Once upon a time, a rich city became very very rich when the world price of oil (which the city either owned or controlled a lot of) zoomed up, up, up.

The city, already something of an urban maverick as the only large American city without zoning (build what you want, where you want, no prob), with its excess wealth attracted, in addition to lots of the unemployed from the Rust Belt, more than its share of creative layabouts.

Prominent among this motley esthetic crew were of course architects, their craft being the most money-intensive of the arts.

Pretty soon, the city, which saw itself as a kind of baby Los Angeles without the movies, the mountains or the Pacific, was littered with examples of what Winston Churchill in a kinder moment referred to as "frozen music." Clearly, he was thinking of things like Chartres, and not the kinds of structures which Houston’s new money put up.

Like human effort generally, most of the new buildings were trivial. Some were so bad they were good. A handful were stunning, possibly beautiful, possibly (only time would tell) great architecture.

Several became instantly famous—and influential—among architects.

One quickly achieved the status of icon.

In the 1970s, Best Products Inc. was a kind of precursor of the Wal-Mart tsunami that still lay ahead of us. Best Products showrooms were everywhere, offering a wide range of name-brand stuff at good prices.

Success and other, unknown factors (early toilet-training? 1960s experiments with mind-expanding chemicals? who knows) caused the corporate managers of the company to link up with James Wines and his radical SITE (Sculpture in the Environment) architecture firm.

Result: seven very unusual Best Products buildings, all different, and all challenges to perceived ideas about architecture: one in Baltimore, Maryland; another in Richmond, Virginia; others elsewhere. Delighted laughter, among those who paid attention, was a common response to these expensive visual puns.

What would become the most famous of the seven went up on the coastal plain between Houston and Galveston, plunked down in a bleak stretch of freeway-commercialism. Wines called it the "Indeterminate Façade Showroom," and when it opened in 1975 its pristine, lovingly wrought rubble looked like this:

One survey found that photographs of James Wines's Houston building appeared in more books on 20th century architecture than photographs of any other modern structure.

Time passed. The economy moved up and down, up and down. Best Products went out of business.

The Houston store closed, sat empty for several years, was occupied by a discount electronics retailer, sat empty again, then became a furniture store of sorts.

The structure, which to this viewer’s jaundiced eye is aging extremely well, is now (May, 2002) for sale.

One Saturday afternoon in the late 1970s, when Best Products was going great guns, I spent a couple of hours on the edge of the parking lot, watching the consumers, of which there were many.

Observation: nobody, not one single customer, looked UP. Nobody paid attention to the building. People drove in, parked, got out, went in, bought, came out, left, with never a glance at the extremely indeterminate facade. Even after all these years, I’m still not sure what to make of that universal indifference to one of the few truly--and intentionally--funny buildings in the world.