Kenneth Cobonpue’s Croissant table.

This post covers the second lecture in the Rice Design Alliance’s three part series, “FURNISH.” If this or our earlier post on Mike & Maaike captivate you, be sure to attend the final and not-to-be-missed lecture by Jurgen Bey.

Locally sourced. Organic. Sustainable. Hand-made. These buzzwords are now ubiquitous in every design discipline. And, at the RDA lecture featuring Kenneth Cobonpue, I heard them a lot. I started to wonder which came first: the design or the buzzwords? Is he following a deeply considered process or cashing out on a marketing trend?

Cobonpue grew up around design in the Philippines. His mother, an interior designer, worked with rattan furniture and even secured patents for a lamination process. In 1987, Cobonpue attended Pratt Institute, followed by a stint in Europe working through several apprenticeships. In 1996, he returned to the Philippines to take over his mother’s workshop. He found a much different world than the one of his education. Where Cobonpue had been trained to design for machine production, the Philippine workers offered him their hands.

Shiro Kuramata’s How High the Moon chair

Cobonpue's "Yin Yang" chair

Cobonpue's "Yoda" sofa

Cobonpue's Phoenix car

Cobonpue's Retaso table

Rendering of proposed Central Station by Snøhetta

On the evening of Tuesday, January 24, the Houston Downtown Management District, along with Metro and its design-build component, Houston Rapid Transit, hosted a public presentation of five proposals for the new “Houston Central Station.” They were the result of an invited competition whose impressive advisory panel featured among others the new, and apparently well-connected, deans of Houston’s two schools of architecture, Patricia Oliver of University of Houston and Sarah Whiting of Rice University. Entries were presented by Chris Sharples of SHoP Architects, New York; Paul Lewis of Lewis.Tsurumaki.Lewis, New York; Neil Denari of Neil M. Denari Architects, Los Angeles; Mark Wamble of Interloop—Architecture, Houston; and Craig Dykers of Snøhetta, New York and Oslo. (I would have liked to see women architects like Jeanne Gang or Toshiko Mori also included.)

They are all decidedly avant-garde, modernist firms who have begun in the last several years to build increasingly large and prestigious projects. Collectively, they tend to use computer modeling to create rather complicated swooping and angled designs that rely on the newish technology of digitally assisted, custom fabrication for their realization. As such, they tend to be highly regarded in architectural schools and in the architectural press where these techniques are the common currency in trade, though perhaps somewhat less by the general public who usually seems to be either awed, mystified, or repulsed by such work.

My initial fantasy image of fedora-clad Mad Men and buxom ladies in stiletto heels rushing to catch the midnight train in a moodily lit Central Station was quickly dispelled by the detailed introduction given by Lonnie Hoogeboom, Director of Planning, Design and Development for the Downtown District, who explained that, in fact, the project was for a modest open-air platform where two new light rail lines, the East End Line and the Southeast Line, intersect with the existing Main Street Line. The site is on Main Street between the existing Main Street Square Station and the Preston Station. It faces Houston’s great Art Deco setback skyscraper, the Gulf Building, completed in 1929, where the Sakowitz Brothers once had their department store. The Central Station will be inserted in the median between the existing tracks, and as a result, will only be about eleven-feet wide, but will run nearly the length of the block. The current budget is about $1 million, including design fees, and each firm was given a $20,000 honorarium for design and travel expenses. Once they accepted, they had about six weeks to design the projects they presented in Houston. That firms of such caliber enthusiastically participated in what is in reality a very small project is perhaps a signal of the clout of the advisory panel. The winning firm will subcontract to a local architect of record, selected by Metro, who will prepare the final construction documents.

Tuesday’s presentation was intended to gather public feedback, which will be given to the jury when they review the projects in the next few weeks. Just as impressive as the advisory panel is the list of jurors, which includes David Burney, FAIA, Commissioner, Department of Design and Construction, New York; Carlos Jimenez of Carlos Jimenez Studio, Houston; Michael Rock, Founding Partner & Creative Director, 2×4, New York; Carol Lewis, Director of Texas Southern University’s Center for Transportation, Training & Research, Houston; and Minnette Boesel, the Mayor’s Assistant for Cultural Affairs, Houston.

On to the projects.

Rendering of Central Station proposal by ShoP Architects

Section of ShoP Architects proposal.

Rendering of Lewis.Tsurumaki.Lewis proposal.

Proposal by Neil Denari Architects

Detail from Denari Architects

Proposal by Interloop Architecture

Diagram of Snøhetta proposal

Aerial rendering of Snøhetta proposal

Rendering of Snøhetta proposal

Divis table designed by Mike & Maaike

This post covers the first lecture in the Rice Design Alliance’s three part series, “FURNISH.” If this captivates you be sure to attend the next two.

In the earnest tone with which he delivered his entire talk, Mike Simonian suggested on Wednesday evening that, in a given body of work, “if everything is perfect, then there’s a certain ugliness to all that beauty.” This, from the designer who made the XBOX console beautiful? You’d be hard pressed to find a blunder among the offerings coming out of Mike & Maaike, the San Francisco-based industrial design studio led by Simonian and his partner, Maaike Evers. By looking for one, though, you’d also miss the point.

Simonian and Evers, with the support of an international cadre of young interns, push their projects through a concept-driven, rigorous process and produce compelling works. A sort of completed perfection, though, doesn’t come across as the primary objective. The designs pose questions without declaring answers. They stir up trouble, find intrigue in uncertainty and sometimes fly in the face of staid conventions.

Take the Divis project, which spurred the most rousing moment of the presentation at the MFAH. An exploration of the natural splitting that occurs in wood grains, the table is comprised of a top, which is punctured by voids that represent “splits,” and legs that engage into those voids. The crowd delighted in Mike’s admission that the generous amount of negative space in the Divis tabletop — the very feature that drives home the wood grain allusion and generates so much aesthetic appeal — effectively renders the piece useless as a functional dining table. With striations that literally drop out from the slab of material running the length of the table, it’s easy to imagine a dinner party devolving into a messy affair. Plates sliding onto laps, food and wine going everywhere. But this is the best part, argues Simonian, with his brand of infectious playfulness: when the table was realized, the designers found they’d “inject[ed] characteristics that make the product misbehave” and that such misbehaving “serves a different function than being a practical, ‘good’ table.” Perhaps a table that safely accommodates a dinner service is, in a world where possibilities and discoveries rule, a staid convention. I couldn’t help but buy this ridiculous proposal.

Neither could Council, the San Francisco company that struggled with the curious design but was so glamoured by its whimsical attractiveness that it eventually put the table into production. Council turned out to be an important character in the story of Mike & Maaike, as Simonian shed some light on the disparate experiences of working with such a small production firm and heavy-hitting players like Herman Miller (where Mike & Maaike’s designs have also come to fruition). Energy and ideas can move much more quickly toward a project’s realization within a smaller outfit like Council. Many of the pieces Simonian introduced in the talk were rushed into production shortly after their conception for design trade shows like ICFF (International Contemporary Furniture Fair), which can offer crucial exposure for design offices.

Juxtapose

ATNMBL

Poet and Inprint Executive Director Rich Levy and novelist Farnoosh Moshiri

Yesterday evening, English + Associates Architects hosted the release party for Cite 87 at their offices in the Sixth Ward. Kathleen English gave a short talk on how she adapted the 120-year-old church building at 1919 Decatur. From the lowest floor, we could see clear through a hole cut in the floor to the beautifully exposed bow trusses. Gwendolyn Zepeda read from her article about growing up in the neighborhood, which she knew as Del Sesto. Her wonderful style is a form of social criticism through humor, keen observation, and generosity. The party seemed to fortify and refresh the spirits of the scholars, designers, novelists, poets, musicians, and artists there before the arctic blast welcomed us back into the purple night.

Linda Sylvan introduces Kathleen English.

Gwendolyn Zepeda reads from her contribution.

Gwendolyn Zepeda

Jim Blain and Jane Creighton

Roger Wood

Laura Tait, John Earles, and Jennifer Blanco of Product Superior

Ben Koush and Mark Kusey

Raj Mankad, Kathyrn Fosdick, and Katie Plocheck

Rose Kuo and Carrie Schneider

Carrie Schneider and Harbeer Sandhu

Marilyn Jones and Miah Arnold

Cover photo by Jack Thompson.

The Fall 2011 issue of Cite (87) was mailed and is arriving at the Brazos Bookstore, CAMH, MFAH, Issues, Domy, River Oaks Bookstore, and other stores. Below is a letter from the editor about this issue, followed by the Table of Contents.

The cover of this issue shows Dan Havel and Dean Ruck’s latest work, Fifth Ward Jam. Fashioned out of an old house, it looks like Houston’s culture—heterogeneous, exploded, twisted, improvised, and strangely beautiful. The editorial team was drawn to Fifth Ward Jam because of the way the splintered wood seems to focus a terrifying energy, like a plane crashed into the house and left a stage in the crater.

This issue of Cite features two ostensibly separate and unrelated sections. Guest editors Terrence Doody and Rich Levy challenged Cite and our readers to reflect on the tenth anniversary of the September 11, 2001 attacks well after the flurry of television coverage has passed. The second section emerged from an effort led by Jane Creighton, Pat Jasper, and Carl Lindahl to commission writers who have insider stories about Houston places. No connection, right?

Texas Johnny Brown performs at Fifth Ward Jam. Photo by Vicky Pink, courtesy HAA.

The afternoon of October 1, Fifth Ward Jam officially opened with a little music festival. Prince Jabo and Texas Johnny Brown played in the zydeco and blues styles that developed right there on Lyons Avenue. The crowd was a wondrous mix of ethnicities. I knew about two dozen of the artists and writers. As for the locals from the Fifth Ward, I did not know a soul. Class and race differences are persistent and real, but the structure of Fifth Ward Jam suggests that communication is still possible. There is a potential “we” to Houston.

During the artists’ talk, Dean Ruck emphasized that Fifth Ward Jam now belongs to the Fifth Ward and that he hoped the community would take ownership of it. Rappers, zydeco bands, political debaters jam onward and forward. However, no Discovery Green-style public/private partnership will subsidize and schedule regular activity. Will Fifth Ward residents come to love and use an art work that resembles the abandoned houses next door?

In his contribution, Carl Lindahl, a scholar of Louisiana folk culture, considers the vernacular architecture of Frenchtown, a locale close by Fifth Ward Jam. The resilience of Frenchtown families and their commitment to their architecture is a powerful reminder that placemaking often emerges without big funders or institutions through bottom-up, creative engagement with tradition and history.

In their contributions, Terrence Doody and Rich Levy note a post-9/11 search not just for answers, but also for a way to frame the right questions. Levy takes solace in his son “tuning in to Al Jazeera” on his phone. Indeed, in less time than it took us to put together this issue, multiple Arab revolutions have inspired the leaderless Occupy Wall Street movement, arguably capturing the nation’s attention more than the excrutiatingly masterplanned rebuilding of Ground Zero down the street.

As far-flung and ununified an issue as this one is, a theme of bottom- up resilience runs through it all. The writing was so strong throughout that we leave the reader to imagine the scenes with only a gentle and skillful nudge from illustrator John Earles. Enjoy and let us know what you think.

Table of Contents

Citings

News: Spring Lecture Series, San Antonio Tour, Brazil Tour, The Concrete Whisperer, Pablo Ferro Packs the House
Calendar
Architecture: The Menil Café COMMUNITY: Rice Centennial House

Features

“What am I Looking at, Jack? What am I Looking at?” An Introduction to the Special Section on 9/11
By Terrence Doody

The Pictures I Could Not Take: We Have to be Able to Imagine What We Know
By Sally Gall

The Pictures I Had to Take: Because I Knew Words Would Fail Me
By Jack Stevens

Three Novels of 9/11: Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close, The Good Life, and Let the Great World Spin
By Terrence Doody

9/11, Houston, and Salman Rushdie: On the Other Side of Fury
By Rich Levy

Placemaking from the Bottom Up: An Introduction to Writing & C/Siting Houston
By Jane Creighton and Carl Lindahl

Shapes of Tradition: Accessing Insider Vision to Understand Architecture
By Carl Lindahl

Exile and Live Oaks: Stories Whispered from the Trees
By Farnoosh Moshiri

The Old Sixth Ward Historic District: Or As We Used to Call it, Del Sesto
By Gwendolyn Zepeda

Insider Visions Photo Well
By Jack Thompson, Rose Kuo, and Lawrence Lander

Keeping the Ghosts Happy: William B. Travis Elementary School
BY Robin Reagler

America Varshe America Kande: Hinduism, Ornament, and the Suburban Box
By Raj Mankad

East Side Ruins: Delighting in Unscripted Spaces Along Buffalo Bayou
By David Theis

Que Huong Supermarket: Rewinding 2600 Travis Street
By Long Chu

Sugarhill Recording Studios: The Story of a House
By Roger Wood

Readings

Art and Activism: Projects of John and Dominique de Menil
Reviewed by John Pluecker

MFAH Selects: New Books on Architecture and Design
By Bernard Bonnet

Hindcite

Ano Demo-Ni: The Death of Central Presbyterian Church
By Ben Koush

Dockside Green, Victoria, British Columbia.

LEED certification is often a sham. The point system used by the U.S. Green Building Council is too easy to manipulate for the sake of marketing. For example, bike racks and showers earn points even if the building is sited on the edge of a freeway. The proximity of one bus line in the suburbs is equal to a downtown grid crisscrossed by public transportation. I’ve seen aerial pictures of LEED-certified, green-roofed buildings surrounded by moats of asphalt parking. The situation is perverse. Isolated features are used to green wash environmental time bombs—the architectural equivalent of putting a few pieces of organic lettuce on a factory-farmed beef patty.

A new type of LEED certification, LEED for Neighborhood Development or LEED-ND, promises to address some of these deep flaws. I attended a workshop on October 25 at CITYCENTRE, 14 miles west of downtown, to find out about the new point system. Douglas Farr, the original chair of the committee that developed the standard, gave the presentation.

LEED-ND came about as a collaboration between the U.S. Green Building Council and two partners: the National Resource Defense Council and the Congress for New Urbanism. This last group is vilified, especially among academic architects, for requiring nostalgic aesthetics into their codes and for the distance between the ideals they espouse and the resort developments they design. So I went into the workshop skeptical both of the LEED point system and the New Urbanist partners.

Farr started off with examples from Normal, Illinois and BedZed, a suburb of London. Right away, it was clear that LEED-ND does indeed shift the consideration from individual buildings to urban context. He showed a waste treatment water feature at Dockside Green in British Columbia that residents pay a premium to face.

Sustainable urbanism needs to be commodified, legalized, and normalized, Farr argued. His slogans for changing social norms were especially entertaining:

“Sex is better within ¼ mile of mass transit.”
“I thought he was hot until I realized he drives more than 20,000 miles a year!”
“Your SUV Makes You Look Fat.”

Farr’s build up was very convincing, and then came the actual explanation and exploration of the point system. We broke out into groups. Each table attempted to determine whether a local development would qualify for LEED-ND certification. We played the role of inspector, ticking our way through a long and complex checklist, parsing out elaborate definitions in an accompanying binder as thick as a biochemistry textbook.

I sat at the table considering a superfund site in the Fifth Ward that developer Frank Liu is turning into a dense neighborhood of townhouses. Mr. Liu sat right next to me, brimming with energy and determined that his project would cross the silver threshold. LEED-ND is comprised of prerequisites that must be met and optional points added up at the end. The superfund redevelopment easily met the prerequisites for avoiding sensitive lands and it earned innovation points: it is the first and only superfund site to be cleaned up through private financing.

The prerequisites abolish buildings that are inaccessible to the pedestrian and the public street. No blank facades, no high fences lining the street, no security gates between the pedestrian and the front door. For that reason alone, I became a fan of LEED-ND.

The definitions and weighting of points for transit, income diversity, and proximity to jobs were less satisfying, though. METRO wisely does not run many buses by the superfund site now, but it easily could in the future. This type of chicken-egg problem came up again and again leading me to wonder if LEED-ND is compatible with underserved, low-income neighborhoods. Also, Mr. Liu was not rewarded enough for building close to downtown jobs. Perversely, the joblessness of the immediate environs of the Fifth Ward rob the development of points. Furthermore, the points rewarding a diversity of housing types were not strong enough to persuade Mr. Liu to accommodate low-income families.

I had other quibbles. Handicapped accessibility only earns one point. Ten points, awarded on a scale based on the percentage of accessible units, would be appropriate given that access is an instrumental freedom—a means and an end to the kind of society we ought to build. At least accessibility made the list, I was told.

On the whole, I was convinced that widespread legalization and normalization of LEED-ND would move the world closer to sustainability. It turns the technical architecture and urban planning world of sidewalk widths, intersections per mile, façade permeability, density of residential units, and diversity of uses into a branded, comprehensible process that a non-expert can more or less trust.

Duany Plater-Zyberk, the firm synonymous with New Urbanism did do the design for the superfund redevelopment. (See Swamplot’s Fifth Ward: New Urbanists Meet Old Toxic Waste.) However, the LEED-ND point system did not, for the most part, reward nostalgia or faux-Charleston styling. LEED-ND’s relative neutrality to aesthetics is a relief.

The barrier to legalizing LEED-ND would be lower, one might suspect, in Houston than elsewhere given our fame for no-zoning. The presentation and the exercise made clear, however, that our “minimum parking allotments” and “minimum setbacks,” as defined in Chapter 42 of the city ordinances, are major barriers. They turn the whole city outside downtown into a one-size-fits-all suburban zone.

Frank Liu decried plans for increasing parking requirements. “I hate to see new regulations that make doing the right thing harder,” he said, adding that, “SPUDs (Special Purpose Urban Districts) would be a game changer.”

No doubt, the new LEED-ND point system can be gamed. Somewhere, LEED-ND developments will replace existing neighborhoods or environments that should have been preserved. They will be enclaves, free of metal gates but marked affordability barriers, that perpetuate income inequality and segregation. That said, sitting next to Frank Liu, watching him respond to the challenges posed by the LEED-ND prerequisites and points, was very convincing. I could see his plans for the former superfund site becoming even more promising.

by Raj Mankad

A two-million-square-foot building designed by WW Architecture. All images courtesy WW unless noted.

To introduce himself to the Glasscock School class for “Spotlight on Rice Architecture School,” Ron Witte said in comparison to his wife, Dean Sarah Whiting, his partner in their practice WW and the first speaker in our series, that she’s the more academically grounded and the more articulate before audiences. His historical knowledge, for example, comes second-hand and is “given to hyperbole.” His presentation on October 4—introduced by a survey of the transformation of Paris in the nineteenth century under Haussmann, and followed by a tour through a few of WW’s recent and ambitious designs—indicated, however, that he was only being modest.

The example of Haussmann’s radical excavation of the Paris cityscape served as a model for what Witte describes as a sort of civic hubris. It is all the more remarkable that today we do not tend to think of the city of Paris as an emblem of hubris, given how few towers it has (besides the Eiffel, obviously), how much walking and sidewalk culture it affords, and how moderate in scale are its residential, industrial, and commercial sectors.

Boulevard Sebastopol, Paris, France. Photo from WikiCommons.

Track Jumping, a proposal by WW.

Proposal for Kaohsiung Maritime Culture and Popular Music Center.

Proposed Kaohsiung Maritime Culture and Popular Music Center bird's-eye view.

Kaohsiung Port Terminal proposed by WW.

Kaohsiung Port Terminal, section.

Kaohsiung Port Terminal, conceptual drawing.

Additions have been made to this 18th-century house in Princeton.

Unfurled box concept for the WW addition.

WW addition to the house.

Lake Flato’s Porch House. Photographs courtesy Lake Flato, lakeflatoporchhouse.com

The fact that architects have been fascinated with prefabrication is no secret. Over the past 90 years, such luminaries as Le Corbusier, Frank Lloyd Wright, Yona Friedman, Team X, and Jean Prouvé engaged in the dialogue. Modernists found it to work in their system of the free plan. Megastructuralists became fascinated with the repetitive unit that the individual could customize after construction. Projects such as Moshe Safdie’s Habitat at the Montreal Expo in 1967 and Le Corbusier’s Unité d’Habitation imagined a new way of building and inhabiting space.

Recently, firms and companies such as Blu Homes, Marmol Radziner, and Alchemy Architects (with their weeHouses) have reopened the discussion of prefabrication, specifically with single family homes. Add Lake Flato Architects to the list. Based out of San Antonio, David Lake and Ted Flato decided to use the recent economic downturn to investigate potential lines of thinking they would not normally have time or energy for. From these explorations the “Porch House” was born. While the aforementioned architects focus on an already miniscule niche of homeowners looking for non-custom high-end homes, Lake Flato noticed a different angle.

Rendering showing a "dogtrot" house, a vernacular form found in Texas.

The reality is that architects design for 2 percent of the world. This narrowness often has to do with the price-tag and the perceived notion that the price-tag will be too high for most. By focusing their efforts on homeowners interested in modest and affordable homes, Lake Flato was able to develop a certain line of thinking. “We wanted to be as simple as possible and start with as few pieces as possible,” says project architect Bill Aylor. Rather than simply making it custom prefabricated homes—a common trap for those firms experimenting with prefabrication—the Lake Flato designs offer a short list of options, configurations, and materials, narrowing the possibilities and allowing construction to be simplified.

The allure of prefabrication lies in the factory setting. By removing construction processes and time from the site and relocating them to a centralized facility, efficiency, and precision can be heightened, reuse of material can be optimized, weather is controlled, and skilled laborers can more easily be coordinated.

However, often overlooked in this idea is an ideal partnership. Without a skilled and experienced manufacturer, the best ideas can never fully be executed. In order to take advantage of certain efficiencies in construction that the factory offers, repetition is critical. As the factory produces more of a certain component, panel, or full building, the time can be further reduced and the coordination streamlined. As with most manufacturing and business in general, economies of scale become critically important. According to Aylor, the success of this model lies in establishing “a critical mass of architects, factories, developers, urban planners—a group effort.” Partnering with experienced builders, Ground Force Building Systems, Lake Flato hopes that after 50 units are produced, they will have the flexibility to explore other options.

In many ways, what the Lake Flato houses also offer that the others on the market do not are site specific architectural considerations. It is easy to say that a house will be covered with Photovoltaic panels and wind generators, but in practice, the economics of such technologies are still prohibitive. However, passive strategies such as orienting the building to capture prevailing breezes, articulating form to allow for proper air flow, and projecting overhangs to allow for solar shading of windows are all easily designed into homes, yet are typically ignored. These considerations created such vernacular types as the shotgun, dogtrot, and saltbox, among many others. Over the years, as air conditioning has been standardized, and construction been reduced to cookie-cutter designs, these ideas have been lost. Lake Flato not only takes these ideas into consideration but adds contemporary versions of vernacular architecture, specifically as the dogtrot and the covered porch, both introduced to make use of the aforementioned passive strategies.

While modest in scale, the homes are contemporary and employ materials often reserved for high end homes including birch plywood, steel, and galvanized roofing. Lake Flato has targeted a price in the range of $150-$200 per square foot (inclusive of site considerations and delivery costs) but aims to reduce that to $100-125 as they begin to develop and refine the design and the process of manufacturing. Compared to the $350+ cost per square foot (exclusive of delivery costs) of the Marmol Radziner houses, Lake Flato’s price is about half as much. In addition, their counterparts’ designs require a significant level of site construction piecing together panels or modules.

Still, in the end, the architects at Lake Flato have recognized that this is not necessarily the answer or the end of the discussion. Most of their clients for this model will be second homeowners looking for a project in the countryside. They do, however, have hopes to expand this model to urban settings and target more affordable units as they expand and develop. But as Aylor notes, “Will this compete with houses made for $75 per square foot? Probably not, but can we influence them with this? We hope this can help move the conversation forward as to how houses are constructed.”

Porch House interior.

Rice Solar Decathlon House on National Mall. Photo by Eric Hester

The third session of “Spotlight on the Rice School of Architecture” featured Nonya Grenader and Danny Samuels who co-teach introductory courses at the Rice School of Architecture and lead the Rice Building Workshop. (See all posts in the series here.) The workshop is an advanced practicum for undergraduates and graduate students that produces buildings from design to completion. In other words, students donate their labor to a building project and experience first-hand all the logistical, practical, and budgetary challenges that builders face when attempting to execute an architect’s plans. The result is that Rice’s architecture students gain a sure sense of how plans and ideas actually manifest in the real world.

Samuels and Grenader attribute just 15 percent of total effort in any given architectural project to the design process. The other 85 percent goes into actual construction “outside the studio”: meeting budgets, adapting to weather conditions, complying with municipal permitting, communicating with contractors, and collecting and deploying available resources, including materials and labor. “Design is a continual process,” said Samuels, “with problems that have to have design solutions throughout the building process.”

Over the past 15 years, the Rice Building Workshop has developed a set of core ideas about design and service that seem quite commensurate with the values and experiences of its student participants, namely thrift, extreme efficiency, and ingenuity in making the most of small spaces. Dorm rooms, shared houses, second-hand furniture, and Ramen noodle dinners in the face of vertiginous debt: these are the conditions of student life. We are kidding ourselves if we think university students enjoy the privilege of being insulated from some post-graduation “real world.”

No wonder that the Rice Building Workshop made for such an apt partner for Project Row Houses, an arts and community center in the Third Ward founded in 1993 by Rick Lowe on the site of a block of abandoned row houses. Since its founding, Project Row Houses has grown in both its physical presence and in its ambition. Today, the nonprofit organization hosts several art exhibits per year, organizes a young-mothers residential program, and works with other arts and educational programs.

The Rice Building Workshop, because it operates on a semester-by-semester timeline and during construction depends on student labor, takes significantly longer to complete its projects than a typical builder would. Because Project Row Houses valued the mission and methods of the workshop, they were able to accommodate their long-term vision. For its first project, three students spent an entire semester first investigating the community around Project Row Houses, as well as the possibilities inherent in its existing architectural heritage. They found that row houses, however they may signal poverty and deprivation to an uninformed outsider, in fact offer unequaled opportunities for joining interior and exterior spaces, and for consolidating neighborhoods through front and back porches and shared backyard spaces.

Six Square House plan.

It took three years to build Six Square House, with students handling all but the electrical, plumbing, and sheetrock. As with later projects, a number of students who had ostensibly graduated mid-project from the workshop and from Rice, degrees in hand, continued to donate their labor to the construction project for months afterward, a testament to the value they placed on the workshop experience.

Six Square House Exterior. Photo by Danny Samuels.

From Six Square House, the students adopted practices and strategies that prevailed in later projects, including modular design, which allows for off-site construction, and then on-site assembly without even much of a toolbox.

They also developed a “core system” that was refined and strengthened in later designs like the “Extra Small (XS) House.” This 500-square-foot building came much closer to the row house precedent and was built within budget for just $25,000. The core in XS, as with later designs, combined storage and mechanical systems—electrical and plumbing—enveloping a bathroom within and supporting a kitchenette without. As the only intrusion into the living space of the building, it separated the single volume into two highly adaptable open rooms. A skylight illuminated the bathroom, whose walls were translucent polygal. The core thus distributed light through the home.

XS Sections and Elevations

XS House interior.

The Rice Building Workshop’s most recent and celebrated project was “ZeROW House,” which they submitted to the Solar Decathlon, an international competition by the U.S. Department of Energy to build houses with “net-zero” energy consumption. Grenader and Samuels recounted the origin of the project, an application which several students completed on their own, and which the two faculty members signed off on without quite believing that the project would ever launch. To their surprise, the application was accepted, and the workshop got underway. (See OffCite’s extensive coverage of the Solar Decathlon and visit the official ZeRow website.)

ZeRow House Plan

ZeRow House exterior

By contrast, the Rice Building Workshop, collaborating with the Rice School of Engineering, was determined to build an affordable solar-powered home, which could be transported to and demonstrated in Washington, but which would finally and permanently be installed in Third Ward Houston. They built prefabricated units on a steel chassis that could survive transportation by truck over freeways and through underpasses. In Washington, they immediately gained notice for their lean-and-mean construction and their row-house typology. They questioned the contest rules for entrants to prove, for example, that they could dry eight loads of laundry. Why not install a clothesline?

Grenader pointed out that “this is a realistic house,” unlike most of its competitors. Though the Rice team scored high in the Architecture and Market Viability categories, their contrarian approach ensured that they would not win the overall contest. However, their principled insistence on affordability made an impression on the competition organizers, which have since added affordability to the judging criteria.

Grenader and Samuels took obvious pride and pleasure in showing off the accomplishments of their students and describing as well their uncommon commitment to the workshop. They capped off our class by announcing the very recent news that designs by the Rice Building Workshop had just been selected by the Menil Foundation for the new café they are planning to install on their campus. Quite a different program for quite a different client, but the workshop found ways to adapt their signature core system to even this project. The design allows for an open plan in which café-sitters enjoy free access and egress, and views in all directions.

To join the distinguished architectural company at the Menil would alone be a high honor, but to have done so as students in a pool of experienced professionals goes to reinforce what the faculty leaders have known all along, that the workshop is capable of excellence through diligent research, independent thinking, practical experience, and problem-solving innovation.

Further Reading
Students designing Menil cafe (Houston Chronicle)
by Lisa Gray

Articles on Rice Building Workshop from the Cite archives:

Small Wonders: Architecture Students and Brazos Projects revive a folk-art museum by Lisa Gray (Cite 53, 2002)

Rice Building Workshop Honored by Mitchell J. Shields (Cite 62, 2004)

Contributions to Cite by Nonya Grenader and Danny Samuels:

Texas Places edited by Nonya Grenader (Cite 39, 1997)

The Small House by Nonya Grenader (Cite 54, 2002)

Freeway as Landscape Living on the edge affords a new view by Nonya Grenader (Cite 63, 2005)

Building the Better Townhouse: Thoughts on an Urban Style by Danny Samuels (Cite 49, 2000)

Port of Call: The deep-water ambitions of a bayou city by Danny Samuels (Cite 56, 2003)

The Disposable (?) City: The many lives of durable building systems by Danny Samuels (Cite 62, 2004)

A general assembly of Occupy Houston at Tranquility Park

Mic check?

Mic check!

MIC CHECK!

MIC CHECK!!!

Such is the call-and-response that kicks off every General Assembly at Occupy Houston. Organizers have chosen to forego the permitting process which would allow for amplified sound in favor of this technique, where speakers talk slowly, one short phrase at a time, and the crowd repeats those snippets of sentences to amplify that voice using “the people’s microphone.” It makes communication a little slower, a lot more painstaking, but that’s part of the point—democracy is a slow process.

From there, the meeting’s facilitators run through a quick primer on the consensus-based facilitation process. Participants are given a handout that explains the hand gestures to indicate approval, reservations, questions or pertinent information regarding the proposal on the table, or outright disapproval.

The meetings all follow the same basic outline. After the process primer, each of the volunteer workgroups are given time to report on their latest activities and make proposals to the larger body. Some examples of workgroups are Outreach, Logistics, Legal, Media, Facilitation, Diversity, and Medical.

After workgroups have reported back on their activities and made their proposals, individuals are given the opportunity to do likewise. Last Wednesday, as one individual was discussing his proposal to add the word “non-violent” to the Occupy Houston’s mission statement, more urgent business required an interruption.

Mic check! yelled a breathless participant as he ran over from the Walker Street side of Hermann Square Park.

MIC CHECK! repeated the gathering.

If you drive a tan Toyota, you are about to get towed!

IF YOU DRIVE A TAN TOYOTA, YOU ARE ABOUT TO GET TOWED!

Some hubbub followed, then the proceedings continued for a bit before another…mic check!

MIC CHECK!

Now it was a Volkswagen getting towed.

FAHRVERGNÜGEN! Yelled a witty camper, eliciting wry laughter.

The discussion continued for a few minutes before a third interruption. Mic check!

MIC CHECK!

If you drive a black Pontiac…

IF YOU DRIVE A BLACK PONTIAC…

Following proposals, time was allotted for announcements. One man announced that he had a list of locations where participants can shower. Another announced that he would be leading a workshop on passive resistance techniques for those who might choose to take part in civil disobedience. I made an announcement for the talent show I organized. A representative from the Houston Peace and Justice Center offered a statement of support for Occupy Houston on his organization’s behalf. A man named Noah gave information on how participants can get involved with National Sleepout Saturday, an annual campaign for solidarity with homeless people. Another man who had brought games like bocce, Frisbee, and various sports equipment invited people to make use of them.

The final segment of the General Assembly allowed for people to share their opinions on any topic. This was their chance to be heard—the most vital, necessary component in any democratic process, and also the most tedious.

Critics say Occupy Wall Street and its spinoffs have no clear set of goals, and few supporters would dispute this claim. For the participants, though, this lack of “goals” or “demands” is not problematic. What they have created is a space, a transparent and egalitarian process by which goals and demands can emerge democratically through consensus. Goals and demands WILL emerge, organically, from the ground up—they will not be imposed from outside and above.

This lack of space for ordinary people to speak and to be heard, to actively participate in the decisions that affect their lives, is much clearer in Houston than in other cities. We have no commons. Parks are not integrated into neighborhoods and so they are not used as gathering places. Few people take public transportation. The places where you’ll find the largest groups of people sitting or walking slow enough that a stranger might engage them in a conversation are shopping malls—which are privately owned and do not allow for political solicitation, i.e. “free speech.” The same goes for Discovery Green—it’s a great space, something akin to a commons, but it, too, is managed by a non-profit and people have been asked to leave for passing out fliers. Even METRO transit centers, which are publicly owned and routinely rent space in kiosks and on sides of publicly-owned buses for corporate advertising, even that space is not available for overtly political speech and METRO police will remove any citizen exercising her First Amendment rights on METRO (public) property.

Indeed, finding a physical space to accommodate this process, this “occupation,” was the main topic of the first General Assembly I attended, in Market Square on Sunday, October 2. The occupation was set to begin on October 6, and organizers had found through research and discussions with the legal team that the only public space open between 11 pm and 7 am is Hermann Square Park—the park in front of City Hall. Unfortunately, that space had been reserved for the Bayou City Arts Festival for the weekend of the 8th-9th.

The decision was made to go ahead with Hermann Square Park, though, and the decision as to how to share that space with the festival was postponed. With the mayor’s support, Occupy Houston spent its first two nights in Hermann Square Park, then moved down the bayou to Eleanor Tinsley Park for the weekend. After weathering last weekend’s rainstorms, protestors returned to Hermann Square on Monday, the 10th. This weekend, in order to make space for TXU’s “Energy Day,” the occupation moved across the street to Tranquility Park. Where it will go from there remains to be seen.

Like many OffCite readers, I have some reservations and questions about Occupy Houston—what it is, what it represents, what it hopes to accomplish. All these things remain to be seen. What I can say, unequivocally, is that it is open to anyone and everyone, and so I encourage you all to stop by Tranquility Park (or check occupyhouston.org for the latest location update) and see for yourself, and don’t just “see” for yourself—take part, speak up, this is YOUR movement if you want it to be.

This is what democracy looks like.

P.S. Think about leaving your car at home–as you can see, parking can be a problem.

Further Reading

Where’s the Revolution? The Changing Landscape of Free Speech in Houston (Cite 80, Winter 2009)
by Raj Mankad

Pursuing the Unicorn: Public Space in Houston
by Phillip Lopate (Cite Winter 1984)