"Austin really doesn't want to be a city," says architect and University of Texas professor David Heymann. He recently published one of the best descriptions of Austin that I've ever read:

No one in Texas thinks of Austin as a real city, and as a city it is in truth a model of nothing. Invented almost from scratch as the capital, its consequent slight grandeur of scale has never been matched by its industry, and so it has had a vague pleasant lithium quietness. Few cities — Madrid and D.C. come to mind — share this peculiar birthright and quality. Like these, Austin had for many years the blessing of a constant artificial economy — the university, the government — without real boom or bust beyond the murk of real estate speculation, a city without the vagaries of city-ness. Then, really in the last ten years, that particular odd disembodied quality became desirable.

That passage is from Heymann's novel, "My Beautiful City Austin." The narrator, a sensitive, work-starved architect, bemoans the ruination of the place he loves, even as clients commission him to ruin it a bit more. For anyone who knows Austin or architecture, the results are both tragic and entirely too familiar. But the descriptions are laugh-out-loud funny.

Consider, for instance, the problem of a neighborhood code that dictates a historic style even for brand-new buildings:

I just have an allergic reaction to the idea. Part of it has to do with the impossibility of making something new like something old. It is not the look part -- not the difficulty of drawing an old cottage or getting labor to do the same level of detail. It is the dwelling in a replicant part, the feel part. It's like wearing a fake Rolex watch, or men who live with wives or girlfriends with breast implants. It isn't that you can't fool everyone else, it's that you know yourself, and so doubt creeps into the relationship.

Heymann -- whose credits include George W. and Laura Bush's eco-friendly ranch near Crawford -- assured me that none of his actual clients make cameo appearances in the book. "The stories are all fiction," he said on the phone. "But they're very believable. The motivations are very real."

For instance: Grandparents really do want to build "honey traps," pleasure palaces designed less as retirement homes than as amusement parks to lure out-of-town grandchildren. And of course clients want Mediterranean-style houses in places nowhere near the Mediterranean. And it's easy to believe that someone might, in all earnestnestness, demand a Shaker-style master bedroom. Who cares that actual Shakers didn't have sex? What does the real world have to do with architecture?

I've gotten used to that kind of whacked-out fantasy in Houston. Hey, why not build a center for Texas cultural heritage that looks like the Jefferson Memorial? Jefferson only died a decade before Texas was born. Or hey! Why not renovate strip-mall-like buildings in the Rice Village so that they exude "authenticity"? You know, like the actual historic buildings that they replaced?

More Information To order "My Beautiful City Austin" or read excerpts from it, check out David Heymann's author page.

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At least in Houston, Heymann tells me, you have a sense that things are getting better: "Every time I go, it seems that something has been improved. Houston makes mature decisions. They're made in a fog, maybe. But the city keeps getting better and better."

It's the opposite in Austin. "It doesn't matter if you've been here five years or 50 years," he says, "Austin has gotten worse. It doesn't matter when you got here: That was its best point, the best you've ever seen it. It just keeps getting worse."

People move to Austin because it's charming and beautiful, he says, and because people keep moving there, it becomes ever less charming and beautiful. It's developed the problems of a city -- the congestion, the ugliness -- without a city's redeeming graces.

Houston, he says, wants to be a city. When Houston was Austin's size, it had already launched big, ambitious cultural institutions: among them, a museum with a permanent art collection and an ambitious theater. But Austin still doesn't have those things. "People here want artisanal stuff," says Heymann, "but not artistic."

He grew up in Houston, in West U., and he speaks longingly of this city's raw ambition -- that naked yearning for more that, in Austin, seems shameful: "In Houston, people really want something. You may not always approve their ambition -- it can be materialistic, imagistic -- but it's always interesting, complex."

And while Houston becomes ever more diverse, Heymann says, Austin seems to grow whiter. Hipsters have colonized neighborhoods where African-Americans and Mexican-Americans used to live. Those places "now look like Williamsburg. You see guys riding bikes while smoking corncob pipes."

In Austin, he says, "there's a level of nonpretentiousness that's charming. But that's disappearing. We have 'Tribeza' now. Do you know that magazine? It's a kiss of death. It means, 'Forget it. Your town is shot. You can forget any pretension that your town has no pretension.'"

"Houston and Dallas want to grow up," he says ruefully. "Austin doesn't want to. It wants to stay a small town. And it may never grow out of that. It may become one of those stunted adults that never holds meaningful employment."

Bookmark Gray Matters. In Austin, that naked yearning for more would seem shameful.