VisionsforVisitors Rice architecture students got a lesson in problem solving last fall when they were asked how they would remedy two long-standing campus conundrums. The first: Rice’s lack of a prominent, accessible visitors center, one large enough to house a long-envisioned Rice museum. The second: Fondren Library’s lack of exterior allure.
Deep Axess
The winner, Deep Axess, by grad students Marti Gottsch, Melissa Seven teams of Rice School of Architecture (RSA) students took on McDonnell and Matthew Austin and undergraduate Jenny Zhan, the challenge of designing one solution for both problems in a sinearned the highest marks for its elegant combination of utility and gle weekend. Their intense activity was part of the Visitation Rights visual appeal in following the mandate to create a Rice visitors center Fall Design Charette, a juried competition. Each team presented that would be high-profile, centrally located and universally accesideas for a new visitors center that would also make Fondren more sible and that would provide an excellent welcoming and, in some cases, more view of the campus. (Rice’s current Welcome functional as a library. Center is tucked away in Lovett Hall, just inGreg Marshall, Rice’s director of uniside the Sallyport.) versity relations, pitched the idea of a Calling their creation “a pavilion in the Fondren-based visitors center to RSA Dean air,” the team keyed in on Rice’s central axis, Sarah Whiting, who decided it was perfect which flows outward from the Sallyport. subject matter for the fall charette. Marshall “Rather than producing a visitors center was grateful for the students’ enthusiasm. “I through a solely additive process,” the team know architects don’t sleep,” he said, “but wrote, “Deep Axess embeds, excavates and to be able to pull this off in three days is cuts through Fondren Library and the axial incredible.” organization of Rice to provide a contempoThe teams, which were to include rary, public space.” at least one returning and one new stuThe team’s bold plan would install a dent, had to come up with a poster preRe-Visitor’s Center ramp from the library’s west side near the sentation of their concept. But that was Brochstein Pavilion to a center floating above the east loggia that just the beginning. They then had to convince a panel of judges would be roomy enough for a permanent, museum-style exhibition that included a cross section of interested parties, including Rice of Rice memorabilia. President David Leebron.
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