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.
more >
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.
more >
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.
more >
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.”
more >
David Robinson leads a discussion of a plan for Dunlavy Street at the site for the Montrose HEB. Photo by Chris Curry.
David Robinson is an architect who has served in a number of different public positions—chair of the urban design committee for the local chapter of the American Institute of Architects, president of the Neartown Super Neighborhood, and president of the Super Neighborhood Alliance among others. He sat down with Raj Mankad, editor of Cite, at Empire Cafe for an interview on September 20.
Raj Mankad: Why not stick to designing buildings? What motivated you to enter politics and, now, run for City Council?
David Robinson: Since studying architecture in college and really even before that, I have always had an interest in the public realm.
RM: But why politics?
more >
Galveston Bay, photo from United States Geological Survey, Wikimedia Commons
In this special series, OffCite focuses on water and waterways. If this interests you, be sure to check out the Rice Design Alliance civic forum, Water: Challenges Facing the Houston Region, Wednesdays August 24 and 31, 6:30 pm, The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston’s Brown Auditorium.
Last week, I led a discussion of Kwame Anthony Apiah’s The Honor Code with a group of Rice University freshmen. In the book, Apiah explores moral revolutions. He finds that appeals to honor, not rational arguments, make the difference. When 19th-century British workers saw the trans-Atlantic slave trade as an affront to their own collective honor and when Chinese literati saw foot-binding as a source of national shame, those practices came to a rapid end. Appiah does not engage in this history as an academic exercise. He challenges us to use honor as a means to end injustices today.
In today’s Houston Chronicle, John Jacob’s op-ed decries our existing rates of water consumption. He focuses on an economic justification for conservation, but I’m going to recast his argument in terms of honor and morality.
more >
Protesters outside TxDOT called for an end to plans for expanding the Grand Parkway.
On Wednesday May 25, approximately 50 people rallied outside the Houston district office of the Texas Department of Transportation (TxDOT). Organized by the Citizens’ Transportation Coalition (CTC), the protest called for a better use of $350 million of government funds currently slated for expanding SH99, commonly referred to as the Grand Parkway. That funding would complete only Segment E, between I-10 and 290. The total funding for the 180-mile ring road—Houston’s fourth—is estimated to cost $4.8 billion to build.
Signs like “Spend It Where the People Are!” and “What about 290?” called attention to Segment E’s remote proposed location in the Katy Prairie far outside population centers and the fact that highways through densely populated area need funding for improvements.
more >
Horses gallop through Montana-sized utility corridors that crisscross Houston.
Two bills before the Texas legislature would create the opportunity for bike trails to crisscross Houston at no cost to taxpayers, but to get them through at this stage will take extraordinary mobilization. Lisa Gray wrote about this effort in the Houston Chronicle and David Nova Lomax covered it for Houston Press. OffCite brings to you on-the-ground photographs showing just how unexpectedly beautiful these trails could be.
more >
Three ponds at Sheldon State Park. All photographs by Theresa Keefe and Keith Koski.
OffCite presents the fourth submission to the Unexpected City challenge, made by Theresa Keefe. Click here to learn about making your own submission.
Sheldon State Park is a wonderfully unexpected place in Houston. It is located in east Houston, wedged in the corner where 90 comes off the Beltway. I would say no more than an hour’s drive from anywhere in Houston.
My partner and I have driven past the treeless pipe yards along 90 numerous times but never noticed the signs for the State Park. We went to the part that was once an old fishery.
more >
Spectators watch as the rotation of a house in Sharpstown is completed.
It is 11 a.m. on a Thursday in Sharpstown, Houston. Roughly forty spectators sit obediently on metal benches provided by Cherry House Moving Company — a mix of Rice University students, architects, “just in for the day” New York art scenesters and garden-variety devotees of conceptual artist Mary Ellen Carroll. Today, Carroll will rotate the ranch home at 6513 Sharpview as the climactic moment in her decade-in-the-making work, “Prototype 180.”
Arguably the most pivotal moment in the artist’s career, “Prototype 180” proposes a myriad of questions on art, architecture, and urbanism. Most obvious is that Carroll is intervening in the makeup of this neighborhood, thereby underscoring the historic significance of Sharpstown as the nation’s largest community of single-family homes when it was conceived in 1954, and its transformation after the 1982 economic downturn from white suburb to immigrant-rich density. The rotational rupture also questions issues of land art and real estate, policy and public space, urban sprawl and first-ring suburbs.
more >
