Twenty-one photographs titled by nothing but their coordinates: in Houston, Rory Gardiner builds Houston, Untitled around Rice Stadium, the Astrodome and the surrounding streets.
Rory Gardiner, an Irish-Australian photographer, made twenty-one photographs of Houston across February 2026. They are not organised by location or type, and their titles hold no description whatsoever, only a pair of geographic coordinates. The images are, for the most part, unpopulated.
The series began as a commission. The Houston Archive Project, an initiative launched at Rice University in 2024, asked Gardiner to photograph two of the city's landmarks, Rice Stadium and the Astrodome. He broadened the assignment to the surrounding areas, following the two structures out into the streets, parking lots and motorway flyovers around them. The project sets out to build a visual repository of a fast-changing city, and the pictures also run in Sphere, no. 2, the school's annual publication.
Where people are absent, their traces are not. Empty seats, ramps and circulation routes, parking lots, idle construction materials: each registers a collective life without showing it. Igor Marjanović, the school's dean, describes Gardiner's landmarks as spaces “devoid of people yet full of atmosphere”, from fog to the diffused sun of Houston's humid air.
The Astrodome and Rice Stadium rarely arrive whole. They come in fragments and oblique views, from below the stands of Rice Stadium, where concrete columns repeat in long rows, or, as Marjanović puts it, seen “from a distance, piercing above a fence, truck, or tree canopy”, the way a resident registers them in passing.
The Houston Archive Project asks which sites and events belong in a city's public record, and Gardiner's reply reaches past the two monuments to the ordinary urban ground around them. A full-colour catalogue, with an essay by the Getty Research Institute's Maristella Casciato, accompanies Houston, Untitled, on view at Rice through 5 December 2026.
