existed only as renderings, too visionary, too audacious,
for bricks and mortar.
In Imber's case, however, the buildings are gloriously
extant and present: six ranches, four villas and six houses,
all built between 1994 and 2012, an eighteen year
period of extraordinary
productivity and flowering
for the architect.
Imber seamlessly fuses
Hispano-Moorish
and
American
regional
sensibility.
Although
some of these buildings
Dos Suenos
successfully grace prairie
land, others inhabit the more variegated hill country outside
San Antonio, Texas. One sees also Shaker simplicity,
craft use of fieldstone and passageways that one might
find in alpine cultures throughout the world from Bhutan
to the Austrian Arlberg. There are also within Imber's
repertoire architectural elements that serve as memorial
to the foursquare housing built by several generations
of German and other central European immigrants in
Texas.
For all of these sensibilities to commingle in the work of
one architect, deftly paying homage to them all, often
HYLAND
