Challenge to Apollo

Houston, the headquarters for the manned space program, last week launched a festival that on the civic scale amounted to an Apollo program for the arts.

Prime showcase was Houston's new 3,001-seat concert hall, named for the late Jesse H. Jones, former owner of the Houston Chronicle and F.D.R.'s wartime Secretary of Commerce. His Houston Endowment Inc. had laid out $7,300,000 for the travertine-faced structure that is the centerpiece for Houston's new cultural complex. No expense was spared. When a fireplug by the entrance created a jarring esthetic note, it was chrome-plated. And when Jesse T. Jones Jr., nephew of the publisher, handed Mayor Louie Welch a gold key to the hall, he said pointedly: "That key really works. Uncle Jesse liked things to work."

So does the hall. Designed by the Texas firm of Caudill Rowlett Scott, architects for Harvard's Roy Edward Larsen Hall (TIME, Jan. 21) and the A.I.A. Award-winning Brazos County Courthouse in Texas, it stands foursquare with the city grid on the exterior, turns curvy inside to encompass a seashell-shaped auditorium. Says William Caudill: "There were 61 people involved with the job and they worked 13 3/4 man-years." To make sure that the acoustics would prove a ringing success, the ceiling is composed of 870 acoustical "lenses" that can be raised or lowered to tune the hall.

Causing special gasps of delight on opening night was Richard Lippold's 90-ft.-long sculpture. Titled Gemini II, it swoops through the air like hammocks of magical cobwebs, belying by its tension the fact that the wire strands support 2,300 slender aluminum bars.

To make the week a banner occasion there was yet another unveiling: a massive 50-ton rose granite abstract sculpture placed in the garden of the Houston Museum of Fine Arts. Hewn out of three 100-ton blocks in a Spanish quarry by Eduardo Chillida, 42, the work was commissioned by Houston's Endowment Inc. To accompany the gift, Museum Director James Johnson Sweeney has assembled the first U.S. retrospective of Chillida, a man who. only began sculpting in 1948, was a Carnegie prize-winner in 1964, and today ranks as Spain's leading abstract sculptor. His granite giant, called Abesti Gogora V, which means "strong song" in Chillida's native Basque, seemed a fitting cornerstone to Houston's cultural boom.

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