the Classical Maya. The Tayrona of Colombia’s Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta built arguably too many stone walkways in an attempt to maintain commerce and communication in the obtusely moist and mountainous high jungle. The incomparable monuments of Angkor existed only because of the massive barays that held the water that made civilization possible. I suppose you could add the US interstate system to this list, which we cling to and amend daily, defying its manifest obsolescence.
In architectural history, the 20th century styles of Art Deco and Modernism celebrated the continuity of materials and lines, visually and materially embodying the ethos of commerce and communication and free-flowing hydraulics. The train and the automobile sought to symbolize sleekness and speed and the mythology of the unencumbered in their relentless windswept contours. You can still see it in the modern trains of China and Japan.
I’ve had a Mayan archaeologist comment on the hubris of their lime walkways and compare it to our own material profligacy. Each civilization burns itself out on the hulls of its kernel concepts, lost in materiality because they invested too much meaning into the thing and were afraid to let it go, confusing gross domestic product with wealth and wealth with the economic everyday. Upon its invention, the thing – the walkway, the road, the car, the chariot – meant commerce and communication and control. That meaning remained even as it drifted into obsolescence, so the civilization invested even more in it because of what it meant, not what it could do.
Civilization literally comes from the word for cities, and commerce is both the source of wealth and an end in itself, an activity that is the economic everyday. Stadtluft macht frei, nicht wahr? Six years ago I wrote about cities and the logic of concentration and how every event from the telegraph in the 1840s to the telephone in the 1870s to COVID in 2020 spurred hyperbolic predictions about the end of concentration that were wrong, as they always are. Commerce is civilization, and it means much more than money and goods, it means ideas and inventions, and new ways of smoothing surfaces, increasing speed and building up. We want to be on top of each other because that is where new and interesting things happen.
It wasn’t a wall, it was a road. And it’s name means Long City.
Photos copyright Vincent L. Michael 1996-2025
Eatonville MCM
I visited Eatonville, Florida last week as part of a consultancy. Considered the first incorporated African-American town, founded in 1887, it is known as the home of Zora Neale Hurston, the author and anthropologist who set her famous Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937) there. It was also the birthplace of NFL Hall of Famer Deacon Jones, who invented the terminology of the quarterback sack. We brought a team to help put together a blockbuster event for August 2027 aiming to raise awareness of the history and culture of Eatonville. That will be the subject of a future blog, but today I would like to simply share some of the lovely Mid Century Modern homes that line the streets of this historic town.
Disappearing original houses
I was always enamored of the story of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Dana-Thomas house in Springfield, Illinois, built in 1903. In what became a familiar scenario, Susan Lawrence Dana had to wait for her father to pass away before she was able to engage the pioneering architectural innovator. Not only that, but she had to promise to keep the original two-story Italianate house her father had built, including his bedroom fireplace. That fireplace is pretty much all that survived Wright’s restless creativity, as the original house vanished into gabled wings of geometric modernism.
Fun fact – AI can not manage to figure out the other FLW examples of this! So here are some remodelings that Wright did in Oak Park in the first decade of the 20th century, from knowledge.
Hills-DeCaro House 1906. The process of modernizing old houses with ribboned windows and continuous stucco finishes became so popular lots of local Oak Park architects and builders did it.
Young House, Wright redesign 1908 – mostly the wraparound porch creating horizontal emphasis with the Tudor gables still sticking up.
Now in my tenth year in Texas, I am surrounded by examples of houses that swallowed up earlier houses, shifting from simple rock houses and cabins into Victorian extravaganzas. Thanks to Professor Kenneth Hafertepe I now understand better how single-pen rock houses grew into double pens and then added upper levels.
You can see the earlier roofline. This is near Bulverde.
The King William Historic District – the oldest in Texas – is rife with big houses that swallowed up little ones. I was recently quoted regarding the Joske House, which is a masterclass in Renaissance Revival, where no pediment is unbroken, no balustrade unbowed and no basket arch unornamented.
But this was a 1900 remodeling by architect Solon McAdoo of a four-room stone house built in 1881. The famous Villa Finale – the only King William house open for tours – also began as a one-story limestone house in 1876. In 1881 a new owner added a two-story brick wing but the big change came in 1896 with the front porch and tower, which is the bulk of what attracts the eye today.
If you look beyond the porch and tower you can see the earlier houses. This actually happened a lot in King William – on Madison Street you can see several houses that began as a single story of stone and had stories of brick or frame added later, like the Elmendorf house, c. 1885 with a 1917 second story.
There are quite a lot of these on Madison Street, including this Wagenfuhr House, of which there were two and each grew a story later. This one was a one-story German rock house in 1870 that had a frame addition perhaps a generation later. Its neighboring Wagenfuhr house added a nice Victorian second story and can be seen in the featured photo for this blog.
Just down the street the Martin/Van Derlip house started as an 1870 limestone one-story and got a brick second story about 1886, smoothed together with a stucco rendering.
The famous Oge house which looks like a Southern plantation was a one story plus basement home built in 1857 and completely made over by architect Alfred Giles in 1881.
On the first block of King William, you have the Ball houses, which were identical in 1868 but one got a second story about 1904.
Project Marvel
The new Mayor and City Council have been sworn in! We don’t really know how they feel about Project Marvel, the “sports and entertainment district” meant to link the Alamodome, Hemisfair and the Convention Center and provide a new home for the San Antonio Spurs, BUT we will hear how the public feels thanks to a series of workshops being held over the next three weeks in each of our 10 Council districts.
Here is the image of Project Marvel that was released last year and garnered the support of perhaps 41% of the public. Famously, the new Spurs stadium occupies the site where we failed to save the 1968 Texas Pavilion.
Our legacy media San Antonio Express News loves the project and endorsed it again this week. The schedule for the public workshops is here so that you can participate. And just to get the juices flowing, let’s take a look at ALL of the renderings of the project that have been released over the last year.
Deco San Antonio
Many years ago I did a lecture on WPA Projects in San Antonio, which were legion. From Brackenridge Park to Stinson Field and Alamo Plaza, the WPA left a large imprint on the city. Much of that imprint took the form of Art Deco styling, with its smooth contours, speed lines and continuous surfaces. I recently did a couple of San Antonio tours for friends and relatives, and many of our major downtown skyscrapers feature the Art Deco Style, with a difference.
Similarly, the Nix Memorial Hospital (1929 Henry Phelps) has Gothic and Classical details. It is also being converted into residential. I was born in this National Register landmark, although I hasten to point out it was listed under Criterion C, not Criterion A. It also has grotesques.
The Emily Morgan Hotel, which started life as a medical arts building in 1926 (Ralph Cameron), is similarly shaped and detailed.
Just next door, one of the great San Antonio WPA projects was the Federal Building and Post Office (1937, Cameron and Cret). Here, the contours of Art Deco were tempered by Classicism rather than Gothic.
Stinson Municipal Airport, founded as a flying school by Katherine and Marjorie Stinson in 1915, is a more stripped-down version of Art Deco.
Much of Art Deco was inspired by trains and the newish technology of the automobile, so it is not surprising that gas stations and houses of the late 1920s and throughout the 1930s made use of this speedy, dynamic style. Columns became stacked pylons and raised brick coursing suggested steamliners or aeroplanes….
While we are talking about Art Deco – two things: First, it is 100 years old! The Exposition internationale des arts decoratifs et industriells opened in Paris in April 1925! And secondly….
I was named an expert in a Redfin article! Check it out here: Vintage 1920–1940 Design Ideas You Can Use Now | Redfin(Parent company of ApartmentGuide and Rent.))
Here is a fun quote from Victoria Charles’ book Art Deco:
“Some twenty countries participated in the exhibit. Germany was not invited because of its role in World War I, but Austria and Hungary were invited, as was the new Soviet Union, though it was not yet officially recognized by France. Many countries had exhibits of furniture and decoration within the Grand Palais, and also built pavilions to illustrate new ideas in architecture. Britain, Italy, Spain, Belgium and the Netherlands all had substantial pavilions, as did the Scandinavian countries, Poland, and Czechoslovakia. Japan had an important pavilion, while China had only a modest representation. The United States, not entirely understanding the purpose of the exhibit, chose not to participate.”
The return of digital billboards
Another recrudescence! Almost a year ago, a company called Outfront Media tried to circumvent the newly minted Sign Ordinance by proposing “Urban Entertainment Districts.” It is part of this blog from last May. By fall, the outsider effort had been renamed “Digital Arts Media Pilot Project” and was promising not only that revenues go to the Department of Arts and Culture, but that the digital billboards would be accompanied by permanent artworks stuck on the side of buildings or parking garages. A survey found 75% of people against the proposed pilot program, and a City Council hearing was delayed five times but then finally held last Friday and shockingly, voted forward.
Blade Runner, here we come!
What was most surreal about the City Council Planning and Community Development Committee meeting was the crazy reason the Council Members came up with to vote for it. Lighting and Public Safety. I kid you not. This is at least five kinds of stupid.
Stupid #1 – Lighting?
If downtown has a problem with lighting, shouldn’t it be solved by, I don’t know, streetlights? The “pilot” project will have up to two (2) billboards per district, and downtown is a maximum three districts. So, maximum six digital billboards, none of which stays on all night. Seven new streetlights downtown beats that nonsense.
See how the Crockett Hotel neon illuminates the Alamo?
Stupid #2 – “Pilot”
Even Centro, which was in favor of the “pilot” program, testified that if a pilot fails, you need to remove it. The media company said they would not, and our experience with the digital kiosks six years ago was the same. Once they go up, they stay up.
Even in front of the oldest unrestored stone church in North America
Stupid #3 – San Antonio
Not too disparage the cities that have taken up this craven combination of culture and advertising, but none of them (Denver, Cincinnati, Atlanta) have the two biggest tourist attractions in the state (the Alamo and the River Walk). None of them have World Heritage status. We have a concentration of historic buildings and sites that exceeds most cities and will be actively and financially harmed by having little Times Square wannabes blinking around the corner.
Move along, nothing to see here….
Stupid #4 – Revenue
The johnny-come-too-lately company proposing this is promising revenue sharing of up to 20% and screen sharing (for arts or city postings) of up to 20%. Again, like the kiosks. Word on the street is that Denver saw no revenue for years and when it finally came it was a fraction of the millions promised. Atlanta reported $760,000 in 2021 of which $330,000 went to artists and that is with 14 signs downtown. The revenue is not enough for a budget line in Cincinnati.
Stupid #5 – Art
San Antonio has recently added a lot of mural art to downtown, thanks to new technologies that allow you to do so without permanently affecting brick walls and the like – removable film. If you walk from Houston and Losoya two blocks west you will encounter three or four of these. I can’t imagine any of them not harmed by having a digital billboard attached to them.
JUNE UPDATE:
The lame duck City Council approved the pilot of up to 10 digital billboards last week in a 7-3 vote. Thanks to D1 Sukh Kaur, D5 Teri Castillo and D7 Marina Gavito for voting against this travesty. Now we will see what actually happens and where – since landmarks are off-limits and downtown will require HDRC approval. Maybe the digital demidemons will be limited to Port San Antonio and the Ferris Wheel/Alamodome district.
How to demolish a MCM landmark, clumsily.
The surprising thing about the impending demolition (they have started on remediation, the most expensive part UNLESS you are keeping the building) of the Texas Pavilion/Institute of Texan Cultures Building is not that the Texas Historical Commission issued a demolition permit without public comment less than two months after listing the building as a State Antiquities Landmark. That was certainly NOT surprising since they had just done the same thing with University Junior High in Austin – landmark it and then six weeks later allow it to be demolished.
It is also not surprising that the demolition permit came just a month after the City finally revealed Project Marvel, a singular rendering centered on a potential Spurs stadium. The Spurs have the superstar of the decade and their current venue is more than 20 years old, which is what, 100 in professional sports years? What IS surprising is the recent revelation that Project Marvel started – and could easily finish – without a Spurs stadium. Or a UTSA hotel program. Turns out those were late additions to the project, according to City Council members at a public meeting this week. And the project could go without them.
That explains why there is only one rendering. The hotel even looks like a late cut-and-paste.
UTSA’s rush to demolish seems a little odd, as does their deal last year to sell, lease or “give” the building to the City. Yes, the city wants it back after giving it to the state in 1967 for a permanent museum. But UTSA kept saying they wanted to “monetize” the site – why would they “give” it to the city? Especially after a really expensive remediation and demolition?
That is 1963 US Gypsum building in Chicago when it was about 10. It was demolished three decades ago, costing $4 million, of which $3 million was for remediation.
Well, one reason is that UTSA as a state agency doesn’t have to bother with demolition permits from the city. If the city owned it, there would be a public hearing, and one thing UTSA has avoided assiduously for the last eight years is any public hearing. I remember going to the public meetings about their master planning six years ago – which included every parcel they owned EXCEPT the Texas Pavilion/ITC.
Since the new President of UTSA arrived, they have wanted to get rid of the building. They pulled back a Request for Proposals that had been issued in 2016 for developers interested in the site. Odd, because “monetization”? Then COVID came to the rescue and within months they cut staff by 80%. The Texas Folklife Festival, which had been the lifeline for the ITC, ended, and soon other events were moved to other locations. They convened task forces and the ULI to study the building so that everyone knew it needed $80 million – except the 2023 engineering report on their website that said $7 million. And last Memorial Day they closed it and moved the collections out. So now it is just a Brutalist hunk.
This is how you demolish a Mid Century Modern landmark. I call it the POLYESTER PANTS method because I first saw it at work in 1980s Chicago with a lovely 1930 building called Hillman’s. Hillman’s had a ground floor “grocery” called Stop and Shop that was the classiest thing in town – the ultimate upscale bodega, a unique experience and a beloved place. If they had announced they were demolishing Stop and Shop there would be an uproar.
So they got rid of that use and put in a place that sold two pairs of polyester pants for $12. Within a year or too, the polyester pants have successfully distanced the building from its fan base and Boom! down it goes.
So, no more Folklife Festival, no more staff, just those pesky Conservation Society folks loading up the old Institute of Texan Cultures building with landmark titles. Sadly, as I explained late last year, those titles only provide a review – nothing guarantees preservation. And when you have one state entity regulating another, well, you can see that there is no independent arbiter here.
Aw heck, transparency and oversight are out of fashion anyway, right? Want some polyester pants?