Signed, sealed and soon-to-be delivered
Rice professor curates ‘Envelopes’ at Pratt Manhattan Gallery

BY MIKE WILLIAMS
Rice News staff

Christopher Hight, an associate professor of architecture at Rice, will pack off to New York City during spring break to deliver “Envelopes,” an exhibition highlighting the skins in which we wrap our buildings – and ourselves.

	CHRISTOPHER HIGHT

Eight international firms and designers, including two from the Rice School of Architecture, will take part in the exhibition Hight curated for New York’s Pratt Manhattan Gallery, which opens with a reception March 4.

Through full-scale, interactive models, architectural renderings and computer animations, “Envelopes” will investigate the sustainable qualities of architectural surfaces.

“On one hand, it’s a critical approach to questions of sustainability in architecture,” Hight said. “On the other, it’s an exploration of how sustainability and such issues can be used as a way of innovating design.”

Mary Ellen Carroll, a visiting lecturer in architecture at Rice and a conceptual artist, will show her “hydroponic curtain wall,” a vertical garden that will also serve as an architectural element at “prototype 180,” her upcoming conceptual piece in Houston’s Sharpstown neighborhood.

Blair Satterfield, a visiting critic in architecture at Rice, and alumnus Marc Swackhamer ’97, now an assistant professor of architecture at the University of Minnesota, will show their OSWall (for Open Source Wall), a construction technique that draws upon a social network of designers, engineers and do-it-yourselfers for ideas about plug-in elements.

Hight said the show explores parallels between the envelope of a building and the envelope of human skin. In a way, the building is a prosthetic “second skin” that allows humans to exist in a hostile environment.

“A lot of sustainable architectures focus on the building envelope, the site where energy is exchanged from the interior to the exterior,” Hight said. “We take that issue as a way of generating innovation and really pushing the envelope – to overuse a pun.”

The exhibition, part of a series on issues of sustainability at Pratt, is supported in part by the National Endowment for the Arts and the New York State Council on the Arts.