This is a story on how architecture in Sweden was influenced by the “Texas Rangers” –an unprecedented teaching program taking place at UT Austin in the late 1950s leading the way in architecture pedagogy eventually formulating the origins and explanations for a postmodern revolution in architecture of the 1980s.[1] It is also a story on how fragments of classical architecture makes up the foundation for the postmodern era, which has a revival in design practices today reaching a new cohesion.

Via ivy-league educators staking down their territory in the Texas landscape, the ripple effects of this foundational architecture program at UT Austin spread all the way to Sweden. First, through architect Lars Lerup, Dean at Rice School of Architecture in 1993-2009. Second, through a productive exchange program for students and teachers at Lund University during the same timeframe. In this way Swedish architects found themselves in the urban densities of Houston, Austin, and Dallas-Fort Worth, while Texas professors spent a semester in Lund teaching architecture. A central figure in this transnational passage of Swedish architects, and reverse, is Abelardo Gonzalez. An architect who designed unforgettable postmodern interiors of the underground world in Malmö, Sweden. Like most interior designs, only fragments of these designs remain. Yet, the drawings and models and other documents are a recent acquisition to the Center for Swedish architecture and Design, ArkDes. These are an archival treasure that can add an additional understanding of how the Texas Rangers teaching program influenced Swedish postmodernism, architecture education as well as why it makes sense to revisit this lineage in history from a contemporary design perspective.  [1] The Texas Rangers are made up by Collin Rowe, John Hejduk, Robert Slutzky, Werner Seligmann, among others.