Sculpture Center in Dallas a few years ago. Wamble’s connections go back further: He took Rice students in his “Light and Color” studio on a weeklong trip to Turrell’s life’s work, Roden Crater, an intricately sculptured meteor crater in Arizona expected to open to the public this year. Turrell has been commissioned to construct a permanent light-and-space installation on the Rice campus this year. “Turrell is dealing with issues of composition, position and light that inherently interest architects,” Finley noted. “It’s hard not to be influenced by him or not have similar sensibilities.” Turrell’s sky spaces allow viewers to appreciate the ever-present but often-ignored beauty of the natural world. “He presents information to your eye that allows you to either better understand how you see things,” Wamble said, “or to realize that the things you’re looking at and the way you’re processing them is largely shaped by the physical elements that frame them.” That appeals to Finley, who went for a similar feel with Interloop’s zero-edge windows, which change the relationship between the indoors and outside. “It’s a pretty incredible effect,” she said. “It’s very subtle, but it transforms the volume and proportion of the space and changes the focus of your eye.” For the parallelogram-shaped addition, zeroedge windows define a cantilevered corner on the second floor, affording a spectacular view to the north and west. Turning around gives a visitor a different view. It takes a few minutes to absorb the fact that every major element — the kitchen table, the sinks, the stair treads and even the drawers — is a parallelogram. “We had an incredible client, a really amazing family,” Finley said. “It’s a fairly substantial addition to a historically significant house in Houston. The house was built in the 1950s by Wilson, Morris, Crain and Anderson, the same architecture firm involved with the Astrodome.” Rather than tear down the house and build anew, the family decided to gut the existing structure and double the space, but in an interesting way. “The interior doesn’t reveal a break,” Finley said. “It doesn’t distinguish, in the floor or the materials, the old from the new — it’s one continuous space. But there’s a shift in the geometry.” “You know something’s askew, literally,” Wamble said. “It’s a deeply conceptual idea about perception, a very subtle shift being a distinction between the old and the new, but with everything else being completely uniform. The clients were committed to an idea that was based in form and perception — something you’d expect more from an artist like Turrell than from an architect, and it provided interesting opportunities for us, as architects, to explore those ideas.” Ideas are at the heart of Finley and Wamble’s work. Another project, the redesign of Julia’s Bistro, a Houston restaurant, drew inspiration from an academic avenue of exploration for Finley — graphics and information design. Interloop was
hired to reconfigure a space for the eatery opening on what was then Houston’s new METRORail line, in an old brick building with narrow slots for windows. “It was,” Wamble recalled, “a mean little room.” On a small budget, the architects opened a corner to light from the street. “The client had little money, and we spent most of it on structural aspects,” Finley said. “Then we used a very intensive interior graphic painting strategy to illuminate and create a kind of glow.” “Basically, all we had at our disposal was light, paint, a couple of new windows and the signage on the outside,” Wamble said. “We ended up fabricating the signage and some of the built-in furniture ourselves.” The team went even further, extending Interloop’s graphic packaging of the space to the menus and the restaurant’s website. “It actually coincided with the development of courses that Dawn has been teaching on representation, format and digital media,” Wamble said. “Rice was one of the first schools to realize that being able to present complex architectural ideas in a very simple and direct fashion is an art. Most schools are limited in what they can talk about by the limits of their graphic skills.” “That applies not only in how you present an idea, but also how you investigate it,” Finley added. “The tools you employ are, quite often, implicit with the kind of techniques you start to develop further in your design ideas. There’s no separation between representing the ideas in a building and the project itself.” Finley continues to feed her love of graphics and representation through a new course in which students track the parallel development of graphics and architecture from the Modernism of the 1950s up to the present day. “It’s important for students to be aware that everything we deal with is visual,” she said, “and to understand the importance of clarity in organizing and communicating information graphically, however basic it might be to the complexity of the issues.” The takeaway message for students is that a passion for detail and a willingness to stretch boundaries matter a great deal. “Within our practice,” Wamble said, “we find it’s essential to take on a few sets of questions that go beyond the economic limitations of the project — not in a way that is irresponsible to the limitations but that go beyond simply providing some ‘product.’” He and Finley believe they have that obligation not only to their clients, but also to the discipline of architecture, and that real-world situations sometimes give way to parameters that are hard to re-create in an academic environment. “I don’t want our students to be lukewarm about it,” Wamble said. “I don’t think we would be satisfied if they left our classes thinking it’s not that important to bring these kinds of disciplinary questions to each project.”
Rice Magazine
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No. 9
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2011
31