Practical experience makes for memorable architecture class

Practical experience makes for memorable architecture class

BY B.J. ALMOND
Rice News staff

This fall the Rice Building Workshop (RBW), which has already designed and built two houses in Houston’s Third Ward for Project Row Houses, will get to build its own work space in that neighborhood.

Photos by Jeff Fitlow

Will Rice junior Sarah Simpson levels a steel column.

Last semester RBW students designed the project, which consists of a covered but open-air structure on Dowling Street that will house the workshop’s novel portable Workbox (a metal shop and wood shop made from modified freight containers), a storage area and a small office, along with a construction yard for research and development. The concrete slab for the project was poured this month in preparation for the erection of steel beams for the framework. Students will work on the build-out and completion of the project this semester and next.

The practical experience of designing a project and seeing it through construction makes the RBW an especially memorable class for architecture students.

Christopher Mechaley ’04, who now works in New York for the studio Christoff:Finio Architecture, recalled how rewarding it was for him to help build out the RBW’s extra-small house, a 500-square-foot house designed and constructed with a $25,000 budget to accommodate the neglected housing market for a one- or two-person residence. The experience “allowed me to work with materials ‘in the real’ and in full scale — not a representation model or drawings, not a mock-up, but what we are trained to ask others to build for us,” he said. “I think you must understand and have experience building in order to make architecture.”

Mechaley noted that such experience made him much more appreciative of the contractor’s role. “The coordinating and choreography of a build-out is a real art that is often overlooked,” he said. But he cited community involvement as the most rewarding aspect of the RBW. “Seeing the effect your work can have on a community is a real pleasure. It has inspired me to seek future opportunities that will connect both my profession and community involvement, and it has reminded me that my role as an architect is much richer than simply designing projects.”

More than 150 Rice undergraduate and graduate students have participated in designing and building RBW projects since the School of Architecture established the workshop in 1997.

Directed by Danny Samuels and Nonya Grenader, RBW has received the National Council of Architectural Registration Boards’ Prize for Creative Integration of Practice and Education in the Academy and the American Collegiate Schools of Architecture’s Collaborative Practice Award. These national awards acknowledge RBW’s work with Project Row Houses, a local nonprofit group that promotes neighborhood revitalization, historic preservation and community services in a low-income area of the city.

Photo by Jeff Fitlow

Melissa Biringer, a fifth-year architecture student, tightens anchor bolts with other students building a work space for the Rice Building Workshop, which gives Rice architecture students real-world experience with design and construction.

RBW students have had an opportunity to explore affordable housing alternatives and examine neighborhood planning issues. The first RBW design/build project, completed in 1999, was a 900-square-foot modular house comprised by six over six square units. Conceived as a low-cost prototype offering a variety of configurations, the Six-Square House incorporated concepts found in neighboring homes, such as deep overhangs and double-hung windows aligned for cross-ventilation, and shaded porches. A mother and her two children now live in the house.

“The Building Workshop offers preparation that students may not get in other classes,” said Samuels, the Harry K. Smith Visiting Professor of Architecture and professor in practice at the School of Architecture. “They work in the community on a real project with time restraints and code restraints and still try to have an innovative building. It’s preparation for the real world.”

“We want the ideas our students come up with to be economically viable,” said Grenader, professor in practice at the School of Architecture. “As the neighborhood in the Third Ward becomes open to developer housing, at the doorsteps of that community are models of what a conceptualized and designed unit can be at a price range the existing community can afford.”

The new work space that RBW students are building this academic year should facilitate the goal of the Building Workshop: Bringing students out of their classrooms and into a community that has a critical need for affordable housing and design services.