Graceful gateway links Rice, Hermann Park

Convergence, the Rice Building Workshop's contribution to Art in the Park, a celebration of Hermann Park's centennial, stands on the northern side of the park across from the Rice-Hermann Park METRORail stop. Photo by Jeff Fitlow

Rice Building Workshop students design, build pavilion for park’s centennial 

Perhaps it’s a harp for an ensemble of giants. Or a suspension bridge looking for a river to cross.

Whatever your interpretation, the pavilion designed by Rice School of Architecture (RSA) students that stands in Hermann Park across the street from Entrance 1 to the Rice campus is a welcome place for park visitors to pause. Its graceful lines direct the eye to a set of benches where park patrons can take a break in the shade.

The pavilion is a project of the Rice Building Workshop (RBW), which was invited to contribute one of eight pieces of public art to celebrate the park’s 100th anniversary. The structure the students call “Convergence” sits within the trees across the street from the METRORail stop on Fannin and Main.

The yearlong effort to design and build the pavilion will soon be complete with the installation of lighting that will turn it into an eye-catching sculpture by day and night. The airy structure is 19 feet high at its peak and is hard to miss.

Rice and Hermann Park dedicated Convergence on July 16. Photo by Jeff Fitlow

Convergence is so named for its placement between the realms of the park, the Texas Medical Center, the Museum District and Rice. “We started with six different schemes, some of which went this way, and some that way,” said Danny Samuels ’71, pointing up and down Fannin while working at the site recently. “We finally settled on this little triangle between the trees, nestling it into the canopies across from the train station.”

Samuels, an RSA professor and RBW director, said more than a dozen architecture students from all levels began strategizing last fall, with graduate student Sigi Zhu emerging as the “head conceptualizer.”

“The only requirements were that they didn’t want us to hurt the earth too much, and we couldn’t move the trees,” Zhu said. By the end of last fall, the students, working with Samuels and Rice alumni and RBW fellows Jason Fleming ’11 and Peter Muessig ’11, had settled on a design and pitched their idea to the Hermann Park Conservancy’s Art in the Park initiative.

Six concrete benches were cast at the RBW’s workspace in the Third Ward while other custom elements were pieced together at the Oshman Engineering Design Kitchen, Samuels said. Rice alum Andrew Daley ’11 of the University of Michigan, who with Fleming and Muessig was part of last year’s successful ModPod project, ran a two-day concrete workshop leading up to pouring of the benches by architecture and Rice engineering students.

Samuels was grateful for consultation and on-site help from Houston’s MetaLab, founded by Rice alum Joe Meppelink ’00, and construction services company Linbeck, as well as the donors whose contributions made the project possible (and are listed on the RBW’s pavilion website).

Like the other artworks, Convergence will stand at the park for at least a year. After that, its fate is uncertain, but Samuels hopes it will find a new home on the Rice campus. The modular structure was pieced together to facilitate a future move, he said.

Rice School of Architecture students, with an assist from George R. Brown School of Engineering students, designed and built Convergence during the spring semester. Photo courtesy of the Rice Building Workshop

Houston architect Jay Baker ’80, a member of the Hermann Park Conservancy’s board of directors and longtime advocate for the park, said Convergence is “a way to celebrate being iconic, important neighbors.”

“The collaboration between the students at the school and Hermann Park being open-armed to the idea turned out beautifully,” he said. “It’s modest in scale but it was immense in effort. I think everybody involved is very happy with the results. In terms of scale and proportion, it’s right on the money.”

Baker noted RSA and the park have been linked for many years, and he has been pleased to serve as the bridge. “In 1992, when I was six months away from being head of the Rice Design Alliance (RDA), I asked (former dean) Jack Mitchell what I should do … and he looked at me and said: ‘Fix. Hermann. Park.’ Then, two weeks later, he died.

“I dreamed up a competition in his memory to address the center of the park, and the RDA funded that effort,” Baker said. The competition drew entries from 26 states and prompted a renewed interest in Hermann Park and the public/private partnerships that have thrived ever since.

“Since that time, we’ve raised over $100 million to improve the park,” Baker said. “In 1992, it wasn’t a very happy place. Now it’s a destination. We’ve been very conscious to build for the long term. It’s a little ironic to know it started with the RSA and that one of our last projects (for the Centennial) will be this sculpture.”