Brays anatomy
Rice School of Architecture students take long look at Houston bayou

BY MIKE WILLIAMS
Rice News staff

It’s not unusual – and in fact encouraged in Rice’s Vision for the Second Century – for members of the campus community to build bridges to Greater Houston and its citizens. That commitment extends even to designing bridges for them.

	JEFF FITLOW
	Third-year students at the Rice School of Architecture show their designs for a section of Houston’s Brays Bayou to visitors at a super crit Dec. 3. They were charged with designing bridges for the crossings at Main Street and Braeswood Boulevard as well as turning a triangular parcel of land near the bridges into a remediation pond.

The future of Brays Bayou, which runs for miles through the city and its suburbs and is one of the nation’s most heavily populated watersheds, is very much on the minds of third-year students at the Rice School of Architecture. They are thinking about how to make a significant piece of the bayou into a showcase for Houston that draws people to it and provides a valuable ecological function.

They showed the fruits of a semester’s labors to community leaders at a super critique in Anderson Hall last week that focused on making the urban landscape between the Texas Medical Center and Reliant Stadium complex more welcoming to residents and visitors. The event was part of the school’s traditional end-of-semester Jury Week, when the work of all students is reviewed by invited outside critics.

Students of Christopher Hight, associate professor of architecture, and Michael Robinson, visiting lecturer, formed two-person teams to redesign the Main and Braeswood bridges as well as the vacant, triangle-shaped 13-acre parcel on Brays Bayou’s south bank.

The parcel was once a Marriott hotel, bounded by the concrete bayou, Greenbriar Street and South Braeswood Boulevard, but now it’s an empty lot owned by The Methodist Hospital. The professors saw an opportunity for the students to transform the area, at least on paper, into an oasis that would also serve a vital function in helping protect Houston from floods.

Having spent considerable time and effort on a research project that would retool Brays into one of Houston’s great destinations, they know of what they speak. Their work can be seen at www.hydraulicity.org, which serves as the background for the students’ ideas.

Students presented a dozen ideas, including the two above — one a rendering, one a plan — at the Brays Bayou super crit. The 13-acre parcel on the bayou’s south bank would be turned into a remediation pond that would cleanse runoff from nearby parking lots and also help protect the neighborhood from flooding.

In every project, the vacant land is transformed into a three-stage remediation pond that would filter water from a massive Reliant Park parking lot that now runs straight into the bayou. “Of course, this water is polluted from residues on the streets and parking lots, chemical fertilizers from lawns end up in the bayou, and rainwater even picks up pollutants as it falls through the air,” Hight said. “All this water ends up in the bayou, and that causes real problems farther downstream when it dumps into the bay.”

Each of the 12 plans on display at the term-ending review, held Dec. 3 at Anderson Hall and attended by city officials as well as by other friends of the Rice School of Architecture, turned the parcel into an ecologically friendly landscape. Plants surrounding the rivulets and pools would absorb toxins from the adjacent concrete flats and slowly release clear water into the bayou, perhaps days or weeks later.

“If we did this along the length of Brays Bayou, we could alleviate some of the flooding problems while raising understanding of the role of these natural and infrastructural systems in the everyday lives of Houstonians,” he said.

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In fact, the ongoing Project Brays is working to do just that. The Harris County Flood Control District, along with the Army Corps of Engineers, is in the middle of a 15-year, $413 million project to reduce the risks associated with flooding around Brays. The project is widening the bayou in many places while replacing bridges and adding storm-water detention basins where necessary. Part of the plan is a linear park that will bring recreational amenities to many residents along its 31-mile length. The student projects explore how remediation and detention parks could become urban nodes tying this long park into the diverse communities along the banks.

Raouf Farid, the Project Brays program manager, took Hight’s students on a tour of the Main/Braeswood site earlier in the semester and praised their efforts at the super crit. “The students have done a fantastic job,” he said. “We are civil engineers and designers, so it’s always good to see the architectural perspective on the functionality of the project.”

“I think it’s in part a provocation on our part,” said Hight of his students’ presentations. “We’re suggesting that instead of building right up to (the edge) and turning our backs on the bayou, let’s explore what new sorts of places could be developed along them, that could transform Houston.

“We don’t have big rivers, we don’t have mountains. The beach is over 40 miles away. The bayous could be an amazing amenity and a chance to rethink the relationship between nature and the city in the 21st century.”