“Small is the catchword now, but we were doing it back when nobody else was talking about it.” —Danny Samuels
Minds Meeting for the Six-Square House In 1996, Samuels and Grenader needed ideas for a building project they were proposing for Midtown, and Lowe needed ideas for new transitional housing — the stock of old row houses had been used up. “Nonya and I talked with Rick about our project,” Samuels said, “and he suggested we do it in the Third Ward.” Samuels and Grenader set up teams in RBW and assigned each the task of designing an affordable house. Lowe initially had some worries. “Most university design/build programs are not heavy on context,” he said. “But we were trying to do something that would honor and elevate the architecture of the shotgun house, which is a very humble style of architecture. It called for a lot of restraint.” The winning design team, of which Kim Neuscheler was a member, came closest to the PRH image: It talked in the vernacular of the surrounding homes, fitting in with the ‘Biggers principle’ of being open to the community. It would be a small (900 square feet), two-story home with clapboard siding, a pier-and-beam foundation, front and back porches, and a metal roof.
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“Small is the catchword now,” Samuels said, “but we were doing it back when nobody else was talking about it.” Another feature would end up playing a vital role in almost all of RBW’s subsequent projects: The Six-Square house would be modular. Each floor would be comprised of six square units, and many modules could be built off-site and assembled on the PRH lot. Neuscheler was ecstatic about her role in the design. Though she graduated before construction started in spring 1997, she couldn’t tear herself away. “I had a full-time job, but I worked on the house every Saturday for two years straight,” Neuscheler said. “I liked the physicality of building it — something may look great on paper, but how it actually gets built may be another story. The workshop inspires students on a different level — you think about things in alternate ways. I got reinvigorated. I finally knew I was doing architecture for a reason, and Danny and Nonya were a big part of helping me get there. Had the program been run by anyone else, the outcome could have been different.” Neuscheler stayed an extra two years in Houston to complete the Six-Square House before moving back to New York, where
she is now a project manager building new health care research facilities and designing smaller residential projects. The Six-Square House continues to make its mark, too: It has been reincarnated, reimaged and reinvented as duplex rental units, not only for Row Houses’ Young Mothers program but also as affordable housing at PRH and in other depressed neighborhoods. “We haven’t worked with any other architects besides RBW,” said Lowe. “Some people say we should branch out, but I think we’re always getting something new and fresh. Everything I know about architecture at Project Row Houses has come from the Rice Building Workshop.”