Philip Langdon of New Urban News co-edits book

Philip Langdon, associate editor of New Urban News, is editor, with the late Jonathan King, of a new book, The CRS Team and the Business of Architecture (Texas A&M University Press, $39.95). The 325-page book alternates relatively brief introductions with chapter-length oral histories of Caudill Rowlett Scott, a Texas-based firm that in the early 1980s was the largest architecture and engineering firm in the US. Soon after being founded in College Station in the late 1940s, CRS pioneered the use of charrettes for designing schools throughout the US. CRS called the charrettes “squatters” – a term that went over much better in small towns than a term imported from the École des Beaux Arts would have during that plainspoken era. Renowned for innovation during much of its history, CRS ballooned into a conglomerate and was dismantled in the 1990s.