Offcite Blog | Design. Houston. Architecure.

Furniture buyers unite! You have nothing to lose but your La-Z-Boy.

All photographs courtesy wacdesignstudio.

“I came home with a high fever; my ears still hurt. Just from the noise — a ringing in my ears. It is very toxic. But it’s Houston.”
Jenny Lynn Weitz-Amaré Cartwright is describing the after effects of Sunday’s Furniture Sale on North Freeway (announced last week on OffCite), a daylong [...]

Guerrilla Furniture Sale

Scott Cartwright and Jenny Lynn Weitz-Amare Cartwright showcase their first furniture line. [Photo courtesy wacdesignstudio]

In January, the New York Times reported that employment at US architecture firms had dropped from its July 2009 peak at 224,500 to 184,600 by November. Commercial development has ground to a halt, the big car manufacturers have pulled the plug [...]

Making Sense of Ike

Remains of Bolivar [From presentation of Nitja McGrane]

According to a FEMA official, about 700 homes along the Bolivar Peninsula will be bought out and the land “returned to nature.”
“People will be relocated,” said Nitja McGrane, community education and outreach coordinator for FEMA’s Region VI mitigation division. She did not offer any further details or [...]

Designing Life after Ike

Storm surge barriers for The Netherlands [Image Courtesy William Merrill]

Now what?
Almost as soon as the immediate danger from Hurricane Ike subsided, experts and government officials began asking themselves how to prevent the devastation from happening again.
The proposals have been varied but have shared certain characteristics—billion-dollar price tags and ambitious scope. One plan extends an enormous [...]

What if Mega-Ike Hits?

Projected 22.4 foot surge [Courtesy Gordon Wells, University of Texas]

The Rice Design Alliance, the organization behind this blog, held the first of a two-part forum on Post-Hurricane Ike Planning. Eric Berger, the SciGuy of the Houston Chronicle, moderated the July 15 event, which featured some big-time scientists and engineers, the kind of people mayors and [...]

Revisiting Cite 71: The Hurricane Issue

Cite 71 was sandwiched in-between several hurricanes. Published in the summer of 2007 — after Hurricanes Katrina and Rita and before Hurricane Ike — the issue managed to digest the still-raw lessons learned from the devastation in New Orleans and offered a prescient analysis before the arrival of Ike.
The issue asked experts what the worst-case [...]

A View of Ike

The above video was made by Sara Fernandez. She wrote, “Setting my camera on interval record looking out of my bedroom window (my home is in Montrose, west of downtown Houston) was always on my list of things to do. Hurricane Ike was the motivator to get it done. I wanted to capture the movement [...]

Paul Villinski’s Emergency Response Studio

Emergency Response Artist Studio [Photo courtesy of Jonathan Ferrara Gallery]

The Rice Gallery features site-specific, commissioned installations and every one that I have visited there has been extraordinary. Last Fall, an installation by Aurora Robson used cut plastic bottles and rivets to create winding translucent tunnels and domes. When I took my two-year-old daughter to visit [...]

Disappeared: Galveston, Ike, and Affordable Housing

Man throwing debris into pile in Galveston. [Photo by Eric Hester]

What happens when you take a failing affordable housing policy and add a direct hit by Hurricane Ike. I talked to Chula Sanchez, a LEED-certified architect and member of the Galveston Planning Commission, about just that.
“The planning commission seems to be more of a permitting [...]