Boldly Reaching Out

Boldly Reaching Out

School of Architecture Project to Bring Innovative Housing to Fifth Ward

BY DAVID KAPLAN
Rice News Staff
Dec. 3, 1998

Inside the School of Architecture, faculty members and students working in teams were pulling all-nighters. Some of them looked bleary-eyed. Classes were disrupted.

“My office was a war zone,” recalls Michael Bell, associate professor of architecture. He is curator of “16 Houses: Owning a House in the City,” the exhibit that created all the commotion.

No one seemed to mind, though. Most participants were thrilled and inspired by the project.

Bell’s exhibit brought together 16 talented teams of architects, designers and artists from inside and outside the School of Architecture. Each team was asked to design an innovative and affordable single-family home for Houston’s Fifth Ward. The models are on display at DiverseWorks Gallery until Dec. 19.

What makes this exhibit particularly exciting is that six of the models will become homes in the Fifth Ward.

The design team members include nationally renowned architects based in Houston, Boston, New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco. Typically they design multi-million dollar museums, offices and exclusive residences, but for this project they focused their talents on serving the economically disadvantaged.

School of Architecture Dean Lars Lerup, a member of one of the 16 design teams, notes that many of the participating architects are used to charging fairly hefty fees, but this time it wasn’t for money. “This is pure desire and love and passion,” he says.

Says Lerup: “’16 Houses’ was a real opportunity to show what the Rice faculty and our friends are about and a chance to think about our role in the community and what housing should be.” Fourteen Rice faculty members and many students participated.

The project is a collaborative effort among Rice University School of Architecture, DiverseWorks, the Fifth Ward Community Redevelopment Corp. (FWCRC) and the Cultural Arts Council of Houston (CACH).

Bell was “overwhelmed” by the quality of the entries and says, “the level of energy was amazing.” He found it gratifying to “watch a strong idea take hold in many people’s imaginations.”

Each team had its own intriguing vision. Concepts ranged from the traditional to futuristic.

The design by Lindy Roy and Seth Howe of New York features a pointed roof boldly reaching toward the street lights, “almost serving as a lampshade,” Bell says. It’s an example of a house merging with the urban landscape, he says, and “emblematic of what we we’re hoping to do.”

Sze Tsung Leong, Chuihua Judy Chung and Ho San Chang of Boston created nine house models, each unique but with similar architectural themes, to show what an entire street of their modular houses would be like.

Visiting critic Keith Krumwiede, Bell says, wanted his three-story house “off the ground” and its residents “into the trees.” Building a tall house is expensive, Bell says, but by using Krumwiede’s proposed pre-engineered steel frame construction, the costs could be substantially reduced.

Stanley Saitowitz of San Francisco made use of corrugated metal and, Bell says, “found an amazing way to build out of ‘Home Depot’ construction.”

The one and a half-story wood-frame house, crafted by Taft Architects; John Casbarian, Rice professor and associate dean; Danny Samuels, visiting professor; Nonya Grenader, visiting critic; and Rick Lowe, is “one of the more realistic entries,” Bell says. “The project is sophisticated in construction and proportion, and they took the budget very seriously.”

Their modular model features a “gaming strategy,” which allows them to discuss a multiple of options with their clients.

Mark Wamble, former assistant professor at Rice who now teaches at Harvard, produced one of the more radical schemes. He proposed taking 10,000 vouchers and building a factory that would mass-produce a fiberglass housing system.

Bell’s sleek glass house, containing six sets of sliding glass door panels, is, he says, “a vestige of the expansive, idealized glass houses of the 20th century.” It is an expression of Bell’s belief that the “house needs to be opened up” and contain fewer “privacy zones.”

Mary-Ann Ray and Robert Mangurian, who frequently teach at Rice and currently live in Los Angeles, designed a free-spirited “Inside-Outside” house that makes use of paraphernalia and found materials, as well as “inventive new building systems that are usually overlooked as ordinary and which are reassembled in interesting ways,” Bell says.

He welcomes such imaginative strategies, noting that, “America is a young country. We still have a lot of time to experiment.”

The idea for the “16 Houses” exhibit came to Bell after he read about the federal government’s new housing initiative offering families financial assistance in purchasing single-family homes from either speculative builders or nonprofit agencies. The program provides down-payment assistance of up to $9,500 in the form of a voucher. Bell began researching the economics of low-income housing. He had already sought funding for an exhibit and had been in discussion with DiverseWorks.

About a year and half ago, Bell ran into his friend Mardie Oakes ’96 inside a local restaurant and told her that he was planning an exhibit. It was a fateful moment in the life of the project. Oakes, a graduate of the School of Architecture, is project manager of the Fifth Ward Community Redevelopment Corp., a nonprofit developer dedicated to empowering, revitalizing and beautifying Fifth Ward.

It was Oakes who brought the dimension of reality to the project. Says Bell, “Without Mardie and the Fifth Ward Community Redevelopment Corp. entering the picture, the project would have been far more hypothetical.” Says Oakes, “We’ve been able to serve as the clients.”

Oakes is impressed by the wide range of submissions. “The next step is to narrow it down and investigate the actual costs,” she says.

The grand goal of the project is to select six models and build them. The FWCRC has submitted a proposal to a lender to underwrite the construction of the six homes. FWCRC has set aside property across the street from Finnigan Park on Coke Street.

Oakes believes the “16 Houses” project holds tremendous potential for lower-income neighborhoods, because “it’s important to be able to offer choices to people of all incomes about how they want to live.”

On Dec. 5, a 1 p.m. panel discussion at Diverse-Works Gallery will address the project and its architectural, economic and sociological implications. Fifth Ward community members, architectural historian Stephen Fox and others will speak, and the public is invited.

Bell hopes that “16 Houses” will serve as a model of collaboration for future endeavors in which the School of Architecture is “working with a real agency to move ahead.”

Grenader, visiting critic and one of the team designers, believes that “16 Houses” offered a wonderful opportunity for School of Architecture students to team up on a project with their professors. “They usually don’t see us staying up ’til 3 a.m.,” Grenader says. “The school was just energized.”

The dean says he is all for a project like “16 Houses” sweeping through his school like a whirlwind. Notes Lerup, “We’re used to havoc. We believe in havoc.”

Says Bell, “The School of Architecture has become an incredibly sophisticated school of urban research and inquiry, and our students are at the forefront of this work. The term ‘city’ has been reinvented at Rice and the fruits of that research show in the DiverseWorks exhibit.”

Bell says that he and many “16 Houses” participants felt inspired by the project because they kept in mind that it was about “people’s lives.” Some of the designers, he says, imagined the children who’d be living in the houses, “sitting in their bedrooms, dreaming about what they wanted to be.”

The following Rice School of Architecture (RSA) faculty were members of the “16 Houses” design teams: Lars Lerup, dean; John Casbarian, professor and associate dean; associate professors Michael Bell, Sanford Kwinter and Albert Pope; assistant professors David Brown, Carlos Jimenez and William Williams; visiting professor Danny Samuels; and visiting critics Nonya Grenader, Keith Krumwiede, Robert Mangurian and Mary-Ann Ray. Former faculty members Lindy Roy and Mark Wamble also were members of the design teams.

RSA graduates Marc Swackhamer ’97 and Blair Satterfield ’95 also participated, and many current students were involved.