Menil’s next masterpiece

Students to build famed museum’s new café through Rice Building Workshop

BY MIKE WILLIAMS
Rice News staff

Houston’s world-famous Menil Collection  will soon feature a work of art by Rice University students — a long-desired café where patrons can dine, chat and relax.

It will be the largest and most public work by the Rice Building Workshop (RBW), which made its last splash with its ZeRow House , its entry into the international Solar Decathlon two years ago.

Houston's world-famous Menil Collection will soon feature a work of art by Rice University students -- a long-desired café where patrons can dine, chat and relax.

Construction on the new building is scheduled to begin next spring, with the café to open in 2013. It will be located behind the Menil Bookstore, marking a new gateway to the Menil campus from West Alabama Street. The glass-fronted café will seat 40 patrons, with room for 40 more outside in the shade of the extended, solar panel-bedecked roof.

Menil Director Josef Helfenstein announced the project this week. “Designed to be in harmony with our green, residential surroundings, the Menil café will enhance the neighborhood as well as the visitor’s experience, being a place of welcome, reflection and refreshment.”

He said the late John and Dominique de Menil, who opened the museum in 1987, envisioned having a café as a gathering place on the campus.

“The Menil is one of the most significant buildings in the United States, not just in Houston, and to build on its campus is a lifetime dream of any architect. For our students to have that opportunity is nothing short of extraordinary,” said Sarah Whiting, dean of the Rice School of Architecture  (RSA) and the William Ward Watkin Professor of Architecture.

Since 1996, RBW has fulfilled its intention of getting students of architecture out of the studio and into the community, where their creativity can be challenged by the demands of real projects. Working with nonprofit groups, more than 300 Rice students have designed and built projects ranging from museum installations to affordable housing. Much of the work has been in collaboration with Project Row Houses in the Third Ward, a campus two miles east of the Menil that similarly incorporates several blocks of typical neighborhood texture and houses into a functioning art district. There, student efforts have resulted in a half-dozen house prototypes and generated scores of affordable apartment units.

Each project can take from one semester to several years to design and build, said Danny Samuels, RBW co-director. “Students must work collaboratively, not just with each other but with client groups, consultants, contractors and community residents. They also enlist in an ongoing process,” he said.

Planning for the ZeRow House, for instance, began in 2006 with the project concluding in late 2009. More than 80 Rice students — including engineers — participated, from initiation through the competition in Washington, D.C., to its final placement as part of Project Row Houses.

The Menil project began when Helfenstein, inspired by the ZeRow House, approached RBW directors Samuels and Nonya Grenader, both professors in the practice of architecture, about the café.

The glass-fronted café will seat 40 patrons, with room for 40 more outside in the shade of the extended, solar panel-bedecked roof.

Last spring, teams of students began conceptualizing the café and came up with three concepts. RBW presented them to the Menil board, and this summer, the Menil chose the 1,600-square-foot version that will ultimately grace the museum’s campus. The café’s “service core,” inspired by food trucks, will open to inside and outside seating.

“The project presented a very unique design challenge: a balancing act of designing a humble café that simultaneously enhances the dialogue between the Menil as a world-class museum and its surrounding neighborhood atmosphere,” said Sara Hieb, a graduate student who worked on the project last spring.

This fall and next spring, students will work out the project’s myriad details in cooperation with the Menil, professional consultants and a contractor. The spring studio will be responsible for final construction documents.

As with the ZeRow House and other RBW projects, students will participate in the construction. “We will build part of the structure and ‘finish out,’ and subcontractors will do the highly specialized work like mechanical, electrical, plumbing andkitchen,” Samuels said. “Basically, the students get to do the fun part.”

RBW students envision a finished project that will respect the template set down by the de Menils, master planner David Chipperfield  and world-renowned architect Renzo Piano , who designed the Menil’s main gallery. “It’s important to keep a certain modesty about it. There’s a real special, humble quality about the whole Menil campus. Piano somehow captured that even in a very large building,” Grenader said.

The de Menils had a long history with Rice. The couple founded the Rice University Media Center in 1969, as well as the Institute for the Arts (now the Department of Visual and Dramatic Arts) to manage the exhibition program at Rice Gallery. Among the notable events organized by the de Menils, whose eclectic collection of modern art remains second to none, was the planting of a tree on the Rice campus by Dominique de Menil and Andy Warhol on the occasion of his exhibition, “Raid the Icebox 1 with Andy Warhol,” at Rice in 1970.

The tree stands strong to this day. So does the Rice-Menil connection.