Brochstein Pavilion [Photo by Stephen Fox]

Stephen Fox

A Review of the Brochstein Pavilion

Brochstein Pavilion [Photo by Stephen Fox]

The Susan and Raymond Brochstein Pavilion is an architectural masterpiece. It is a masterpiece even though it is “only” a coffeehouse and, in terms of its architecture, “beinahe nichts” or “almost nothing,” as the great, twentieth-century, German-American architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe described his modern skin-and-bones buildings. What makes this simple, one-story building so extraordinary? It’s the feeling of elation that it stirs in those who visit or simply walk past. The Brochstein Pavilion makes you feel happy. It’s rare for any building to exert such power. Analyzing just why the slender steel columns, concrete paving, glass walls, and layered interior ceiling and exterior pergola produce this effect is intriguing. Is it the gleaming whiteness, the transparency, the proportions, the subtle way the roof structure filters skylight, the long-distance views to the west, the outdoor room beneath the ranks of elm trees between the pavilion and the back of Fondren Library? Transparency and spatial intimacy—the contrasting sensations of sweeping openness and protection—contribute. The deft, unpretentious character of the architecture—which calls so little attention to itself yet is so meticulous—is another factor. Even normally prosaic details—the way that exterior lights are suspended from the building’s frame and the choice of the aggregate for sidewalks and terraces—enhance the sensations of lightness and effervescence. The result is magical: the pavilion feels both vivid and serene, alert and relaxed. What cannot be overlooked is the landscape architecture. At the Brochstein Pavilion, the design of the building’s setting is as important as the building. Elevating the pavilion on an artificial rise, so that one walks up to it from the north, south, and west, overcomes the depressing flatness that previously tyrannized this section of the campus. The decomposed granite surfaces, black concrete fountains, and rows of slender trees construct strongly formed, room-like spaces that finally make sense of the back wall of the Fondren Library, which has waited forty years for this, its spatial complement, to be built. The big beds of mulch that replaced lawn beneath existing tree canopies provide spatial counterpoints in what Lars Lerup, dean of architecture at Rice, calls the “flat planet” of Houston, re-proportioning the ground plane at the scale of the landscape. Here too details are critical. The spiky rough horsetail, planted in clumps around the perimeter of the terrace, animates the terrace with a staccato beat and architectonic verticality that play off the linear horizontality of the cantilevered roof plate. The flat, black river rocks in the splash troughs around the fountains are just the right shape, size, color, and texture to make the transition from the fine scale of the ruddy ground plane to the dark, shimmering slab fountains as they slide through the landscape. Thomas Phifer + Partners, the architects, and The Office of James Burnett, the landscape architects (along with consultants Altieri Sebor Wieber, Haynes Whaley Associates, Walter P. Moore, the general contractor Linbeck, and Barbara White Bryson, Rice’s associate vice president of administration, facilities engineering, and planning), have achieved a masterpiece with the Brochstein Pavilion and its setting. Instead of trying to design something that “looks like” Rice, they designed and built superlative spaces that, thanks to the generosity of Susan and Raymond Brochstein, are an integral part of Rice. If you doubt this assertion, just come by on a university holiday when the pavilion coffee shop is closed. People will be there anyway, sitting on the terrace or in the elm glade. The Brochstein Pavilion is the place to be. If you are interested in learning more about the Brochstein Pavilion, see Ronnie Self's review in Cite 76.

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