Houston: space, museums and urban park

The most populous city in Texas and home to the American space program, Houston alternates world-class museum districts with a park system built around a bayou threading through downtown.

The distances between stops require a car or ride-sharing service, as this is not a city designed to be explored entirely on foot.

At Space Center Houston, the official NASA visitor center, a tram takes you to the Johnson Space Center to see up close the historic Apollo missions control room, left virtually unchanged since the 1960s.

The Museum of Fine Arts, the heart of the Museum District, houses over seventy thousand works ranging from pre-Columbian art to Impressionism, distributed across two buildings connected by an underground tunnel designed by a conceptual artist.

Buffalo Bayou Park, approximately sixty-five hectares along the waterway that gives the city its name, features cycling trails, sculptural gardens, and an old underground cistern from 1926, abandoned and reopened to the public as a space for art installations.

Discovery Green, an urban park created from a former parking lot in 2008, remains the most informal gathering point of the day, with a roller-skating lake and weekly markets for local products.

Few cities in the world can show both the mission control room for lunar missions and a former parking lot transformed into public grassland in a single day: Houston manages it without effort.

The thread connecting Space Center and Discovery Green is not their notable physical proximity, but the same practical attitude of reinventing a space when needed.