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.
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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?
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.”
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Columbia Street House, Carlos Jiménez Design Studio, all images from Paul Hester, Hester + Hardaway Photographers
In the second installment of the “Spotlight on the Rice School of Architecture,” faculty member Carlos Jiménez took up the central theme “The Future of Design” by interrogating that notion, the future, and considering the value of related concepts like timeliness, tempo, and speed. (See all the posts in this series here.)
We began looking at a 1891 birds-eye-view of the city of Houston, a lithograph that shows a city already growing rapidly, its grid reaching far out to the horizon, but even the hopeful industrialism in this image fails to anticipate the later explosions in building and expansion through the twentieth century (abetted by post-war highway construction). Architects and civil engineers build our futures surely, but our future is often obscure and difficult to discern, no matter how great their skill and foresight. The self-same models of wild-eyed futurism discussed a week earlier by Sarah Whiting were recalled by Jiménez’s in cautionary terms. “Nothing gets old as fast as the future,” he quipped.
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A gated community of highrises in China
This morning the Houston Chronicle printed an op-ed by Christof Spieler about his journey to China. He blogged about the trip on OffCite and you can find all his posts here. If this interests you, be sure to attend the Chinese Architecture lecture series that starts next week.
In his op-ed, Spieler finds some surprising similarities between Houston and Chinese cities. For example, he likens a walled and gated compound of 30 highrises to our suburban planned communities. The observation of his that I really loved isn’t about a specific building, but is about attitude.
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Frank Lloyd Wright sketch for Broadacre City
The eight-week course “Spotlight on Rice University School of Architecture,” which is offered by the Glasscock School of Continuing Studies, began on Tuesday with an introduction by Dean Sarah Whiting to architecture as an academic discipline. The focus on how architecture is taught and studied required an examination, in turn, of how architecture is represented in photography, painting and drawing, and modeling, as well as the typical plans and sections we associate with the architectural blueprint. By means of a robust slide show of such images, Dr. Whiting made the case for the tendency of architecture as a subject of study toward advancement and innovation.
Indeed the first half of the slide show featured images from the 20th century’s greatest architectural speculations, a great-hits rally of what Whiting called “imagined futures” including the Italian Futurists, Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927), and Frank Lloyd Wright’s “Broadacre City” (1932), le Corbusier’s “Ville Radiuse” (1935), and moving into later examples like Paul Rudolph’s “Lower Manhattan Expressway” (1967).
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Biosphère Montréal designed by Buckminster Fuller, 1967
The Rice School of Architecture has put together a special course for the general public and its starts tonight. You can register here. The first meeting will be led by Dean Sarah Whiting. She will give a “brief history of futures envisioned by architects,” setting the theme for the course. You will have a chance to learn from one of the world’s leading architectural thinkers not just about the past, but about new “specific futures envisioned by Rice faculty architects.”
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