Gerald D. Hines College of Architecture & Design Prospectus 2020–21 Undergraduate Architecture

Gerald D. Hines

College of Architecture & Design

Program

Deniability Is No Longer an Option

Assemblages in the House of Education

Areas

Design Media

History, Theory, and Criticism

Design Studios

Studios

Arch 1500: Representation

Arch 1501: Conceptualization

Arch 2500: Contextualization

Intermediate Studios

Arch 2501: Design Methods

Arch 3500: Design Strategies

Arch 3501: Material Practice

Comprehensive Studios

Arch 4510: Integrated Design Solutions

Studios

Arch 5500: Topic Studios (Fall)

Arch 5500: Topic Studios (Spring)

Arch 5593: Thesis Studio

Jury Awards

Deniability Is No Longer an Option

Patricia Belton Oliver, Dean

As a College and a University, if we are serious about establishing ourselves as a center of influ ence, we must understand that this journey de mands intellectual and physical agility. We must commit to transforming ourselves into leaders necessary for such a context. This aspiration calls us to move quickly, accept and embrace change, and let go of traditions that are not adequate for our time.

It is both inevitable and necessary for in dividuals and organizations to evolve. During these times we are impelled to give up some dreams and hopes, but we replace them with new capacities and talents instead. Transitions require critical decisions be made to avoid stagnation and ensure progress.

As a culture, we are currently grappling with some very dramatic shifts. Whether we acknowledge it or not, the ongoing pandemic has affected us in ways we could not have wholly pre dicted. We are fundamentally changed. There is no going back to pre-COVID life in the College or the world. Technology has been essential to how the world copes with the pandemic’s impact on society, the economy, and politics. It has be come necessary for our personal and profession al lives. A design school of the 21st century must address the adaptation of traditional practices to new technological systems, as well as the social, cultural, and economic consequences arising from the rapid acceleration of technological in fluence in everyday life.

For many years, another shift has been oc curring. The University’s research agenda has been connecting environmental concerns to growing expectations that the College lead re search and professional preparation in sustain-

ability and regenerative practices. The climate crisis of the last couple of decades has finally pierced our armor of complacency: particularly here on the third coast. Deniability is no longer an option. Woven through our coursework must be the urgency to design with evaluative strate gies for water management, energy consumption, and stewardship of natural resources.

The third seismic shift was our realization that the time for social and political justice and equity had passed the discussion phase and was now in the action phase. Not since the Civil Rights Movement have we seen such a universal resur gence of demand for inclusivity, compassion, and mutual respect. The work of the Diversity, Equi ty, and Inclusion Task Force and the faculty and students of the College have inspired us to work harder to ensure an environment supporting col lective conversations toward social justice around ability, age, class, ethnicity, gender, race, religion, and sexuality. An equitable environment culti vates a productive educative process.

As citizens of the world, as citizens of the College, we are experiencing a dynamic period of fracture when all is in a state of significant trans formation. It is a time of great movement from one way to another. Thom Mayne, Visiting Pro fessor in 2016–17, said that the methodology of his work was “constantly a push-pull between af fect and effect, our working methodology embraces the tensions between the emotional and pragmatic dimensions of the human condition.” The push-pull of our world of transition today places us on the threshold of a transformative world of tomorrow. This edge is where we, as ar chitects, designers, educators, and students, thrive. Every day is a time to look forward.

Assemblages in the House of Education

Rafael Beneytez-Durán, Director of Undergraduate Architecture Programs

Change is all about motion. Academics and pro fessionals are challenged by how rapidly new co ordinates of their fields emerge, enlightening new ways of thinking, new ways of doing. The best teachers embrace change as a way of questioning themselves. Today’s architecture discipline and practice are evolving over a privileged period of changes in humanity’s history. Design is all about adaptation.

Since the mid-20th century, the world, the earth, is facing a dramatic rise of global warming, logarithmic population growth, social inequality, wealth imparity, health risks, numbers of refu gees, to mention some of the elements that belong to contemporary entanglements in which the world is taking shape. Such changes inevitably impact the coordinates of architecture when it is conceived as an expression and form of human culture and technology. Design is central to the way the world is being discussed today. Architects can empower the place from where they speak by giving consistency to the world they design. Design is layered as ecological, political, social, for mal, material, technological, environmental. In this new era of ecological consciousness, archi tectural work becomes an embassy (a cross-sec tion) of all these assembled layers. Architecture is the assemblage that manifests in ethical and aes thetical form. As an embassy, architectural work is a powerful tool that reconfigures and mobiliz es the earth’s crust, termed the planet’s critical zone. When many of these layers come together in exemplary architectural works—or why not to say—“architectural devices and embassies of the planet,” they disseminate knowledge as becom

ing paradigms. In a world that has never changed so rapidly, the Undergraduate Architecture (UGA) programs at the Gerald D. Hines College of Ar chitecture and Design embrace this privileged period of change and prepare students to design ar chitectural works that will be paradigmatic embassies, assemblages of all the layers that the world is considering today.

Design studios are at the heart of the UGA programs, acting as hubs, as laboratories of ex perimentation, where all academic areas of Design Media, History, Technology, and Theory and Criticism interact and overlap in their commit ment to global evolution. Every semester the UGA programs launch more than 30 studio problems that evolve in multiple directions before report ing back their results in juries, discussions, and exhibitions that cover the building walls or populate our digital archive with thousands of re markable drawings, plans, sections, axonometric drawings, emblematic images, and models that, beyond training students how to design brilliantly, display the state of knowledge of the collective intelligence that has assembled potential new worlds. The diversity of students and faculty that have formed this body of work represents a myr iad of fields of sensibility that goes from the most pragmatic professional to the most experimental soul; from the logics of technique to the speculations of history, theory, and criticism; from tac tile craftsmen to new design media robotics. Pro spectus is not just an archive of new assemblages; it lays forth a hint of what is being discussed to prepare students in emerging fields of architec ture. Prospectus has been born in a context of eco

logical consciousness and celebrates the diversi ty of design ecologies that dwell in “The House of Education.”

Today’s architects are forced to look closely at the proximate and the remote. Architecture is no longer only about the building scale. Just imagine the quarries from where all the stones are coming, then Rome becomes a pile and a hole for the contemporary architect. Red, black, and white stripes, squares and circles, from its rocks and sands, the school’s monumental atrium floors can explain to us the landscape forms of the for eign territory. Design is all about assembling cul tures, ideas, materials, and technologies of the past, present, and future. In 1983, inspired by the project “The House of Education” (1773) of Claud Nicholas Ledoux, Philip Johnson and John Bur gee reassembled the new college’s building ideas and its material forms. The 1980s introduced a period of fantasy when architecture and symbol ism were married with the late 20th-century par aphernalia of the emerging technologies that envisioned a sealed world—a quasi-autonomous world fed with conditioned air, managed by ma chinery, and fueled by oil and gas. The paradigm of closed worlds—from the corporate tower to the house—belonged to a period of an energy par adigm of abundance that divided Houston in tem pered and untempered built environments. Then, there, and in that way was born the college’s building. Now we know we should open windows and leave the air to blow, temper passively, and move freely within the House of Education. Pro spectus is illustrated by a photographic survey that captures overlooked details and corners of

the Hines, assemblages that we can touch and contemplate closely, to display the proximate. These assemblages today invite us to revisit, re think, and reformulate the college’s material and technological forms. Where are the quarries, the territories, and the landscapes that have been re arranged to support this building? “Building” be comes a noun and a verb.

In closing, I would like to extend my thanks to all the students who reassemble knowledge when inadvertently asking the unknown, the impossible, the unthinkable, thereby challenging contemporary standards. I thank students who force faculty to think the unknown and faculty who trust student’s formulations to defy the log ics of our present.

Academic Areas

Design Media

Coordinator Andrew Kudless

The Design Media curriculum sequence prepares students to use the tools and media of contemporary architectural design. The curriculum emphasizes developing adaptable and iterative work flows between diverse media types (images, drawings, 3D models, etc.) using a range of analog and digital platforms. The overall objective of the Design Media sequence is to facilitate students’ ability to create, represent, and communicate their designs to multiple audiences, including fellow designers, clients, the public, and others in the architecture/engineering/construction professions and political contexts. Topic Areas: Architectural Visualization and Mixed Reality; Computational Design; Fabrication & Robotics; Interaction & Gaming; Simulation, Analysis & Data Visualization; Design Drawing & Sketching; and Theories of Design Media.

Required Design Media Courses, Undergraduate Architecture, 2020–21

ARCH 1210: Introduction to Design Media / Andrew Kudless

Tools, techniques, and theories of media and vi sualization across the design disciplines. An in troduction to the history and methods of design drawings, ways of making, analog and digital me dia, and other forms of design communication that have been crucial to design processes across scales.

Approved Design Media Electives, Fall 2020 / Spring 2021

ARCH 3397-12: Architecture and Techno-Social Media / Galo Canizares, Stephanie Delgado

This seminar takes on the premise that software is an ingrained part of the creative process and that real-time technologies such as Internet browsers and video games push back not only on acts of design, but also on our social conscious ness. We will find that to design is not simply to dream a perfect image and reproduce it flawless ly with tools but is instead a collaborative nego tiation with these powerful tools and the data managed within them. Students will investigate how software and real-time technologies actively condition their users and reflect social contexts. They will then parlay these investigations into de sign projects, making use of real-time technolo gies such as web and graphics programming.

ARCH 3397-10: Datascapes: Architecture in a World of Transmedia / Jeff Halstead

The ubiquity of free downloadable 3D content and easy access to sophisticated gaming environ ments has generated a wave of playable architec ture that is immersive, animate, and transmedial. Untethered from traditional constraints, these works turn physics simulators into design tools and online databases into construction material. Websites like 3D Warehouse can be mined for their content and have their objects repurposed. Open world environments like Unity and Unre al can be used to create, render, and exhibit proj-

ects in real-time. Datascapes will question how we can utilize these affordances and what the broader implications of technology’s democrati zation may mean for architecture. We will ap proach design as an act of discovery, make cata logs of design tools, and consider how a database (a normally static and “objective” form) becomes dynamic and subjective. Throughout the semester, we will switch back and forth between two complementary learning channels: a series of technical 3D modeling exercises and a set of read ing discussions. We will explore projects that make use of Game Engines, Surveillance Equip ment, and Electronic Literature, and we will read a selection of texts by new-media theorists such as Aubrey Anable, Lev Manovich, Hito Steyerl, and Alexander Galloway.

ARCH 2331-01: Digital Vocabularies / Megan Jackson, Michael Gonzales

This seminar will be a basic-to-intermediate lec ture/lab introduction to the concepts of digital design. We will use Rhinoceros and introduce Grasshopper as well as explore methods of digi tal fabrication and production. The course is open to any students who want to explore, experiment, and research with Rhinoceros. The course will be organized thematically (curve, surface, contour, seam, pattern, assembly, etc.), and lectures will give an overview of the software. This course is meant to introduce how digital media, digital craft, and methods of digital assembly are ap proached by different design disciplines and at different scales. Basic concepts will be outlined and taught in class; however, students will be asked to explore and learn the software in depth on their own. This seminar will be set up as a crit ical workshop. The students will be asked to re alize each theme (or working method) by com pleting a problem-solving exercise for critique. The goal is to not only immerse the students in the software but also challenge them to provide their own critical analysis of the techniques. The class will include a discussion of research meth ods within the discipline of digital design and craft. In addition to group and individual prob lem-solving exercises, theoretical readings and

precedent studies will be required. (Students will be responsible for purchasing software for their personal machines.)

ARCH 3397-05: Introduction to Computational Design / Andrew Kudless

This architecture elective will explore computa tional design strategies and tactics. A series of lectures and demonstrations will cover general knowledge of emerging computational strategies within architectural, interior, and industrial de sign as well as more specific training in paramet ric modeling using Grasshopper for Rhinoceros. The course will be taught using a series of case studies drawn from the history of architecture, design, and art in order to demonstrate various methods used with computational design. Start ing with the fundamentals of various geometric data types (points, vectors, lines, etc.) and non-geometric data formats (items, lists, and data trees), students will build up a strong foundation in computational design that will be a valuable basis for further professional development. Stu dents will be responsible for completing assign ments in Grasshopper and submitting wellorganized and annotated files for review and grading. Lectures and demonstrations will be pro vided via synchronous online instruction, and all recordings will be made available so students can review the course materials on their own sched ule. In addition, students and instructor will com municate asynchronously via email, chat, and oth er platforms.

ARCH 3397-11: Hybrid Visualization with AR / Joshua Smith

This lecture course is based on a set of three prem ises that will lay the foundation for the content and scope of the Augmented Reality projects that each student will develop individually: 1) The possibility of constructing an afterpop1 discourse as a response to new modes of immaterial existence. 2) The digital render, although useful, is in need of an updated agenda. 3) There exists a possibili ty to connect AR/PR (physical reality) as amal gams of physical interaction, digital connectivi ty, and symbolic creativity. The resulting projects

will have the ability to create a new typology of public space that exists within our collective tech nological imagination.

Due to the ubiquitous computing technol ogies, shared data networks, global media and techniques of control, and surveillance at the scale of the entire planet, our world seems increasing ly uniform, monocultural, and generic. This appearance of growing homogeneity hides differ ences and heterogeneities at a small scale, which manifest themselves as resistant discontinuities or emergent phenomena in that seemingly con tinuous field. This semester students will project places, landscapes, or constructions that could have an inexhaustible capacity to bring people together, to congregate at the edges of the digital world. Our goal is to bring the digital and the physical closer. A perfect project would be one that erases the boundary completely and defines a new type of reality through augmented draw ing. Our workflow will take us from augmenting an existing drawing to developing our own digital render to finally augmenting our original work. We will be using Maya, Unity, Vuforia, Photoshop, and iOS and Android mobile devices. Students that choose to implement on Apple devices must have an Apple computer in order to build for iOS.

ARCH 3397-08: Computer Visualization I: 3D Modeling / Peter Noldt

Today’s designers are presented with a wide va riety of digital tools for modeling and visualizing their designs. Some software programs are general in nature while others are discipline specific. The purpose of this course is to introduce a num ber of modeling tools so that the designer can choose the program that best fits the presented design problem. Types of modeling mechanisms include parametric, mesh, NURBS, and Building Information Modeling. Basic rendering techniques will also be discussed.

ARCH 3397-07: Computer Visualization II: Rendering and Presentation / Peter Noldt

While digital modeling has given designers the ability to create projects that were unfathomable even just a few years ago, presentation is an often

overlooked partner in the design process. The purpose of this course is to expand the basic pre sentation tools found in most software packages. Major topics include lighting, materials and tex ture mapping, perspective matching, and animat ed walkthroughs. Emphasis will be on the impor tation of 3D geometry from all major modeling programs.

Technology

Co-Coordinators Rives Taylor and Tom Diehl

Introductory course content seeks to instill an understanding of information and performance-based criteria that forms the core of the technology curriculum. These criteria include material appli cations in both structural and architectural roles, sustainability, building systems, and human factors. They are further linked to idea-based themes underlying studio investigations. Subsequent course content follows procedures intended to deepen and expand student comprehension and application of these issues. The goal is to develop understandings of the role and impact these criteria have on building design. The pedagogy underlying the technology sequence incorporates two considerations. The first consideration, related to the content described above, incorporates faculty-led teaching in association with curriculum content provided by professional engineers. Taking advantage of its setting in an urban context, the college can blend research and interests underlying faculty roles with insights provided by professional engineers from multiple disciplines. A second consideration acknowledges the distinct differences between design themes underlying infor mation and performance-oriented topics relevant to the technology classes and pairs them with exercises incorporating design research and application. Students explore and research performance-based principles through an analysis of building precedents and applied structural, building systems, and sustainable criteria. Learning outcomes of that research are then applied and incorporated into studio projects, testing and evaluating their use and potential.

ARCH 2327: Technology 1

Introduction to the broad nature of archi tectural design through defining human factors, site determinants, and material, structural, and building system determinants. Introductory survey of site, structural, and environmental systems including mechanical, electrical, and plumbing. Construction site visits and analytical models and drawings explore building assemblies and are in tegrated with studio projects. By the end of the se mester students have an awareness of the multi ple performance-related factors impacting the design and construction of buildings.

ARCH 2328: Technology 2

Examination of the multi-faceted integra tive nature of architectural design with an em phasis on structural and environmental systems and the role of the architect relative to other consultants. Introductory investigations and analy sis of structural and material considerations. Analysis of HVAC system selection in relation to climatic and human environments with further exploration of active HVAC and electrical sys tems in relation to passive sustainable strategies.

ARCH 3327: Technology 3

Increased development of structural and environmental systems with an emphasis on the integrated nature of design. Analysis of quantitative structural and mechanical performance fac tors through calculations and integration with studio design projects.

ARCH 3328: Technology 4

Advanced building science focusing on quantitative measures. Case studies of integrat ed building systems: site, climate, structures, en velope, and materials. Investigation of the inte gration of design systems in architectural design with an emphasis on site, climate, structures, en velope, and materials. Students will apply values gained from previous Technology courses into their own studio projects to produce innovative results.

ARCH 4327: Technology 5

Assigning life-cycle values to integrated design decisions. Identifying simple systems solutions to complex issues in innovative ways.

Patrick Hugo Margain and Ana Sevilla

History, Theory, and Criticism

Coordinator Michael Kubo

The History, Theory, and Criticism (HTC) curriculum emphasizes an understanding of architecture as a field of cultural production in which social, cultural, economic, and political forces, as well as professional practices, discourses, and modes of representation, have been crucial to the agency and disciplinary definition of the design fields. By deepening student engagement with histories and theories of design, the program cultivates students’ abilities to think, read, and write critically about the cultural and political implications of architecture and design at a global scale. Throughout the HTC curriculum, the pedagogy is intended to address the diversity of design disciplines and student backgrounds with the knowledge represented at University of Houston College of Architecture and Design. HTC courses frequently aim to situate broader, global histories within local examples that can engage student interest and attention. Tangible concerns including historical narratives relate design examples to students’ diverse social, economic, and political contexts.

ARCH 1358: Introduction to Design Culture / Michael Kubo

Lectures provide a thematic introduction to ma jor issues, events, and actors within the history of the design disciplines—in particular architecture, interior architecture, and industrial design. Week ly topics are organized around a series of funda mental social and cultural concerns that affect the human-made and human-impacted environment and connect across the design disciplines, from the everyday objects that surround us to global concerns at the planetary scale. The course also provides an introduction to critical reading and discussion as a means to develop the tools of ob servation, description, and reflection that under lie critical thinking and practice in the design fields.

ARCH 2350/2351: Survey of Architectural History

I/II / Nora Laos

This two-semester introductory course studies the buildings, events, texts, and practices that have shaped the designed environment since ancient times up to the present. We will engage with the central idea that buildings do not exist in isola tion. They are part of global processes that include colonialism, imperialism, nationalism, in dustrialization, and urbanization. We look at how specific political, social, and economic contexts defined works of architecture, landscape, and urbanism, and how these works impacted their con texts in turn. We examine the worldwide move ments of commodities, labor, and capital and their influences on our designed environments. Each semester is divided into thematic cuts that will encourage an appreciation for the differences, similarities, and interdependencies across cultures, time, and space. Crucially, we move away from entrenched nation-state constructions and historiographic categories in favor of a more global perspective.

Approved HTC Electives, Fall 2020, College of Architecture and Design

ARCH 3329/6397: Architecture of the Three Faiths of Abraham: Synagogues, Churches, Mosques (Selected Topics) / Nora Laos

A variety of design approaches of sanctuaries and prayer halls of Jews, Christians, and Muslims; history and basic tenets of each religion are ad dressed in order to provide context for architec ture; focus on the 19th-century to the present. Includes readings and associated essay questions, three essay exams, and a short paper (1,000 words).

ARCH 3341/6397: Contemporary Japanese Architecture / Marta Rodriguez Fernandez Many view Japan as a leader in global architecture, a reputation that is supported by Western atten tion and admiration. This course investigates the roots of this new Japanese architecture, looking beyond the nostalgic argument that Japan’s suc cess is based on its respect toward tradition. This seminar is intended to promote read ing, writing, discussion, and critical investigation of selected aspects of Japanese architectural cul ture and practice. Students will be responsible for research papers in addition to other assignments.

ARCH 3354/6354: The Culture of Architecture / Drexel Turner

This course attempts to provide a better under standing of how architects learn, think, practice their art, and regard themselves. To this end, we will become acquainted with diverse and often contradictory points of view through selected readings, which will form the basis for class dis cussions. These include five short books that will be read in their entirety: From Bauhaus to Our House, Learning from Las Vegas, Palladio, Toward an Archi tecture, and Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture. Each class will focus on one or several ar ticles or the equivalent in chapters from a book.

ARCH 3356/6356: City As Palimpsest: The Case of Paris / Nora Laos

An in-depth study of the city of Paris from the Ro man Empire to the present. Includes illustrated lectures, readings on culture and theory with as sociated essay questions, two essay exams, one short paper (750 words), and a comprehensive layered map completed in Illustrator.

ARCH 3371/6397: Landscape, Ecology, Urbanism (Selected Topics) / Matt Johnson

Two central issues inform the topics of this class: 1) the urbanization of the globe, with over 50% of the world’s population living in cities, and 2) the threat to our functioning ecological systems that arises from this global urbanization and all that it entails. In the last few years, architecture has turned toward the idea of ecology as a way of ex plaining its connection to landscape, infrastruc ture, and building. Architecture is now regarded as only one part of a complex urban system—in which interlinked trends and forces can affect conditions both locally and globally. As such, this course is not meant to be a survey of landscape architecture, but rather an examination of glob al urbanism vis-à-vis this thing we call landscape. The framework of the course is half semi nar, half design studio. The main projects in the class will be research exercises intended to understand more specifically the physical and demo graphic variables that shape the modern global city.

ARCH 3380/6380: Architecture + Film / Dietmar Froehlich

The class introduces students to films and litera ture that have fundamentally captured the essence of architecture and the metropolis. We will look at the mutual influence of film and architecture in regards to their development. The objectives of the course are to enable students to read film and architecture critically and to write about it, to position film further within the context of con temporary architecture, to enable students to use film/video as an investigative architectural tool and as a means of representation for architectur al ideas, and to work in multi-disciplinary teams.

This class consists of writing components and film/video exercises. For Graduate Students this course is conducted as a seminar.

ARCH 3397: Gold Medal Architecture (Selected Topics) / Vera Adams

This course is a lecture/discussion, with a signif icant writing element, using the AIA Gold Medal Winners and Industrial Design Award Winners as our topic. Each student will choose five proj ects by award winning designers and research a case study for each. Writing products at semes ter’s end will include two-page design briefs. A design brief is an example of professional writ ing that discusses: Context, Program, Design Objectives, Design Concept, and SMT (structure, materials, and technology).

ARCH 3397/6397: Publishing Practices (Selected Topics) / Megan Jackson

A historical overview of publishing practices in architecture and design, understood as the process of making things public through communi cative media—from books to magazines, pam phlets, broadsheets, zines, blogs, Instagram feeds, and other publication formats both analog and digital.

Note: This class should be taken by any stu dents wishing to apply for editorial positions for the next Collective Works publication.

ARCH 4351/6351: Readings & Criticism in Architecture / Drexel Turner

This course provides in-depth information on a select group of buildings as well as exposure to different approaches to thinking and writing about particular buildings or classes of buildings, whether considered “high” design or vernacular. Some of the writers you will encounter operate at the level of literature—John Ruskin, Henry James, and J. B. Jackson—while others furnish lu cid, insightful, and intermittently provocative commentary, as with Reyner Banham, Mark Girouard, Mariana Griswold Van Rensselaer, Henry-Russell Hitchcock, Ada Louise Huxtable, James Ackerman, William Jordy, Lewis Mumford,

Colin Rowe, Vincent Scully, Joseph Rykwert, and John Summerson among others. Through read ings and class discussions we will explore ways of looking at and writing about interesting buildings, whatever their architectural pretensions and how ever subtle their claims to our attention may be. This course is reading-intensive; you can expect to read at least one long article or chapter and several shorter pieces for each class.

ARCH 4355/6355: Houston Architecture / Stephen Fox

The course consists of a series of illustrated lec tures and walking tours that describe and analyze the architectural history of Houston. The basis of the lectures is a chronological account of the de velopment of the city from its founding in 1836 to the present. Characteristic building types and exceptional works of architecture are identified for each period within the city’s development. Notable architects who worked in Houston are also identified, and the evolution of the practice of architecture is profiled. Walking tours acquaint students with outstanding buildings and educate them in developing an awareness of the histori cal dimension of urban sites.

ARCH 4374: World Cities / Vera Adams World Cities is a discussion/seminar that is part history and part current events. We will investi gate physical, social, economic, and political mor phology of cities and address the following re search questions: What are the traits of a globally fluent city? What are design problems and solu tions of global fluency for a city? What skills with in your profession impact the design of cities? How will you position yourself as a professional to be of use and in demand? Research, discussion, and presentations will revolve around four traits of globally fluent cities: 1) legacy, 2) opportunity and appeal, 3) connectivity, and 4) identity.

INAR 3300: History of Interior Architecture / Ziad Qureshi

History and theory of interior architecture, in cluding cultural, political, economic, and envi

ronmental influences. Introduction to the important role of “the existing” in interior architecture through a global survey of designers, works, his tory, theory, and contemporary influences includ ing philosophy, fine and applied art, and broader material culture.

Approved HTC Electives, Fall 2020, College of the Arts

ARTH 2394: Introduction to Islamic Art and Architecture (Selected Topics in Art History) / Nisa Ari

This course introduces the art and architecture of the Islamic world from the rise of the Umayyad dynasty in the 7th century to the present. We will consider the relationships of architecture and the visual arts to the history, geography, and tradi tions of the region where Islam emerged and spread, from the eastern Mediterranean and the Arabian Peninsula to North Africa, Spain, Iran, Central Asia, and India. Reflecting the exceptional diversity of the arts in Islamic cultures, this course will examine architecture, painting, met alwork, mosaics, textiles, and more contempo rary media, such as photography and video, in or der to investigate the complex connections between Islam, political history, and the arts.

ARTH 3312/6340: Pre-Columbian Art and Architecture / Rex Koontz

Art and architecture of the Aztec, Maya, and their predecessors. This fall we will examine the painting, sculpture, and architecture of the Classic Maya (c. 300–900 CE). We will focus on the ex tensive collection of fine painted vases and stone sculpture in the collections of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. Students will work directly with the museum collection and produce research on the collection. In architecture, we will focus on the buildings and spaces of the Classic Maya site of Palenque, Chiapas, Mexico, in an effort to un derstand how courtly ritual shaped the center of what is perhaps the most celebrated architectur al ensemble created in the Americas before the coming of the Spanish.

Drake Flood

ARTH 3336/6394: Contemporary Art, 1960–80s: The Postmodern Turn (Selected Topics in Art History) / Natilee Harren

This course explores the diversity of practices and art forms—including painting, sculpture, perfor mance, installation, and new media—that defined advanced art from the late 1950s into the 1980s, a period encompassing the epochal shift from modernism to postmodernism. Focusing on art ists working in North America and Europe, the course charts the shifting definitions and roles of art, artists, and the avant-garde in the wake of so cial, cultural, and economic change in the post–World War II moment, as well as significant the oretical concepts that helped make sense of the myriad new approaches to artmaking.

ARTH 3394/6394: Global History of Photography

(Selected Topics in Art History) / Nisa Ari

This course surveys the history and theory of pho tography from its invention and global dissemi nation in the mid-1800s to the present day. With special attention to how photography’s rise cor responded with the final decades of expansionist, colonial empires and the subsequent growth of modern nation-states, we look closely at how the new medium of photography inspired transna tional networks and new forms of collectivity across the globe. Moving chronologically and thematically, we will examine the diverse uses of pho tography not only in the fine arts, but also in the fields of science, anthropology, and military con quest. Class visits to local museum collections are required.

ARTH 3396/6396: Histories of Latin American Art

(Selected Topics in Art History) / Rex Koontz

A survey of the art and architecture of Latin American from Spanish and indigenous Vicere gal art and architecture to the contemporary in Mexico, Argentina, Brazil, and other key Latin American artistic centers. No previous experi ence in Latin American art or history is required or expected.

This course gives students a firm basis in the key objects, monuments, and scholarship of

Latin American art and architecture. Students may choose to apply to take the spring course

ARTH 3314 Latin American Art at MFAH after hav ing successfully taken this course. In the spring course, you will work directly with curators and objects in the MFAH’s rich Latin American col lections that will be on display in the new MFAH Steven Holl/Kinder building.

ARTH 4389: Museums and the Problem of Display / Sandra Zalman

Development of the culture of display and the impact of art institutions, curators, and exhibi tions on the understanding of artworks and their history.

Approved HTC Electives, Spring 2021, College of Architecture and Design

ARCH 3198: Design Justice / Alan Bruton, Megan Jackson, Donna Kacmar, EunSook Kwon, Susan Rogers

This interdisciplinary seminar focuses on the re lationship between design and justice. The sem inar will address the practices of industrial design, interior architecture, and architecture. The meth od will be a series of short readings, writing and visual assignments, discussions, and other media organized into the following topics: design histories, design pedagogies, design values, design scales, design practices, design narratives, and de sign matters.

Grounded in critical readings, videos, discussions, and in-class activities, the course ex plores the histories, values, practices, narratives, scales, pedagogies, and matters of design justice from both historical and contemporary perspec tives, providing point and counterpoint materials to spark discourse and critical thinking.

ARCH 3342/6342: The Shape of the City / Drexel Turner

This course will provide detailed information about how American cities and towns look and work. In most cases, the articles and books we will read are written by non-native observers who

have lived in the places they describe for extended periods. More often than not, they are “inex pert” witnesses with an uncanny ability to see things as they really are simply by bringing a fresh pair of eyes and an acute critical sensibility to bear on places whose virtues and vicissitudes are of ten hidden in plain sight. Readings and in-class discussion will typically include the equivalent of two long-form articles or several chapters from a book for each class.

ARCH 3347/6347: Evolution of Architectural Interiors / James B. Thomas

This course follows the development of interior architecture through history and how this history is applied to current practice. Students study the broad history of Western interior architec ture emphasizing 18th-through-20th-century in teriors and their influences on current practice. This involves: lectures by Houston interior archi tects; visits to both residential and institutional projects, with their designers; selected films; projects challenging the students ability to relate to history; investigations into the role of nature or biophilia in design; the study of color and pattern usage; and lectures and visits to the Bayou Bend Collection of Decorative Arts, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.

ARCH 3369/6369: The Architecture of the Chapel from Its Origins to the 21st Century / Nora Laos

This course addresses the architectural history of the chapel and is organized according to the different sub-types that define this kind of building. We will study the different kinds of chapels that have developed over time, since the concept of this kind of space was created in Western Europe in the 7th century CE and extending all the way to the present.

The course will be divided into two parts. The first part is split into lectures and short read ings about different chapel types, and it will con clude with an exam on the material presented. This is intended to provide the background and foundation for the second part of the course, in which each student will prepare a researched

PowerPoint presentation on a particular chapel constructed in the 20th or 21st century. This pre sentation is intended to lay the groundwork for a formally written research paper about the chap el, due at the end of the semester.

ARCH 3397/6397: Rethinking Architectural Education (Selected Topics) / Michael Kubo *Approved Research Elective

This course offers a space to critically assess the state of contemporary design education and to explore the recent calls for more equitable and just methods of design pedagogy at institutions in the U.S. and abroad. Readings and topics will include teaching and the practice of freedom (Paolo Freire, bell hooks); race, justice, and equi ty in academia (Sara Ahmed, Stefano Harney, and Fred Moten); theories of creative education in the arts (John Dewey, Donald Schön); and the history of significant schools of design, includ ing the University of Houston. We will revisit key moments of debate in which students, faculty, and institutions have grappled with the social and political dimensions of design pedagogy, par ticularly including histories that bear parallels with the current moment. We may work collab oratively to structure a model curriculum for a design school and/or to create syllabi for cours es within such a curriculum, among other forms of research.

Note: Admission to course by permission of instructor only. Students interested in the course should contact the CoAD Academic Advising office.

ARCH 3397/6697: The Great American City (Selected Topics) / Vera Adams

This course will involve reading, research, obser vation, and analysis of the Great American City and of the writing of Alexander Garvin. Garvin’s “ingredients for success” include: market, location, design, financing time, and entrepreneurship. Special attention will be paid to the role of pub lic parks and open space in successful, livable, sus tainable cities, focusing on improving personal well-being and public health, sustaining a livable

environment, and providing a framework for development and quantifying value. The course concludes with a view to the future as we address the goals and principles of the 21st-century city— beauty, sustainability, preservation, cultural diversity, and justice—via presentations by the students.

ARCH 3397/6697: The City: Social Aspects (Selected Topics) / Vera Adams

*Approved Research Elective

The course is an extension of the World Cities course taught in the fall semester. We will inves tigate the physical, social, and economic aspects of the public realm and sustainable futures of the cities. The course is part history and part current events and conducted as lecture/discussion sem inar. The course addresses in particular the re search of four urban professionals: Alexander Garvin, Clare Cooper-Marcus, Sir Peter Hall, and William Whyte.

ARCH 4351/6351: Readings & Criticism in Architecture / Drexel Turner

This course provides in-depth information on a select group of buildings as well as exposure to different approaches to thinking and writing about particular buildings or classes of buildings, whether considered “high” design or vernacular. Some of the writers you will encounter operate at the level of literature—John Ruskin, Henry James, and J. B. Jackson—while others furnish lu cid, insightful, and intermittently provocative commentary, as in the cases of Reyner Banham, Mark Girouard, Mariana Griswold Van Rensse laer, Henry-Russell Hitchcock, Ada Louise Hux table, James Ackerman, William Jordy, Lewis Mumford, Colin Rowe, Vincent Scully, Joseph Rykwert, and John Summerson among others. Through readings and class discussions we will develop acute and sophisticated observations of (and writings about) interesting buildings, what ever their architectural pretensions and howev er subtle their claims to our attention may be.

ARCH 4354: Ideas and Buildings / Ronnie Self

Influences on architectural thought and practice are numerous. This class will investigate major 20th-century architectural theories and their re lationship to design and built works while giving particular attention to the ideas and buildings of contemporary architects. The material will be ap proached from a point of view that gives value to the craft of architecture and the art of construc tion. Students will situate the work and ideas of a series of contemporary architects in a greater architectural context.

ARCH 4355/6355: Houston Architecture / Stephen Fox

The course consists of a series of illustrated lec tures and walking tours that describe and analyze the architectural history of Houston. The basis of the lectures is a chronological account of the de velopment of the city from its founding in 1836 to the present. Characteristic building types and exceptional works of architecture are identified for each period within the city’s development. Notable architects who worked in Houston are also identified, and the evolution of the practice of architecture is profiled. Walking tours acquaint students with outstanding buildings and educate them in developing an awareness of the histori cal dimension of urban sites.

Approved HTC Electives, Spring 2021, College of the Arts

ARTH 3333/6333: Issues in Contemporary Design / Luisa Orto

Issues facing design in the 21st century, includ ing sustainability and environmental design, ex posure in museums and galleries, global design and national identity, the impact of technology, and conceptual design.

ARTH 3334/6334: History of Graphic Design / Luisa Orto

Development of graphic design within the histor ical context of the late 19th century through con temporary developments in the field.

ARTH 3337/6394: Contemporary Art, 1980s–

Present: Democracy, Identity, Globalization (Independent Study/Selected Topics) / Natilee Harren

ARTH 3394/6394: Modern Art Museums and the Modern Brand / Sandra Zalman

ARTH 4394/6394: Orientalism and Representation (Selected Topics) / Nisa Ari

This seminar explores the historical and cultural construction of the “Orient” through specific ar tistic, architectural, literary, scholarly, and cine matic examples from antiquity to the present. Though Edward Said’s seminal book Orientalism (1978) will ground our discussions, we will also challenge the idea of Orientalism as a singular dis course—that of how the “West” constructed the “East”—by comparing it with theories of intercul tural artistic exchange and by examining Orien talist art’s additional desires, including to engage nostalgia and manipulate time. Through readings and object-based case studies, we will discuss the relevance and implications of Orientalism’s his torical legacy for the fields of art history and post colonial studies.

ARTH 4394/6394: Drawing in the Expanded Field (Selected Topics) / Natilee Harren

Image by students—Jen Bootwala, Virginia Patterson, and Katherine Polkinghorne

Design Studios

The Design Studios are at the heart of the curriculum and pedagogy of the undergraduate architecture programs at Hines, acting as both hub and laboratory. Here, the academic areas of design media, history, theory, criticism, and technology interact and over lap in their contributions to contemporary global evolution. The evolving challenges of a world in the process of reinvention ask architecture for a new agenda, and each year’s projects are framed by this context, responding to design challenges and demonstrating the vibrancy and intensity of design as a distinctive architectural tool that contributes to defining this emerging world.

Student life is organized around the design studio, a unique educational setting that has supported the development of architecture education in North America over the course of a century and a half. The studio’s atmosphere has been modeled on critical practice, and the novice designer is trained over a series of projects of increasing complexity. The four-semester sequence through foundation, intermediate, comprehensive, and professional levels combines project goals with themes from design media, history, theory, and criticism, and technology on a year-by-year basis. For example, design media interacts with foundation studios in the first year to develop representational and design skills with both digital and analog tools. Through the second year, history, theory, and criticism are brought in to connect with the last semester of the foundational phase and the first intermediate semester in order to mature the students’ understanding of architecture culture. This enables them to navigate the different discourses that situate architectural works. Technology interacts with the intermediate studios in the third year to prepare students to embrace the tech nological significance demanded by our cultural context from the urban to the building scales. The comprehensive studio level is a cross-section of the students’ state of knowledge; it serves as

an essential bridge between the intermediate and professional studios with a focus on further developing the tools, concepts, and sense of freedom to explore that will be required in the three professional semesters.

After seven semesters of design education, three additional professional studio courses are dedicated to different topics that open up lines of speculative design, research, and exploration. The variety of these topical studios promotes an understanding of different potential career paths. The studios and academic themes combine to develop prompts and coordinate mini-lecture series, discussions, and juries and conclude with an extraordinary accumulation of drawings, essays, and novel premises for new architecture agendas. Beyond each year’s jury, the program culminates with the Super Jury, an event that celebrates design excellence with awards given by three external critics, principals of critical practices. After the celebratory presentations, the new generation of designers is released into the vast fields of reality.

Foundation Studios

Foundation Studios follow a three-semester sequence. The Foundation Design Studios operate between two parallel pursuits: one that establishes a series of core concepts, techniques, and skills that are essential for the discipline of architecture and another that encourages and provides the space for experimentation and critical examination. The foundation studio sequence does this by focusing on two themes that are fundamental to the discipline of architecture: architecture as a conceptual, cultural, and intellectual enterprise and architecture as a material, haptic, and phenomenological enterprise.

The Foundation Studio Sequence progresses through a pedagogical structure in which we prioritize tools of representation as to the fundamental basis for any design discipline. Then the curriculum moves toward developing techniques for conceptualization and how to consider fundamental elements of the discipline critically. The sequence concludes by locating these conceptual and repre sentational techniques in the world, focusing on the contextualiza tion of the fundamental aspects of our shared design disciplines. Additionally, the foundation sequence is structured so that each project advances at least one new modeling/drawing technique and design methodology within the conceptual framework of a disciplinary design problem.

Representation

ARCH 1500 - Design Studio I (ID, IA, ARCH) serves as the foundation studio for all of the design disciplines within the College of Architecture and Design (CoAD). As such, a series of abstract design exercises explore a variety of techniques for generating form and space through iterative experimentation, lending applicability across a range of scales. The studio offers an introduction to a variety of 2D/3D media and contemporary design methodologies that are developed to foster design creativity and enable critical thinking. Each exercise is coordinated to produce a reciprocity between representational forms and material processes, allowing for a level of conceptual exploration, while asking students to consider how a design is materialized through methods of making. Students are expected to develop a connection between the various tools and media explored in the studio and their effect on design outcomes, representation, and materialization. This will establish the foundation for an informed design process that will be devel oped throughout the design studio sequence. The studio asks the questions: What is my design intent? Why am I using a particular tool/media? And what do these tools and media produce?

Faculty Sharon Chapman

Michael Gonzales

Jeff Halstead

Dijana Handanovic Emily Moore

Roya Plauché Joshua Robbins Joshua Smith Adam Wells

Ross Wienert

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Project 1: Graphic Forms

Necessary for any designer is a facility with and understanding of the representational tech niques that allow for the practice of a particular discipline. This is because designers rarely make the things they design—objects, products, furni ture, interiors, architecture, etc. Instead, design ers create representations of their design ideas through various forms of 2D/3D media. In the first project of the semester, students will focus on developing 2D media—drawings, images, graphics, etc.—as part of a generative and iterative design process (a process that resists precon ception). Graphic Forms is the first step in ex ploring the reciprocity between 2D graphics/ drawings/shapes and 3D forms/spaces. How can one give rise to the other and vice versa? To be graphic is to be flat; hierarchy is achieved through line weight, line type, color, fill, hatch, pattern, image, etc. Yet graphic images are capable of in spiring or suggesting 3D form. This can be done more directly (e.g., drawing a cube), but it can also operate indirectly—consider the relationship between cultural patterns and design objects, or var ious art movements and their impact on fashion, industrial design, interior architecture, and ar chitecture. Similarly, designers may engage in de veloping graphic drawings/images as a way to discover or reimagine the possibilities for 3D forms and space. In this sense, graphics are generative rather than descriptive or analytical. They act as a form of design thinking that precedes making. The first project of the semester is inter ested in the graphic resonance between the orig inating geometries, patterns, etc., that are speci fied by each studio, and how they are composed, collaged, or transformed into a final drawing or image. Students should be able to articulate the

process or the procedural logic that guided their design investigation. The final drawing or image should serve as a trace (what Rosalind Krauss has called an index) of the design process.

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Project 2: Boolean Forms

In the second project of the semester, stu dents will build on the processes and techniques developed in the Graphic Forms exercise to ex plore how graphic images/drawings can inform— either directly or indirectly—a 3D design process. Boolean Forms investigates solid modeling techniques to develop hybrid forms that expose— rather than resolve—the ambiguities that emerge from the intersection of simply extruded forms or geometric primitives, confounding the distinc tion between part-to-whole relationships. The project seeks to find the threshold where a new hybrid form maintains identifiable characteristics of the originating geometries but can no lon ger be clearly defined as such. The point of the ex ercise is not to celebrate imprecision; the value of borderline formal taxonomies is that they resist classification and therefore cause a productive pause, forcing us to critically evaluate our pre conceptions of form and space. In Project 2, each studio will develop a series of rule sets that uti lize predefined geometries or extruded shapes/ profiles, while exploiting the Boolean operations: NOT (difference), OR (union), AND (intersection). The goal is to explore how precedent or preexist ing forms can generate something new. In this case, the new is defined by the degree to which appropriated material is extended or transformed, its arrival set beyond the threshold of derivation, mimicry, or pastiche.

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Project 3: Surface Forms

In the final project, students will explore surface as a volume-defining element that lever ages minimal material means to maximum for mal, structural, and spatial effect. Surface Forms is about thinness rather than thickness, and the project is interested in how manipulating a thin layer can accomplish multiple design goals simul taneously. Each studio will establish different objectives or criteria for the design problem, but common to all will be an investigation into the ways that thin materials offer solutions that are unique to surfaces—such as how a bubble is the most efficient material form for a particular vol ume of space (material efficiency), or the way that folding a surface can create the most surface area in as small a volume as possible (spatial efficien cy). However, design isn’t simply a question of ef ficiency; there can be other agendas—aesthetic, formal, spatial, experiential, etc. To that end, students will be tasked with thinking critically about what surfaces offer, and how those qualities can be exploited toward novel design outcomes. In the second phase, students will investigate how surfaces are structured and assembled, moving from the abstraction of digital surface modeling toward the realities of material properties. Studios may approach surface development differ ently—from articulated assemblies of surface-toframe, patterning, tiling, layering, etc., to notions of composite assemblies where techniques of lam inating, weaving, or embedding simultaneously create structure and form. Common to all studios is an interest in the reciprocity between materials and their effect on surface forms.

Keir Nero

3Kai Wen Chua

Trevor Pyka

Mario Correa

Trevor Pyka

Maria Vazquez

Darnell Zamora

Phuc Kevin Truong

Belen Reyna

Conceptualization

ARCH 1501 is an elaboration of the design methodologies introduced in the fall semester, focusing on questions related to architecture at the scale of the individual and the interior. A series of design exercises introduces the human body’s relationship to form and space (anthropometrics) while investigating the phenomenal and perceptual effects of immaterial and material conditions (interior atmosphere.) Architectural precedent is introduced as both an analytical tool and a generative one, allowing students to learn from history so that they may work with it anew. Techniques of hybridization—formal, spatial, and programmatic—reimagine fundamental architectural elements, allowing for the translation of conceptual design strategies into proto-architectural propositions. The studio asks the questions: What does it mean to be a column, wall, floor, ceiling, door, window, stairway, etc., in the 21st century? How can these elements affect my perception of space? And how are these elements informed by the human body and its movement through space?

Faculty

Michael Gonzales

Dijana Handanovic

Brandie Lockett

Emily Moore

Roya Plauché

Joshua Robbins Heather Rowell

Joshua Smith

Ross Wienert

Project 1: Walls as Rooms

“The Scottish Castle. Thick, thick walls. Little openings to the enemy. Splayed inwardly to the occupant. A place to read, a place to sew... Places for the bed, for the stair... Sunlight. Fairy tale.”

—Louis I. Kahn

“Beyond a certain depth the envelope can broadly be understood as a zone, a boundary elevated to space.”

—nARCHITECTS

From Poché to Poche. Poché is a drawing conven tion that is used to distinguish the space of archi tecture from the surfaces or materials that define it, rendering the cut “figure” of a building as an inaccessible mass. The word poché is french in origin, and it is the past participle of pocher—to blacken (oeil poché - black eye) or to poach (oeuf poché - poached egg). Historically, poché was used in drawings to represent the material thickness of heavy compressive stone/masonry construc tions. As modern construction methodologies have evolved, the blackened abstraction of poché conceals an increasingly specialized assembly of layered technologies, structures, and systems. No longer representing material thickness, poché hides the complexity of interstitial spaces creat ed in architectural construction and made inert by their inaccessibility. Rather than focusing on the graphic clarity of poché, the studio will ex plore the opportunities of the space that it con ceals. The French word poche (no accent on the “e”), translates to pocket, which will serve for the purposes of the studio as a convenient misread ing of the word. Poche shifts our curiosity to the concealed spaces of poché—signaling a missed opportunity that allows us to reconceptualize what it means to be a wall or structure (or both).

Sharon Chapman

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Project 1A: Body in Space

Anthropometry (n): the scientific study of the measurements and proportions of the human body. Creating a tool to understand the body’s re lationship to form and space, students will develop an anthropometric drawing study that docu ments their human proportion in relation to the average heights used in furniture design, interi or architecture, and architecture. Students will also document their bodies’ movements through space to understand minimum spatial require ments and the constraints of stairs, ramps, and circulation spaces. The drawings should be de veloped as both an analytical document and an aesthetic work, drawing inspiration from photo graphic motion studies such as those by Éti enne-Jules Marey and Gjon Mili, among others.

voids • 1 void must be larger than the others and spatially connect at least 2 levels • The volume of all the voids must total 1/3—2/3 of the original bounding volume • Voids must engage all 6 sides—i.e. no sides of the bounding volume are solid/blank • All areas of the remaining mass/ poché should be occupiable, either as a surface or a volume • The massing studies must connect to all existing floor levels in the CoAD.

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Project 1C: Develop Poché

“A place to read, a place to sew… Places for the bed, for the stair…” Students will begin by selecting one of the Mass/ Void studies from Project 1B. Then each student will cut a series of plans and sections through the Mass/Void study and apply the research from the anthropometric studies in Project 1A to develop a variety of spaces that will accommodate a series of body positions and activities. • Must include 3 types of spaces (minimum of 1 each): • Public— opens directly onto one of the larger void spaces

• Semi-Private—embedded/not visible from the larger void spaces • Private—only accessible through a semi-private space • Must include 3 body positions/activities (minimum of 1 each):

54Project 1B: Mass/Void

Project 1B will utilize the atrium of the University of Houston College of Architecture and Design (CoAD) as the site for the first spatial design problem of the spring semester. Students will begin by removing the first two stairs on the west side of the atrium (library side). Working within a volume of 36' x 36' x 36', students will de velop a series of massings that describe the spa tial sequence of an installation that will provide spaces for studying, resting, socializing, eating, etc. The massings must have a minimum of 3

• Standing • Sitting • Laying • A minimum of 1 stair for each level • At least 1 space within the poché should be double-height (or more) and con nect to another spatially.

Project 1D: Embedded Functions, Aperture, and Interior Atmosphere

“Sunlight. Fairy tale.” Within the remain ing poché of the plans and sections, embed func tions and cut apertures to support the various ac tivities: • Embed functions—storage, furniture, etc. • Cut apertures • View out/in, up, down

• Aperture size • Light levels • Surface materiali ty, texture, pattern, etc.

Project 2: Rooms as Fields

In 1999 Stan Allen wrote the essay “Field Conditions.” In it he describes a design method ology that moves from the development of ob jects to fields. He describes a field as a system that can be linked or interconnected globally while al lowing the flexibility to respond and differenti ate itself locally within the overall network: “To generalize, a field condition could be any formal or spatial matrix capable of unifying diverse ele ments while respecting the identity of each. Field conditions are loosely bound aggregates charac terized by porosity and local interconnectivity. Overall shape and extent are highly fluid and less important than the internal relationship of parts, which determine the behavior of the field. Field conditions are bottom-up phenomena, defined not by overarching geometric formal schemas but by intricate local connections. Interval, repetition, and seriality are key concepts.” Working from a list of precedents, students will analyze the orga nizing systems and the interior building elements of canonical architectural projects. Students will develop a conceptual matrix that hybridizes the organizing systems from multiple precedents and they will use hybrid systems to develop their own “field condition” that can respond to the specifics of a site and particular works of art.

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Project 2B: Hybrid Rooms

Working in the groups from Project 2A, students developed a conceptual matrix that hy bridized the organizing principles from the assigned precedents. Each of the organizing prin ciples from one precedent was compared to the organizing principles from the other precedent(s), i.e., what would happen if you hybridized the structural diagram from precedent A with the cir culation diagram from precedent B? Or the pro grammatic organization from precedent C? When all of the possible combinations had been played out, each group of students developed a matrix of potential hybrid systems. The important distinc tion to make during this process was differenti ating between extracting an organizing system of parameters/rules from a precedent versus mim icking the specific form of a precedent. Students focused on defining the organizing system in such a way that it could be deployed in other contexts.

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Project 2C: From Rooms to Field

98Project 2A: Precedent Analysis

Each student will draw the primary floor plan of their assigned precedent and analyze the assigned precedent based on: Structure, Circulation, and Programmatic Organization.

Students picked one of the hybrid systems from the conceptual matrix in phase Project 2B. Each student took the rules from the selected hy brid system and applied it to what Stan Allen describes as a “field condition.” The field condition must demonstrate the capacity of the hybrid sys tem to respond locally to the specificities of the project site and a selected series of artworks.

Lindsay Bevers

Kai Wen Chua

3

Celeste Beistegui

Rachel Gutierrez Rodriguez

Yetlanetzi

Kai Wen Chua

Illeana Lune

Rachel Gutierrez

Jeffery Sosa

Lindsay Bevers

Rachel Gutierrez

Stacey Echartea

Contextualization

ARCH 2500 (IA, ARCH) brings the lessons from the previous two semesters of the Foundation sequence to a design proposal set within the particularities of a site and our Gulf Coast climate. The subject of this investigation will consider one of the most fundamental questions of our design disciplines: What does it mean to dwell in our contemporary context? Throughout the history of architecture and interior architecture, the question of dwelling has served as one of the most potent sites/subjects of design thinking and experimentation. The question of dwelling offers a specific reflection of society/culture—acting as a watermark for who we are, what our priorities are, and how we envision the world. The semester starts by developing a taxonomy of canonical and/or vernacular dwellings to study the environmental, formal, organizational, spatial, and structural strategies that have expanded our conception of dwelling. In parallel, students will analyze the particularities of a site set within a Gulf Coast climate, while developing a broad and inclusive understanding of site analysis as something that considers—in addition to environmental criteria—social, cultural, and contextual factors. Students should also consider evolving notions of privacy, life/work, the nuclear family, and individual subjectivity as a way of challenging cultural norms and redefining what a contemporary dwelling should offer. This research will establish the context from which each student will develop an architectural proposal—a vision for what it means to dwell in the 21st century, inflected by the particularities of their site and climate.

Faculty

Kevin Barden

Sharon Chapman

Donna Kacmar

Christopher Oliver Celeste Ponce

Joshua Robbins

Kristin Schuster

Ross Wienert

Project 1A: Taxonomy of Dwelling

The typical “Building Analysis” exercise of ten puts an emphasis on the reproduction of ar chival quality models and drawings as a way of teaching fundamental skills of technique and craftsmanship, while also learning from an archi tectural precedent. Taxonomy of Dwelling will focus directly on the critical analysis of canonical and/or vernacular precedent by generating analytical diagrams in a very controlled represen tational technique. A comparative analysis will allow students to understand the diversity of scales, forms, types, and organizations across cul ture, time, technology, and place. The catalog of dwelling types should be used during the design phase of the semester to either build an argument for or develop a critical position against a set of design precedents.

Project 1B: Site Analysis

“Because of its intrinsic importance and generative potential, the conceptual content of site must be made available for study and opened up to question as a means to disclose and, ultimately, to challenge the motives and precepts of the discipline.”

—Carol Burns, “On Site: Architectural Preoccupations”

Students will develop a broad understanding of site analysis as something that considers social, cultural, and contextual factors, in addition to the fundamental environmental criteria that is needed when developing a design proposal. In other words, the task of the 2500 studio site analysis will work toward defining a notion of place as a comprehensive form of site analysis. However, this notion should be expanded beyond the act of “cultivating” an already present genius loci toward a generative and projective notion of site analysis that speculates on what new cultural forms might be introduced to, or emerge from, a partic ular context.

Project 2: Dwelling as __________ : A Proposal for a Multi-Unit Dwelling

Working within the studio theme “Dwell ing as __________,” each student will develop a multi-unit housing proposal (2–4 units) for an in fill site in the city of Houston.

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Project 3: Materialization

During the Materialization phase of the project, each studio looks at how a design inten tion is reinforced and refined through a more detailed investigation of material, structure, or en vironmental systems—whether passive or active. Each studio selects a topic for elaboration.

Widad Hayali

Ray Hennig

Regyna Palacios

Saige Prucha

Christopher Torres

Ryan Napitupulu

T’Andra Hatch

Intermediate Studios

The Intermediate Design Studios include students in their Fourth, Fifth, and Sixth semesters of Architectural Design Studies. The sequence provides students with an opportunity to work in the structure of a system of diverse aesthetical approaches led by a diverse group of faculty with expertise in different levels that move from Design Methods to Material Practices and evolve from abstract tools to material realities. Initiating the sequence with an intense exploration of design methods, students are educated in the analysis, representation, and criticism of architectural works by designing a project in parallel to understanding the architectural discourse. This semester runs in conversation with the History, Theory, and Criticism program faculty. The second Intermediate design studio, Design Strategies, develops students’ capacity to make choices and assess their own routines in order to achieve concrete objectives of the final architectural work and built environment, technically and culturally. The third Interme diate design studio, Material Practice, develops students’ capac ity to understand how architecture operates simultaneously with abstract tools and material realities. As the last semester of the intermediate level, the studio format allows students to explore architectural modes of practices and the spectrum of possibilities between instrumentality and symbolism. Focusing on the role of architecture in complex urban contexts, the students reinforce the ability to work with multiple scales, from urban infrastructures to building forms. Concluding the intermediate sequence, this semester emphasizes students’ ability to demonstrate technical awareness of different aspects of materiality, constructability, environmental responsibility, regulatory context, economics, politics, and/or building performance.

At the end of the Intermediate Sequence, students can choose to develop studies of Bachelor of Environmental Design or Bachelor of Science of Architecture.

Each year, interested applicants from around the world apply to Second or Third Year for entrance into Intermediate Level Bachelor of Architecture or Bachelor of Environmental Design. Alongside the completion of admissions applications and the submission of letters of reference and a sample portfolio, applicants are invited to learn more about the programs and study at the Gerald D. Hines College of Architecture and Design.

Design Methods

ARCH 2501 Design Methods (DM) aims to develop students’ understanding of values of disciplinarily knowledge by interrogating and elaborating on case studies in order to explore the methodologies of design processes that result in architectural works. Based on curated and evolving lists of architects and architectural works of the late 20th century and the first decade of the 21st century, DM teaches beginning designers to identify and understand different design methodologies and design media across recent historical periods, providing students with technological knowledge as well as social, political, and ecological perspectives. Structured in three phases, the semester will allow students to develop the ability to analyze case studies and site conditions while growing their own design skills using the precedent method. Through a series of representations, phase 1, focused on Frames, articulates the myriad factors that align in a prece dent study to support the analysis and understanding of the case study’s design methods. Once Phase 1 has unfolded all the mate rials related to the precedent study, phase 2, focused on Alteration, aims to develop students’ critical thinking to enable them to use the tools learned to design an addition attached or adjunct to an existing building. In phase 3, focused on Re-Presentation, which is shorter than phases 1 and 2, the semester concludes by revisiting the Frame and justifying the Alteration.

Precedent Analysis

What kind of object is a work of architecture?

When architects analyze architecture works, they confront their own design capacities. In the process of analysis, designers find areas of certainties and areas of uncertainties. The certainties can be depicted through disciplinary knowledge; the uncertainties can only be depicted by interrogating the design problems that the author is exploring and dealing with. The author’s creative biography is one of the many themes investigated in order to decipher topics that interested the architect, the context of the work, and the problems specific to the historial period. From a physical reality of the work in itself and disconnected from other forces, such as its own bias or historical alignments, the architectural features, position, and dimension build a difference that distin guishes the object’s problem from the building’s problems. These two features also permit us to distinguish the category of architecture from other design disciplines. The form analysis will put the architectural work against, with, within, and in parallel with the many different ways that architecture has been dealing with formal problems. From the vernacular to the industrial, from the abstractions of the modern avant-gardes to the semantics of postmodernism, and from the carbon forms to the ecological awareness age, design methodologies have been evolving significantly in search of new tools, not least because the knowledge and representational tools to represent the world have evolved.

Which toolboxes are needed to represent the contemporary world through architecture? What are today’s questions, themes, and topics of architecture that differ from previous periods? We

can elaborate on these questions later. Phase 1 will analyze architecture paradigms in their own moment and period to understand the architectural work in its context.

In preparation for spring 2021, ARCH 2501’s faculty discussed methodologies, mechanics, charts, and diagrams that have tried to understand the architecture realm’s underlying organizations in order to make readable the discipline’s structure. All materials discussed are built upon a different history, influence, power, or material: none of them is innocent. The Evolutionary Tree of Charles Jencks, the Synoptic Vision of Adrian Meyer, the Career Connections of major American Architects of Roxanne Williamson, or the recent Political Compass: A Taxonomy of Emerging Architecture of Alejandro Zaera, to mention some, permit us to understand connections, lines of work, aesthetical periods, and identities that illuminate that architecture work is, intentionally or inadvertently, always born somewhere close to or in response to another architecture work.

Each ARCH 2501 unit has defined a list of 15–16 precedents (case studies) to be analyzed in depth to decipher the matters concerning the design method used to achieve the architectural work. The design methods will emerge in the process of representing the architectural work within its context and in itself.

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Building Meet Ground / Ground Meet Building / Kevin Barden

GRouNd: Hi Building! I’ve been waiting for you!

BuIldING: Excuse me, do I know you?

GRouNd: C’mon, don’t play coy... it’s me, Ground! I’ve been expecting you for some time now.

BuIldING: Oh, um, really?

GRouNd: Yes, of course! I’m very pleased to meet you. You know, I think we have a lot to learn from each other. Before you get too settled, I’d love to hear what you’re up to these days and maybe I could tell you a little bit about myself as well (?) You see, it all started about 4 billion years ago...

This studio critically examines the rela tionship between Building and Ground. Too often the exact moment of this bond is overlooked and considered an afterthought; however, could this be a starting point for exploration in design? The set of precedent projects chosen for this stu dio interacts in specific and unique ways with the ground plane. While differences may be recog nized in terms of form, material, climate, time, and program, the relationship still stands signif icant in each project between Building and Ground. How do they meet? Is it a handshake? An embrace? An elbow bump? Or perhaps just a nod from across the street? And what impact does this have on the inhabitants and program, space and circulation, structure and atmosphere? Let’s walk into the forest of ideas and come out the other side with a firm understanding of how Building meets Ground.

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Lightness: On Exemplary Gravity Emancipations / Rafael Beneytez-Durán

When the Greek sculptor Calimaco designed the Corinthian order, he declared not only that the symbol of Western architecture par excellence was born from arbitrariness, but also that gravity was inevitably in the ethos of the archi tecture form. The acanthus leaves were at once both supporting the roof system and being pressed under the lintel. That is on the one hand, Calimaco wanted us to know that the delicate acanthus leaves (still present in the freshness of their own forms) were slightly compressed (since they were not smashed or ruined); and on the oth er, the roof lintels, with their perfect horizontal ity and tremendous dimension, were none other than a symbol of stability, equilibrium, and firm ness. Was Calimaco trying to defy gravity by plac ing the graceful leaves at the point of maximum compression? Gravity has always formed archi tecture. The terrestrial attraction force of 32.174 ft/s2 magnitude is a passive designer of the archi tectural form. From the Greek temple to the Tatlin Tower, from the architecture of semantics to technologies, architects deal with gravity either to emphasize it or defy it. Cantilevers, long spans, trusses, steel frames—in other words, the struc tural grid became a fundamental element of the modern movement; as Colin Rowe has stated, “Again, the structural system became the catalyst of a new architecture” to newly signify gravity as “form” in architecture. Houston’s soil and flat to pography combined with disruptive weather events contribute to a place where being elevat ed has become a way to build. Let’s leave Hous ton’s undulating soil to flow underneath and place the building in the air! The precedents selected for this studio signify exemplary emancipations

from the ground, and architecture’s challenge to gravity, being held in the air. While there are sub stantial differences between the various ap proaches to addressing this emancipatory trend, all celebrate lightness, elude the historical opac ity of architecture, and operate with a necessary stability, in contrast with an architecture that abuses formal stability to symbolize its permanency.

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Sanctuary / Sharon Chapman

The de Menil family’s legacy of inclusion, as evidenced by the accessibility to the arts of the world and the ecumenical spirit of the Rothko Chapel, will be the underpinning principle of the project. The intersection of the immediate pop ulace with residents of surrounding areas will be come a focus of the project. The experience of occupying the new building(s) will be characterized by shared interests in education and community, with new relationships being forged and protect ed; residency and income levels will not be taken into account. Art, education, and play/sports/ac tivities should be blind to socioeconomic and res idency status; they are, in fact the tools we can use to break down barriers, both explicit and implic it. Although there are no John Hejduk buildings as part of the Menil compound, his influence and spirit wereentwined with the de Menils. In the small book Sanctuary: The Spirit in/of Architecture, the de Menils’ vision was to be “an instrument for encounters...encounters on such fundamental themes as love, humility, tolerance.” Is there a sort of palimpsest of the spirit and intentions of the Menil neighborhood that can be explored? Is there an overarching sense of genius loci to the location that might be considered in developing the project?

“Hejduk was able to find in the most com mon things, the extraordinary. And I think that’s his lesson, pertinent to all of us. That we strive to find, even in this floundering of rather ordinary times and very disturbing times, something extraordinary.”

“I think that’s part of what we’ve alluded to, that Hejduk had this capacity to extract out of no place, or in the absence of an immediate his tory, something that was immediately palpable... That’s what makes him so vital, because it’s real ly more about the architect exercising imagina tion at all costs, any place.” Carlos Jimenez

The site will become an extension of the St. Thomas / Menil compound. It is not a grand site; it is a residual space, part of the Greek Or thodox church’s site. This humble site will em body the spirits and intentions of both Hejduk and the de Menils.

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Gather / Interact / Community / Tom Diehl

Architects are organizers, as creating or der is required to bring to the design process a level of intentionality that promotes coherence, whether of the site or building. The distribution of the various elements of the building’s program requires organizational concepts, both in their functional and architectural domains. Chief among them is the identification and organiza tion of the primary formal-spatial typologies, as these represent conditions found in all architectural programs. Focusing on community does not negate the need to understand the integration of other spatial typologies. The design of buildings that interact with the community also require the integration of additional supporting issues such as siting requirements, vehicular circulation and parking, system infrastructure, landscape devel opment, and material cladding, etc. These aspects require organizational concepts and strategies as well. Forming those into intentions creating a co herent whole defines the basis of a thorough design process. Often left under-conceptualized are unidentified design attributes that impact a build ing’s design. They are not always themes that em anate from the pragmatic distribution of the func tions comprising the building’s program or design conditions determined by the site. These include spatial and language qualities of the types identified above, the use of circulation as an ordering

device, and structure and materials envisioned for their architectural potential instead of their performance and functional roles. The goal of this semester is to explore these factors and under stand the “non-functional” yet impactful relation ship these qualities have in relation to the design of buildings. The intended outcome is to increase your use of additional design intentions that are often of equal value to those that derive from re sponses to the site and program. With this under standing the goal is to refine the use of lan guage-based design intentions in both their organizational, representational and perfor mance-related domains.

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Contain / Reveal / Roya Plauché

Design Methods (DM). Our studio will fo cus on the relationship between architecture as the container and architecture as the revealer in designing a hybrid space for education. Our theme of the Container and Reveal will focus on three areas of focus: Nature, Program, and Con text. The precedents chosen for the studio each play a role in this containment and revelation to some capacity. Each student will define, analyze, and apply these strategies to their individual proj ect for the semester.

The Container: “Architecture is basically a container of something. I hope they will enjoy not so much the teacup, but the tea.” Yoshio Taniguchi.

The theme of architecture as a container of space, program, and content is not a current phenomenon. Architecture has been used for con taining, collecting, gathering people, places, and things throughout history. In some cases, the con tainment is defined physically, providing barriers and boundaries. In other cases, it is a collec tion of things such as artifacts or the bringing together of similar and dissimilar programs.

The Reveal: “The task of the architectural project is to reveal, through the transformation of form, the essence of the surrounding context.” Vittorio Gregotti

The revealing moments in architecture are sometimes clear and direct and other times more complex and dynamic. The built environment, in whole, is the revealing agent or in part. The no tion of the reveal can be present in relationship to light, color, views, sequences, movement, etc. It is this making apparent that allows for an em phasis or focus on the object or subject in the experience of the built environment.

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The Materialization of Concept and Knowledge / Celeste Ponce

In the essay titled “Paragraphs on Concep tual Art,” Sol LeWitt wrote, “When an artist uses a conceptual form of art, the idea or concept is the most important aspect of the work.” With or igins stemming from Marcel Duchamp’s ready mades, LeWitt helped define the international Conceptual Art movement during the 1960s. In an effort to reinvent or develop new ways of thinking about art, LeWitt rejected abstract ex pression or “gestural art.” He was not interested in art as precious objects or expressive “gestural” forms, but instead looked for ways to generate ideas through rigorous systems and sequences. Inspired by Dan Flavin’s fluorescent tubes and Eadweard Muybridge’s index of The Horse in Mo tion, LeWitt developed ideas centered around se riality, rules, and constraints. He explored systems that produced the next idea: where arrangements were constructed by instructional programs. Influenced by his work at I. M. Pei’s office, he was inspired by the architect’s ability to create a set of drawings or instructions for oth ers to execute or construct. He questioned wheth er art can be created by others with a similar set of instructions, if the work was truly about the idea and not the object. He believed in emphasiz ing concept over object or “thinker” over “crafts man.” The student will examine artworks by Sol LeWitt, as a way to think about the implementa tion of a concept through a rigorous process. The student will survey their precedent study’s plans and section drawings not as a series of activities

but as an arrangement to map out. The indexing and classifying of photographers such as Hilla and Bernd Becher will be examined to better under stand and collect their architect’s measuring tools. Scientific observations will be utilized to formu late a set of instructions for the student to execute as his/her Design Methodology. LeWitt’s essay “Ziggurats” will also be reviewed for its commentary on the employment of New York’s rigid building codes issued in 1961. LeWitt argued that the constraints challenged the design’s original ity to meet a particular function instead of aes theticism. LeWitt’s notion of constraint will serve as a backdrop for analyzing environmental, cul tural, and code constraints/ideas of the student’s work and precedent study.

SITE, Understanding and Reading to Context / Joshua Robbins

“Our environment is the product of diverse processes that are linked in complex ways. Cities are no longer defined by, or even identified with, a single culture. They are spaces where a multiplicity of cultures and cultural forms cohabit and interconnect, where novel subcultures and identities are constantly emerging. Culture can no longer be considered as a set of universal values or conventions which have been established by practice and validated by consensus. Cities are characterized by difference and multiplicity, and this unprecedented level of complex-ity has increased the demand for built forms that provide higher levels of performance.” —Farshid Moussavi, The Function of Form

A clear understanding of Program, Precedent, and Context is critical when developing an architectural project. Each contributes a framework which, when understood in relation to one an other, begins to articulate a thesis to be built upon. Our semester will begin and end at the building scale. Firstly, we will take a careful look at a se ries of iconographic projects and quickly zoom out to understand their contextual relationships.

The goal of this investigation will be to define these projects not by their aesthetic, but by the contextual forces which instigated the architec tural reaction. Once we have finished our jour ney from inside to outside, we will turn and be gin the journey back based on new (and more local) contextual constraints prompting novel ar chitectural responses. Guidance on this journey will be provided by a series of readings including Infrastructural Urbanism by Stan Allen and Land scape as Urbanism by Charles Waldheim.

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Sensitive Containers / Ross Wienert

“I do not think of (architecture) primarily as either a message or a symbol, but as an envelope and background for life which goes on in and around it, a sensitive container for the rhythm of footsteps on the floor, for the concentration of work, for the silence of sleep.”—Peter Zumthor Sensitive Containers: This studio will investigate both the internal and external forces that act on a building and consider how these forces can give that building shape. Though architects must consider a myriad of factors in the design of a build ing, the way that designers respond to those fac tors varies widely. Each designer will prioritize certain influences, emphasizing some elements while minimizing others. The expression of that hierarchy possesses the potential to embody val ue and establish meaning. Internal—Program matic Relationships: Within the building, students will be asked to consider the demands of a vari ety of internal building functions, each with its own spatial, acoustical, and structural requirements (among others). Investigations will be made into how this combination of programs may shape the building in order to create harmonious relationships. Approaches to these questions will be challenged to go beyond the rational in pur suit of the surrational. External—Experiential Sustainability: Beyond the building, students will

be asked to consider both the aesthetic and performative potential of sustainability. This ques tion will be addressed from the standpoint of a designer, with an emphasis on the effect on expe riential qualities and embodiment of cultural val ue over the calculation and quantification of nu merical value. Each design should consider how the building responds to issues related to sun, wind, and water in order to provide thermal com fort and potentially heighten one’s understand ing of ecological forces.

Ryan Napitupulu

Rowena Jayamanne Mohottige Dona

Erin Nieto

Joshua Carter

Saray Mata

Yanci Ramirez

Isabella Ludena

Danielle Zabaneh

Andrew Thai

Hussein Al Hamadani

Design Strategies

ARCH 3500 Design Strategies (DS) aims to develop students’ capacity to make design choices and assess their own design routines to achieve concrete and determined objectives. DS rein forces students’ ability to think critically and develop a robust knowledge of the final architectural work, both technically and culturally. In the first half of the semester, students develop a set of research frames and precise representations of the site conditions as well as elaborate schemes to explore the design problem. Students will gain a clear understanding of the project premise after determining design objectives and responding to them by establishing a set of design strategies for the midterm reviews. In the second half of the semester, students will provide specific solutions related to program, materials, constructability, and/or building systems and their relationships with the built environment at the scale of building, extrapolating to the impacts on site and territory. Students will progress on the process of form find ings and the search for technical solutions. Students are expected to mature in their methods and design routines and to critically assess their outputs. The semester will conclude with two main outcomes articulated in the realms of idea and constructed form through a unique architectural work.

Recycling Plant

For a future of ecological and social balances

In a city with a population of about 7 million, the production of waste is unmeasurable. One million tons of waste is accumulated and digested by different processes but not all waste can be accumulated or digested. For instance, a big bulk of waste is shipped from London to China every day, or unmanaged waste travels from rivers to seas and accumulates everywhere. The average American generates 29 pounds of waste a week. Displaced waste is contributing to substantial social, political, economic, and environmental injustice. By 2050 oceans are expected to contain more plastics than fish (by weight). Millions of citizens live buried under the waste of society’s consumption and are forced to dig into it to find ways to survive since they don’t have access to any type of commodities.

Within this problematic frame, recycling is not merely an option, rather it is an ethical, aesthetical, and ecological necessity. Recycling is a shared responsibility from the citizens to their community, from communities to their governments, and from governments to Earth. Accumulated waste might be the quarry of the future.

An immense flux of matter takes place in the domestic and public spheres. Plastic, glass, cardboard, paper, cars, computers, containers, dredged material, or food pass through our hands every day, in every action. An immense bulk of matter flows through the domestic space. Being accountable for our own waste, actively participating in the process of waste management, and

taking responsibility for the material flux—these are actions that can start by interrogating the materiality that surrounds us.

Whether talking about tools or buildings, French fries or landscapes, designers and consumers can place themselves some where in the product chain. From making material choices to everyday life’s material rituals, citizens can substantially impact these processes and their territorial consequences. The material chain has to be visualized in order to accomplish this goal. In this chain every single individual action and every single gesture matters. Architects’ decisions impact communities, territories, and cultures. During the fall 2020 semester, 3500 studios sought to actively discuss the topics of waste and recycling to design a built environment where recycled waste will produce a circular economy that will benefit the proximate and remote communities, ecologies, and territories.

On August 10, 2002, Hans Ulrich Obrist interviewed Cedric Price on the work of Abalos & Herreros. Price focused on the Recycling Plant project they designed in Madrid in 1999 to emphasize several aspects toward a new set of architecture values by naming features such as cheap materials, social economy, social values, non-pompous forms, modesty, process, time, and infrastructure architecture. With chip materials and social awareness “they designed the recycling plant as if it was the first cathedral that had been built.” Price signified the cathedral as a product of many communities and groups and demystified the heroism of the solo author to empower the communal action of design. From waste to the built environment, recycling is a collective effort that can be linked through design.

Going beyond the multipurpose box and with clear sustainable principles, in 3500 studios the recycling plant was considered as infrastructure architecture, where fluxes of matter and fluxes of social impacts met, where the designers built relation ships between the territory and the form, the individual and the community.

Each studio unit, led by a different critic, approached the theme from various angles and perspectives. Eight units produced a critical mass of discussions over the first half of the semester to define design objectives and architectural answers for the midterm reviews. The second half of the semester developed the ideas and images in detail toward the final project, with an equal balance of architectural ideas and technical documentation. The studio sought to reimagine the paramount relationships between the subject and the social, territorial, environmental, and ecolog ical realms. The problematic framework was constructed during the unit discussion and was shaped by student preferences.

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Recycling: The Industrial Neighborhood / Robert Burrow

The biologists Edward Wilson and Bert Hölldobler have studied ants for more than 40 years. Their discoveries about ant communica tion and survival in different ecosystems have led to insights about invisible interconnections among living organisms. These living systems operate with an interconnected symbiotic technol ogy. Ants, bees, and humans are known as *su perorganisms.*

Unlike natural systems living in a negoti ated balance with their environment, human technology constitutes a synthetic superorgan ism. To sustain itself, natural resources are irreplaceably mined, and dispossessive social order arises. The human relationship with nature and itself exists more in a parasitic capacity than a symbiotic capacity. This era of enormous human impact on earth has been termed the *Anthropo cene.* Architecture bears a large share of this an thropic footprint. This project will examine industry and its effects on the fabric of Houston neighborhoods. From this examination students will offer critical proposals examining select dis parities. One of the many goals is to understand the symbiotic aspects of neighborhoods and ecol ogies that have been disrupted.

The primary economic drivers for the Houston economy have been the petrochemical and shipping industries. Without zoning, these flourished along Buffalo Bayou, the Houston Ship Channel, and Galveston Bay. While they have helped make Houston relatively wealthy as the second-largest port by tonnage in the nation, there has been collateral disintegration of the so cial fabric with neighborhoods subsumed and marginalized by this growing “prosperity.” Hous ton has firmly rejected zoning to guide this de velopment since its first zoning vote in 1948. This

has engendered and continues to sustain an antagonistic relationship between industrial devel opment and domestic prosperity. The older city fabric of the ward systems that evolved along the Houston bayou network has gradually eroded due to the dominant presence of an indifferent heavy industry.

Houston’s history is inextricably linked to its waterways. What were once small thriving neighborhoods near the bayous have been dis rupted by industry, climate change, and econom ic disparities threatening their survival. This proj ect will examine these affective and effective layers along Buffalo Bayou and propose architec tural solutions mediating encountered disparities and prosperities.

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A Plastic Island: On the Origins of the Period of Material Thinking / Rafael Beneytez-Durán

A blue pen, sunglasses, most of the ele ments in my computer, the frame and fabric of the chair that hosts me while writing this premise, a flash drive, the kindle frame, a screen and case protector, my headphones, the cover of the books I am consulting, packaging of things, or the laminating and encasing of the printer placed on my back. Plastics surround me here, in my car, in the shower, in the airplane...everywhere plastic, plastic, plastic! Plastic, a material that can become anything, is the “mass product of the mass democ racy” at such a level that it has metamorphosed from crude oil into many of our forms of dwell ing and living. On the one hand, plastic is an endlessly transformable material, on the other hand, plastic cannot return to nature because it is not biodegradable. Knowing this, humanity has par tially plasticized environments and bodies, even culture, by producing 260 million tons of plastic per year. “Plastic has become emblematic of econ omies of abundance and ecological destruction....

The material force of plastics prompts new forms of politics, environmental responsibility and cit izenship.”

In 2016 The Global Partners of the Ellen Macarthur Foundation anticipated the following: “By 2050 oceans are expected to contain more plastics than fish (by weight), and the entire plas tics industry will consume 20% of total oil production, and 15% of the annual carbon budget.” Evidence of the long-term effects of microplas tics on human and animal bodies is insufficient today, but it is highly probable that they will have negative consequences. Ingrid Halland’s essay “Being Plastic” starts by re-creating the narrative of artist Gaetano Pesce’s 1972 installation in MoMA (New York) called The Period of the Great Contaminations. In the interior of a plastic bunker, a plasticized man is found by an archaeologist team in 3072. Halland navigates us to the point of Barthes: Life is being plasticized; “microplas tics have been found in a variety of commercial fish and shellfish, including samples purchased from retail outlets"; and, “the whole world can be plasticized, and even life itself since, we are told, they are beginning to make plastic aortas.”

the local economy. At the industrial scale, recycling—where it occurred—was considered a pro cess of removing waste in an economical manner with little concern given to environmental con siderations. Waste byproducts of extraction and manufacturing processes were seen as necessary outcomes of doing business rather than as inte gral parts of a process where the waste products of one manufacturing process could be reimag ined as feedstock for another.

This semester research and design inves tigations will expand the premise of recycling to advance awareness of its potential beyond mate rial considerations. The intent is to allow for a re conceptualization of how land, communities, and even perspectives can be “recycled” to promote a more inclusive and balanced approach to factors affecting design decisions. To that extent the proj ect can be viewed as a place of education, wheth er that relates to the building and its program, the use and repurposing of the site and surrounding areas, or how materiality and its assembly is understood as conveying meaning instead of being understood as a commodity. While other criteria can and will be considered, the larger premise of this semester explores how to develop an archi tecture that not only solves the necessities of the program but also informs and educates.

5Expansive Recycling: Perspectives, Materials, Land, Program / Tom Diehl

The idea of recycling became a part of the public mindset with the inaugural Earth Day cel ebrated in 1970. The holiday gave a voice to an emerging public consciousness about the state of our planet. An outgrowth of the actions and ac tivities surrounding Earth Day was a new com mitment to the recycling of materials. While ex tensive in its reach, recycling became primarily understood as an individual act that could, on oc casion, include community action.

Houston, as the center of the oil and gas in dustry and a significant manufacturing center of the country, maintained a consumption-based profile where the extraction and production of natural resources remained a dominant driver of

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Forgotten Fruit: The Industrial Neighborhood / Michael Gonzales

“Understanding what drives our consumption behaviors to design and assume better practices.” —Charles Michel

This semester our studio will examine our relationship to food, its waste, and the ability for food to be a driver of social and environmental change. The United States is the global leader in food waste, with Americans discarding approximate ly 219 pounds of food waste per person per year, which equates to 40 million tons of food every year and 30–40% of the U.S. food supply.

Discarding food has irreversible environmental consequences; it wastes the water and en ergy it took to produce it and generates green house gases like methane, carbon dioxide, and chlorofluorocarbons, which contribute to global warming.

According to the World Wildlife Federa tion, the production of wasted food in the United States is equivalent to the greenhouse emis sions of 37 million cars. Inedible food waste can be recycled into other products and materials such as biocomposites, which produce little to no waste, can be degraded into water or other mate rials with no toxic byproducts, and can be modi fied to respond to environmental changes.

ues to operate a comprehensive maintenance and management program that utilizes hundreds of community service workers to collect and remove trash and debris from Buffalo Bayou and its trib utaries—preventing it from flowing into Port Houston and on to Galveston Bay.

Five days a week, BBP’s field operations staff directs and works alongside land-based crews of community service workers who collect litter and debris from the banks of the waterway. Crews working from boats clean storm drains, banks, and other natural collection areas. Collec tion booms are placed not only on Buffalo Bayou but also along neighboring bayous, with BBP re moving trash and debris along Brays Bayou up to the Gus Wortham Park Golf Course. In 2019 over 1,500 cubic yards of trash and debris were re moved from the waterway.

7The Upcycle / Paul Homeyer

The Houston area stormwater drainage system directs street water and debris into curb catch basins that route the runoff through an un derground system that empties into the city’s bay ous. Discarded soda cans, plastic bags, Styrofoam cups and other pieces of floating litter from the streets enter into the drainage system. After a rainstorm, a tidal wave of trash flows into the Turning Basin on its way to Galveston Bay, the largest estuary on the Texas coast and part of the National Estuary Program. As the water level re cedes to normal in the bayou, trash is left in the water and along the bayou’s banks, trapped in trees and other vegetation. This recurring pres ence of trash, debris, and pollutants degrades wa ter quality and negatively impacts the ecosystem. In addition, the appearance of litter results in a less appealing recreational amenity for residents and visitors to enjoy and affects Houston’s overall image.

To advance its mission of revitalizing Buf falo Bayou, Buffalo Bayou Partnership (BBP) ini tiated a clean-up program in 2002. Thanks to on going partnerships with Harris County Flood Control District and Port Houston, BBP contin

8Dredge of Tomorrow: Recycled Dredging Facility + Institute for Landscape Architecture / Marcus Martinez

This semester’s investigation focuses on rapidly evolving landscapes. Brady Island was cre ated as the result of Houston Ship channel dredging along the Neighborhood of Harrisburg and the 50-mile Houston Ship Channel. With ample time, all land is fluid. While the dredge cycle be gins with erosion, geological or naturally occurring erosion makes up 30%, and human activity accelerates the remaining 70%. For further scale reference of this acceleration over time—in Egypt 2500 BCE the annual earth moving per year was 600kg per person, whereas today worldwide it is 6 tons per person and nearly 30 tons per person in the U.S.

The island oscillates between neighbor hood living and logistical landscape. The locale has a famous restaurant, Brady’s Landing, which hosts waterfront weddings for local patrons, and the site is heavily logistical to the east with a re cycling facility, and along the south are industri al businesses and services.

Central to this project will be the concept of recylcing or, more precisely, recovery of ship channel dredging material. To keep Port Hous ton’s waterways navigable, City of Houston has to dredge to reinforce commerce. “Port Houston has received $70.4 million for maintenance dredging in the 2020 fiscal year. The money, up from the $20 million to nearly $30 million received in past years, is to maintain the waterway’s current width and depth.”

Dredge material can be recycled and “pro cessed into engineered structural fill and em ployed in wide variety of beneficial reuses includ ing mine reclamation, landfill capping, golf course contouring, and the redevelopment of brownfields.” Through this project we will understand this resource over time as an ecological resource, an economic tool for manufacturing pathways and terrain, and we will capture untapped social qualities.

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Brady’s Island Area: Houston / Kevin Story

The spot formerly known as Old Harris burg is nestled between working-class neighbor hoods and tankers heading to the ship channel. It also marks the spot where Buffalo and Brays Bay ou meet. Early visionaries saw the importance of the area to what would become Houston. The community is located east of downtown Houston, south of the Brays Bayou and Buffalo Bayou junc tion, and west of Brady’s Island. It was founded before 1825 on the eastern stretches of the Buffa lo Bayou in present-day Harris County, Texas, on land belonging to John Richardson Harris. In 1926 Harrisburg was annexed into the city of Houston. The original name of Harris County was Harrisburg (Harrisburgh) County until it was shortened after the demise of the City of Harrisburg. Histor ical markers at the John Richardson Harris site tell of Santa Anna razing the town on his way through chasing Sam Houston and his retreating army just before they reached Lynch’s ferry.

The City of Houston has partnered with a private investment group to promote environ mental sustainability to the public by providing a public viewing area and educational center for student and community groups showing the pro cess of recycling large- and small-scale waste products and its benefit to support a more sus tainable environment. The types of waste to be recycled include paper goods, aluminum cans, and large steel and/or aluminum product waste collected from local industrial manufacturing plants. Large waste products collected for recy cling will be delivered to the facility using barge access from the bayou system and from a street-access trucking driveway. The public can also drop off small-scale paper good and alumi num can waste products at a designated on-site drop-off location.

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Broken Feedback Loops of Brady’s Island: Inequalities of Land and Community Future Loops / William Truitt

Ecology is simply the relationship between organisms and the environment. Although the term and and field of study was originally developed for the sciences, design has the greatest op portunity to make physical the link, or feedback loop, necessary for any ecological system. On Brady’s Island, that link is broken. Geography and economy combine to create an uneven landscape that is decidedly against the local population. What are Terrain Vague, LOCOs, or Prickly Space? Reading and analysis illuminate these (and more!) in the site.

Saotonglang

Danielle Fronda

Adrian Cardenas

Constance Teng

Kieran Renfrow

Tricia Asuncion

Jenna Agatep

Lucia Barquin

Thu Trinh

Material Practice

ARCH 3501 Material Practice (MP) aims to develop students’ capacity to understand how architecture operates simultaneously with abstract tools and material realities. As the last semester of the intermediate level, MP allows students to explore archi tectural modes of practice and the spectrum of possibilities between instrumentality and symbolism. Focusing on the role of architecture in complex urban contexts, MP reinforces students’ ability to work with multiple scales, from urban infrastructures to building forms. Concluding the intermediate sequence with critical knowledge of design methods and strategies, MP emphasizes students’ ability to demonstrate technical awareness of different aspects of materiality, constructability, environmental responsibility, regulatory context, economics, politics, and/or building performance. In the first phase of the semester, students are expected to demonstrate the ability to integrate research into the project through a holistic approach to multiple scales of the design problem. The relationship between input and the impact of the research process will be assessed in the midterm reviews through comprehensive project documentation that articulates the proposal within the premise defined by the instructor and within the ideological frame defined for the semester. In the second phase of the semester, students will elaborate on the material and constructed form in their final proposal, which concludes with a unique architectural work presented through a graphic narrative that articulates abstract tools and material realities.

The Architecture of Speed Zone

As Laurence Lumley might suggest in his essay “The Invisible Bituminous Desert” (2019), the asphalt empire that builds the vast intercontinental road networks of the world can be understood as a single form. This form has become a way of designing cities, transportation, industrial processes, and policy decisions—and through all these, our very relation to the world. Asphalt is everywhere, a ubiquitous matter that has become both invisible and a way of life.

“In the late 1940s, the Texas Highway Commission undertook an immense construction program, much of it in Houston. By 1980 the city had over 200 miles of freeway—spoke and wheel. The network of suburban freeways contemplated at a remove from its setting is a singular feat of engineering—a grand tribute to the expansionist spirit of suburbanization. Constant geometry elevates technological prowess to the highest form of reason in the tattered landscape. Freeways rule the metropolis, just as sewage rules the traditional city.

When immersed in Houston, it does not take long for the obsessive character of its freeways to come into mesmerizing focus. Negotiated at the top speed, the human parade of suburban culture is here most vigorous and most determined, yet paradoxically, most dependent on technology. The denizens of the freeway have become its product, users transformed into victims. Commuters on a subway train passively submit to the indignities of underground life, while drivers on the freeway enact the very form of the network. No longer kibitzers, they are performers in the theater of mobility.

In Texas, most freeways are bordered by two parallel front age roads which feed the endless commerce distributed in repeat ing clusters of franchise outlets, forming a linear city—soon a thousand miles long. The result is a network of speed zones that

dominates the metropolis at its major trunk lines. Houston’s freeway form a spoke and wheel system, now augmented with high occupancy lanes and series of semiprivate toll roads. The formerly smooth prairie is today pulled pushed, tweaked and twisted by the reckless force of mobility, whose destiny no one can predict.” —Lars Lerup, Speed Zone, on One Million Acres & No Zoning

Fieldroom, Zoohemic Canopy, Downtown, Speed Zone, and Weather are Lars Lerup’s Megashapes. In his Abecedarium, Lerup has adopted the speedway as one of the Megashapes used to describe Houston’s urban reality. In other words, the scale of this urban form is the very one of bigness. Is Houston depictable in scale other than the one of bigness?

This semester ARCH 3501 will discuss the reality of architecture confronted against or in agreement with the Speed Zone’s scale. Can architecture survive in its delicacy, peaceful dreams, and sensitive forms when close to the infrastructural Megashapes of Houston Speed Zone and ignoring the tons of asphalt, concrete, and steel to support mobility? On the contrary, can the Megashape of the speedway become an ally that gives reason to the architecture work?

Eight different perspectives are open for discussion. Each ARCH 3501 studio section will work on a different site and with a different programmatic problem. All of them will be interrogating the relationships between architecture and speed zones to consider multiple scales, from urban infrastructures to building forms.

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Resilience Factory: An Icon of Houston’s Motiva tions / Amna Ansari

Agenda 2018 marked Houston’s resilience journey, joining the 100 Resilient Cities Network. These plans focus on equity, health and wellness, connectivity, and sustainability. In particular, in frastructure and environment are facets so dis tinct to Houston that they have become form-giv ing and regional in scale (bayous and freeways, flooding and traffic). Amplified by the automo bile as well as development practice, architecture, once operating on a scale to effectively organize the public life of the pedestrian, now confronts challenges beyond historical reference. The stu dio is focused on how we can navigate a landscape defined by such an over-abundance of space that it stresses connectivity by means other than the private car—instead, a highly networked “micro speed zone,” a bike city. Program: This “resilience factory” is a bike pavilion; a space for health and fitness; a teaching space for bike repair; a space for creation, assembly, and entrepreneurship with small-business mentorship; and a mechanism for water storage with proximity to the bayou. If mass production defined a shift into modernity then the factory is modern architecture’s definitive ty pology. How can the “resilience factory” serve the existing community by considering a comingling of programs and architecture? Projects will be represented, evaluated, and calibrated through “distinct flows” as a process, environmental im pact, community impact, and material logic. Am bition: We set out to ask not only how architec ture can continue to function in this condition but also how it can play a transformational role in it. This studio envisions the site as a prototype that can respond to the environmental stresses

and shocks of the freeways and the bayou. In addition, we propose two additional sites in the city where your prototype could bring value to the community. Representation: We take aim to vi sually construct ideas with durable impact. From exploded axonometric, obliques, and performa tive slices, the semester promises a perpetual min ing of representational means, capturing material interrogations that produce rich drawings that chronicle contextual attributes, quirks, environ mental cycles, and the diversity of participants.

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: Transient : Permanent : / Robert Burrow

Human civilization has made great tech nological leaps, but fulfilling the promise of so cioeconomic equality and material coexistence requires interim steps. Economically the plight of most humans is improving, but we are still faced with dramatic housing shortages affecting the well-being of many in marginalized commu nities. These communities are nomadic, transi tioning between temporary resource opportuni ties for survival. Freeways and streets participate in these migrations by creating public open space and shelter, though often removed or alienated from established neighborhoods. Though shelter is available, basic services and a sense of defensi ble territory are lacking. Inaugurated for military mobility, freeways slice through cities and landscapes, often unaware of the effects on local nat ural and sociological contexts. Their necessary expansion deepens the wound to neighborhood connectivity. Today, environmental impact stud ies are an essential part of understanding land scapes. Architects can participate by examining the needs of underserved communities and the implementation of infrastructure as a catalyst for meeting local communities’ needs. How can free ways, as public infrastructure, better accommo date a growing need for spaces for the placeless? What are possible solutions for the combative living environments near freeways? Solution proposals proliferate, but practical solutions are

elusive, often requiring conflicting interests to collaborate for a common cause. Real solutions will likely be public-private partnerships, allow ing government agencies to maintain jurisdiction over public infrastructure. This project will ex plore alternatives to transitional and permanent housing for marginalized individuals and groups. An array of temporary and permanent strategies will be explored at two sites along the proposed IH-45 relocation corridor. The “East Corridor” proposes a section of underground freeway used as a stormwater collection point during major flood events. The project will allow reconnection of the Houston Central Business District with the historical East End.

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Urban Farm Islands: A Shift from Mobility to Community / Karim Fakhry

By 2050 urban residents will account for more than 68% of the world’s population. Cities will further expand. Food and agricultural de mands will grow exponentially. Transportation networks will have to respond to the increasing needs. Highway systems intended to cater to growing cities create ruptures within the larger urban fabric and on the scale of neighborhoods and communities. Residual spaces or urban is lands are byproducts of vehicular mobility. These spaces are underutilized and proliferate within the infrastructural network. They also further contribute to the disruption of pedestrian traffic and connectivity. If highways are a nod to the reign of mobility in the sprawling metropolis, could vehicular infrastructure serve as a canvas to dramatically transform fresh food production and its transportation? How can an appropria tion of the residual infrastructural islands enable a reinvention of the urban agricultural landscape? How can these interventions enhance urban con nections, prioritize pedestrian traffic, and empha-

the urban islands of existing infrastructur al megashapes contribute to human-centric ur ban development and allow cities to become more resilient, ecological, and sustainable?

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Urban Pontis Flood Shelter / Victoria Goldstein

This semester we will explore the urban potential of the flood shelter—the kind of urban activation this architectural typology can offer when used for its initial purpose as well as when used as a community centre. This double-fold program will encourage students to think about flexible architectural space and how it can influ ence its surroundings within the urban realm. The site sits between the metro rail, the highway, and the urban fabric, demonstrating the complexity that unfolds in the interaction of such systems. Houston used to be a conglomeration of small towns “sewn” together by a rail system, to be lat er displaced by the automotive. Recent trends are reincorporating the rail system, and this should be reflected as an initial thought to generate the project’s concept. Connectivity in this fast-grow ing city is crucial to its long-term health and as a strategy during flooding periods, mainly to get city dwellers to safety. Highways play a major role during flooding times as well, since they allow a variation in movement speed at higher planes than locals roads. The initial site studies will incorporate digital design, site analysis, and envi ronmental conditions in order to generate hy brids between natural and artificial city-systems. The initial Parametric Charette will introduce students to techniques with which they can quick ly generate urban scenarios that “tie up” existing systems, generating fluid transitions rather than

border conditions and encouraging environmental responses that may be transformative rather than static.

The Bridge: Reconnecting the Third Ward / Paul Homeyer

Houston’s Third Ward, just south of down town, has a rich history and culture deeply significant to the local African American community. The original northern and western boundaries of the Third Ward were Commerce Street and Main Street, respectively. Houston’s wards were origi nally political boundaries establishing districts for city council seats. But the identity of the wards has shifted since being defined by their primary ethnic makeup. By the early 20th century, the Third Ward was known primarily as an African American neighborhood. Partly as a result of seg regation and Jim Crow laws, black businesses (limited to certain areas in the city) thrived in the Third Ward. Dowling Street (now Emancipation Ave) was lined with scores of black businesses serving the neighborhood. The construction of two major highways later in the 20th century im pacted the Third Ward dramatically. Opened in 1952, the Gulf Freeway (IH-45) divided the Third Ward into north and south, bisecting the once-bus tling Dowling Street. The construction of State Highway 288 through the middle of South Central Houston between 1974 and 1985 divided the neighborhood into east and west and displaced 295 households in the Third Ward. Though tech nically part of the historic ward, those areas cut off from the heart of the neighborhood are now identified as East End (or EDO) and Midtown. The decision of the Texas Highway Department to run these roadways through the predominantly mi nority ward was not accidental or unusual. Ac cording to Kyle Shelton, author of Power Moves: Transportation, Politics, and Development in Houston, “During the 1950s and 1960s, as a part of wid er urban renewal efforts, officials from many states and cities worked jointly to place highways through minority and working-class neighbor hoods.” The disenfranchised residents of these neighborhoods had no political or economic clout to successfully resist the intrusions. The current

Elgin Street bridge crossing Highway 288 is a 60-feet-wide by 450-foot-long swath of concrete that is unpleasant to cross for not only vehicles but especially pedestrians and cyclists. The view of the downtown skyline to the north is the bridge’s only aesthetic asset.

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Climate Consulate: The Climate in the Speed Zone / Christopher Oliver

The booming suburban and exurban rings that surround Houston, and the attendant Speed Zones that serve them, are the basic stuff of the post-war American city. Yet the vast fields of as phalt and concrete that undergird these meta phorically “hot” real-estate markets are them selves getting hotter as the earth warms and the dangerous effects of urban heat islands are exac erbated. A 2019 study indicates that the number of days with 105°F+ heat indices will rise from 10 to 74 in 2065. In addition, an August 2020 heat-mapping study showed 20°+ differences be tween highly paved and unpaved areas in Hous ton during the hottest times of the day. Extreme heat is just one danger posed by a paved, warm ing earth. Yet traditional political bodies are proving inadequate to address these issues. Our area’s atomized management strategy exemplifies the inability of siloed political bodies to coordinate a regional response to climate change. We need both a comprehensive approach to environmen tal management that acknowledges our shared climactic “citizenship” and more robust and vis ible advocacy for climate-related interests: a “cli mate consulate.” This semester we will explore the potential for a single intervention to serve as 1) a hub for regional climate administration, 2) a public venue for heat relief and leisure, and 3) an accessible symbol for an evolving relationship between the climate and its citizens that goes beyond outdated “natural” tropes. We will thus eschew traditional locations of symbolic politi cal power. Our site is at the corner of Loop 610 and Westheimer in Uptown, the prototypical

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Polis: Houston Police Department South Central Sub-Station / Ronnie Self

The North Houston Highway Improve ment Project to rebuild IH-45 is scheduled to be gin in 2021. Within its 24-mile length reaching from Downtown to Beltway 8, the project will displace 160 single-family homes, 433 multifamily residences, 486 public and low-income hous ing units, 344 businesses, five places of worship, and two schools (TXDoT Environmental Impact Report). The current HPD South Central Sub-Sta tion located at 2202 Saint Emanuel Street in Third Ward will also be displaced. The studio project undertakes the design of a new home for the sub-station to be located in Third Ward at the crossing of IH-45 and the Columbia Tap Rail-Trail. The studio will reference and build upon the re search of Studio Gang Architects’ Polis Station to develop a community centered police station that promotes connection between officers and neigh borhood residents and provides opportunities for interaction. Beyond the police station program, students will propose an additional program component based on the site and greater context analysis to promote connection and interaction. Polis: city, a body of citizens.

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Living in the Shadows / Kevin Story

The City of Houston Department of Plan ning and Development does not list zoning re quirements for land-use development in Hous ton. The freedom to build disparate building program types in and around our local commu nities has been a point of contention for many years. While the “zoning versus no-zoning” debate continues, it can be argued that the freedom of property owners to build without zoning re strictions has added vibrancy and richness to the city’s urban and sub-urban infrastructural fabric. While the debate is ongoing, the development of open landscaped areas controlled by the Texas Department of Transportation offers the possibility of adding to the rich diversity of the urban fabric. These “in-between” void spaces located under the TXDoT Freeway infrastructure have long been thought of as “dross” spaces that are not suitable for building development. The dynam ics of Houston’s life revolves around the freeway system, but we typically ignore the drosscapes below. These landscapes are used as drainage facil ities, TXDoT storage areas, and general landscap ing in an attempt to enhance the freeway infrastructure. This studio project seeks to un cover the spatial and social possibilities for im proving the experience of these non-developed areas. The urban experience is enhanced when the element of surprise and/or spectacle is intro duced into the environment. These forgotten landscapes have become tenement ad-hoc home sites for the unfortunate and are emblematic of the imagery of hopelessness experienced by the homeless population in our city. Despite progress in recent years, on any given day approximately 3,400 individuals in Houston experience the trau ma of homelessness. In a year, 36,000 individuals in our community will experience homelessness. The goal of this project is to provide a place of refuge to escape the malaise and despair that per vades the daily lives of the homeless community in our city. The proposed building and site area shall infuse the concept of “shelter” with light, na ture, color, and autonomy to stimulate the sense of a brighter future.

Houston “Speed Zone” along the most congested highway in the state and one of the hottest neigh borhoods in Houston.

Bruno Xavier

Jacob Ramos

Francisco Perez and Blake Wilcox

Leonardo Hernandez

Ashel Jaimon

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Luis Hinojosa

Benjamin Blankenburg

Lance Hensley

Jesus Tapia

Arturo Valencia

Kim Saotonglang

Trang Ly

Comprehensive Studios

The Comprehensive Level is an essential bridge between the Foundation/Intermediate Level studios’ focus on developing architectural tools and concepts and the rich freedom for exploration available in the three semesters of the Professional Level studios. As such, it is focused on deepening understanding of the fertile relationship between a building’s systems and its organizing idea or architectural premise.

The studio emphasizes the methods and strategies for integrating architectural conceptual thought with various building system technologies, both individually and synthetically. This studio requires the design and documentation of a comprehensive architectural project for which the design skills of the architect critically apply to each step of the process. From the initial schemes to the refined construction details, design is essential. This process requires the acquisition and organization of specific technical knowledge to achieve the construction of a resolved outcome. This outcome values the building not only as a tech nical construct but also as an inclusive synthesis of the cultural, political, economic, ecological, historical, aesthetic, and other influences on the design process. Circumstances, when filtered through the design process, become a building.

The Comprehensive Design Studios enable students to represent ideas, concepts, and specific problems of architectural thinking through technology. In this studio, the impact of technology, materiality, financial considerations, and other constraints are valued and integrated.

Integrated Design Solutions

The specific program and project type selections are planned organically through individual faculty interests and their searches for relevant educational vehicles. Nonetheless, the proposed insti tutions and project locations as well as specific sites will involve the students in research and discussions about a well-documented history of exclusion and inequity and also point toward positive models. The Comprehensive Level (Integrated Architectural Solutions) studio is an essential bridge between the Foundation/ Intermediate Level studios’ focus on developing architectural tools and concepts and the rich freedom for exploration available in the three semesters of the Professional Level studios. A chief goal for the comprehensive level studio is to allow all students to explore the opportunities and confront the limits of building systems quite early in the semester to provide more time to work on the how of integrating systems and construction methods with the overall spatial idea and architectural premise as well as integrating the various building technology systems. Two strategies support this pedagogical path and its goals: 1) Form collaborative teams focusing on a project proposal shared by a two-student team (the partnership offers a sounding board to share technical expertise and insights, and it allows students to individually explore design requirements while collaborating on deliverables). 2) Establish constraints through existing building sites/volumes, utilize building precedents, and provide a framework of external and internal influences on the architectural idea.

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John Lewis Center for Social Justice, 393 Auburn Avenue, Atlanta, GA / Emily Moore

John Lewis was an American politician and renowned civil rights leader. A Baptist preacher, Lewis began his fight for civil rights by partici pating in lunch counter protests and eventually joining the Freedom Riders. His leadership and sacrifice during the voting rights march in Selma, Alabama, led to the 1965 Voting Rights Act being passed and sparking Lewis’s career in politics. Lewis served in the United States House of Representatives for Georgia’s 5th congressional dis trict from 1987 until his death in 2020. His unof ficial title was the “conscience of congress,” and as the recipient of Presidential Medal of Freedom, he is remembered for his invaluable contributions to the civil rights movement and his unwavering fight for social justice.

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3The Quakers and the KKK / Patrick Peters

Meet at the Center for Education Along the Underground Railroad. Levi and Catherine Coffin House Interpretative Center.

Levi Coffin, a lifelong Quaker and aboli tionist, is known as the “President of the Under ground Railroad.” The house that he built for him self and his wife Catharine in 1839 sheltered many of the estimated 2,000 freedom seekers that he helped escape from slavery. The Coffin House is now a National Historic Landmark, and the community within which it is located, Fountain City, Indiana, is now a National Historic District. The Historic American Building Survey docu mented the house, and these drawings are held

within the collection of the U. S. Library of Congress. The Levi and Catharine Coffin House In terpretive Center is to be built across the street from the Coffin House on the footprint of a his toric building: the Seybold-Price House. This building was documented as a contributing struc ture to the Historic District but could not be saved due to its advanced deterioration. The proposed interpretive center building intended to maintain the massing of the Seybold-Price House, includ ing its street profile and volume. The Coffin and Seybold-Price houses evoke Fountain City when it was an active commercial center along the pri mary north-south trade route and Underground Railroad that freedom seekers traveled between Cincinnati, Ohio, and Detroit, Michigan.

Despite the profound local heritage of ad vancing social justice, Klu Klux Klan members are active in the area today, and the Coffin House His toric Site has received threats in the recent past. The first residents of many extant 19th- century homes in Fountain City were formerly enslaved Black people who had been freed. Ironically, some of these buildings may now be occupied by un aware KKK members.

Volumetric Constraint: Until recently the Interpretive Center site, 201 Main Cross Street (U.S. Highway 27), contained the Seybold-Price house of 1836, a contributing structure within the Fountain City National Historic District. The structure, the subject of a state archaeological as sessment, was determined to be unfeasible to ren ovate, and it was ultimately demolished. However, in order to maintain the character of the urban precinct of the historic district, the footprint, massing, and volume of the Seybold-Price House is to serve as a design constraint along the two street faces of the interpretive center, Main Cross Street and Mill Street.

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Boston Center for Spiritual Renewal and Hope / Kevin Story

The city of Boston has partnered with a non-profit foundation to dedicate the construc tion of a new facility to provide the public a place devoted to promoting individual and collective spiritual renewal, diversity, and hope in a world that is in constant turmoil and uncertainty. The building design shall provide a place that lifts the spirit and seeks to promote the numinous that can be found in architectural form, space, and ma teriality. The intention of this project is to use ar chitecture as an artistic medium to enhance our collective sense of the human spirit’s aspirations for a more hopeful and peaceful world. The owner partners are specifically interested in the ar chitectural use of light, space, structural system(s), and materiality to enhance the aspirational rep resentations of the building design.

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7Memorial for Peace and Justice Dialogue Center / Sheryl Tucker de Vazquez

This specific studio program and process will explore structural and environmental sys tems as well as building assemblies and principles of sustainability as a means to create an architectural experience/atmosphere that embodies the mission of the surrounding Memorial for Peace and Justice. Rooted in phenomenology, the stu dio intentionally shifts the creative effort away from the development of a form to that of an

experience created by the choreography of volume, light, shadow, materials, and sound support ed by the space’s envelope, as well as environmen tal and structural systems. Site Context: Memorial for Peace and Justice, Montgomery, Al abama. The National Memorial for Peace and Jus tice, also known as the National Lynching Me morial, is a national memorial to commemorate the victims of racial lynching in the United States. The memorial is intended to acknowledge the leg acies of racial terrorism and to advocate for so cial justice in America. Founded by Equal Justice Initiative, a non-profit dedicated to racial justice, the memorial opened in Montgomery, Alabama, on April 26, 2018.

Drake Flood and Amanda Whitley

Drake Flood and Amanda Whitley

Trish Huynh, Elsy Miranda Perez, and Nix Valerdy

Patrick Margain and Ana Sevilla

Raquel

Maise Muñoz & et al.

Nastassia Chua, Sharon Lott, and Rebekah Mireles

Professional Studios

Professional-level studios focus on exploring design topics and opening up lines of speculative design, research, and exploration in the context of global evolution where faculty and practitioners respond critically to the emerging challenges of the 21st century. Each semester, a curated list of renowned faculty covers different areas of inquiry from the global to the local, from the environmental crisis to new digital imaginaries, from contemporary ecological realities to novel material practices, from the molecular to the territorial. Topics evolve and change each year in response to global and local dynamics and to architecture discourse. At this level, the studios collaborate freely with academic themes to develop prompts and coordinate mini-lecture series, discussions, and juries to create an extraordinary accumulation of drawings, essays, and new premises for fresh architecture agendas. Multiple pedagogical methods are employed in these studios as the outstanding faculty for undergraduate architecture demonstrate the currency and urgency of their research agendas and critical practices.

Topic Studios

Topic studios report their results in different venues and open original career paths for the next generation to enlighten with new ways of designing and discussing a world in the process of reinvention. Under this agenda, distinguished experts, such as Brooks + Scarpa in partnership with Jesse Hager, have held the prestigious William Stern Visiting Professorship: Jeff Halstead has explored new digital tools and grammars; Bruce Race and Shafik Rifaat have taught urban system research studios; and Peter Zweig and Geoffrey Brune have led international exhibition and historic preservation studios, respectively. All of these contributions combine with exciting new topics developed by internal adjunct faculty, including Sheryl Tucker de Vazquez, Dijana Handanovic, Jesse Hager, Roya Plauché, and Kevin Story, and faculty research topics, such as Andrew Kudless on digital media; Susan Rogers on Houston’s community design; William Truitt on colonialism and modernism; Donna Kacmar on vernacular dwell ing; Ronnie Self on museums; and Marta Rodriguez on collective housing, explored in a series of studios combined with elective courses.

Other lines of collaboration between the Hines undergraduate programs and international institutions have been developed since spring 2021, starting with the Virtual Global Studio as a three-way collaboration between Rafael Beneytez-Durán and Michael Kubo; Sofia Krimizi and Kyriakos Kyriakou and their micropolitan perspective of rural America in the Houston region; and a master’s research studio at the Escuela Técnica Superior de Arquitectura de Madrid led by Luis Rojo de Castro. However, we know that this is just the beginning, and potential topics for the undergraduate architecture programs in the upcoming academic years are already under discussion.

The Problem / Geoffrey Brune

In the context of contemporary architec tural design fashion (formalism and digital dec oration), how can the values of a client, whose mission is defined by goals for an underserved populace, be given authenticity in the design of a building/site complex? If the program for spaces leads the design process, then what initiates the idea—or is it left to “program arranging” and “skin (façade) application”? The problem is to “see” in a different way that allows the basic architectural responses—space/form/light/material—to re flect and support the beliefs, philosophies, ideol ogies, understandings, purposes, and other deeply held ideas or feelings that comprise the owner/user values.

You will select from one of three project types: music venue for the selected genre of music and cultural library for historical and contem porary education. A base program will be provid ed for interpretation and for determining the focus for a specific user group of persons, an iden tifiable community, and/or a set of specific con ditions. You will make a site selection using the approximate required area of building and site improvements, including parking or other pro gram-specific uses.

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Dense-City / Jesse Hager, Brooks + Scarpa Dense-City is a way of thinking about how we live. Many factors come together to shape the built environment: the way a building faces the street, its height, its spaces within, and its circu lation patterns. None have a more significant im pact on neighborhoods and cities as a whole than

density. Traditionally measured by population figures, density at the neighborhood level is best characterized by how buildings, transport, and ultimately people are arranged on the street. Throughout Houston, a critical look at density, both how it is measured and how it is formed, is needed to create positive growth in our commu nities. The effects of increased housing costs continue to cripple urban areas throughout the coun try, with the supply of new, affordable housing failing to keep up with the demand. New housing models are needed in Houston to create livable, dense communities addressing the region’s need for affordable housing. Understanding density and its relationship to the city will begin to inform these new housing models that are sensitive to the need to house increasing populations with out displacing existing communities. Only by making connections between disparate elements and working toward designing cities as compre hensive are sustainable approaches to affordable housing created. Interdisciplinary approaches that combine practiced solutions with innovative methods are needed to address the increasingly challenging housing development issues today. Illustrating the possibilities inherent within the existing urban fabric, Dense-City invites com munities to rethink their neighborhoods and pol icymakers to tailor existing development mechanisms to new uses and new ways of living.

ogies of living not only with each other, but near and with other species. Exploring a variety of al ternative building technologies, students will de velop dwellings that accommodate both humans and nonhumans. Here, we will be thinking of an imals as autonomous neighbors, not as pets, pests, or domesticated beings. The studio will be orga nized into four phases. In phase one students will gain the needed intellectual, technical, and mate rial background through readings, software tu torials, and fabrication experiments. Next, stu dents will explore traditional human and nonhuman building processes and adapt these to potential automated fabrication strategies. Stu dents will build a collective archive of nonhuman building techniques, potential nonhuman clients within the Houston region, and examples of hu man-built animal architectures. In phase two, stu dents will choose at least one of these nonhuman species and develop a prototypical structure that facilitates their dwelling. In phase three, students will expand on these prototypes and create a series of designs for multispecies domestic struc tures from the scale of details to regional and even global networks. During the final phase, we will focus on creating immersive representations through hyper-real drawings, renderings, and short films. The studio will envision different forms of domesticity that reengage humans with the messy and complex reality of living together.

Quad Zero, Resilient Texas City: Sustainable Catalysts for Building Community / Bruce Race, Shafik Rifaat

4Wild & Domestic / Andrew Kudless

In an age when we are finally recognizing the extent of our deep relationships with the en vironment around us, and the microbiome with in us, this studio will develop a form of solidarity with the nonhuman. As the Coronavirus pandemic and stay-at-home isolation has reac quainted us with the importance and complexi ty of domestic space, the studio will also research how domestic architecture can serve as the me dium to reevaluate the politics, cultures, and ecol

The urban built environment is responsi ble for 75% of annual global GHG emissions; buildings alone account for 39%. Eliminating these emissions is the key to addressing climate change and meeting Paris Climate Agreement tar gets (Architecture 2030, 2019). Students are expected to be aware of any additional course pol icies presented by the instructor during the course. In the fall of 2020, the Quad Zero Studio is exploring a sustainable community framework and clusters of synergistic activities that are cat alysts for reinventing Texas City. The goal is to

envision a forward-leaning community that is fresh, opportunistic, and livable. Currently, over 50,000 brave souls live 10 feet above sea level in a town with a history of storm surge from hurri canes and refinery explosions. Upon completing the Coastal Barrier (Ike Dike) System, this com munity of hardworking Texans will have new op portunities for investing in the future. The Port of Texas City has traditionally focused on export ing petroleum. Texas City will need to identify a new economic base in a net-zero future and is in terested in your generation’s perspective. What will make this strategically positioned communi ty livable at a 2040 Galveston Bay address? Our project sponsors are the Houston-Galveston Area Council (HGAC) and the Texas City Department of Community Development. The information contained in this class syllabus is subject to change without notice.

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6 Urban Hybrid Housing Complex / Marta Rodriguez

In this studio, students will design a col lective housing building to question the concepts of the apartment building and social housing, to reinvent the concept of “urban hybrid housing complex.” The course will be divided into three parts: 1) Students will deconstruct and analyze housing projects to propose an innovative open program. 2) Students will design a revolutionary (productive) housing infrastructure, defining in detail its material and structural particularities. 3) Students will further develop the project according to an urban strategy to be implemented in different locations of Oakland. This studio will focus on designing a collective housing building to question the Paradox of the Metropolis in tune with the current urban challenges related to den sity, productivity, integration, connectivity, iden

tity, safety, and ecology. The studio project will be an opportunity to reflect on the concept of “liv ing and working together,” as well as on the build ing as a socially interactive experience, adaptable to the varying needs and desires of the commu nity. The studio will analyze the work of archi tects such as Moisei Ginzburg, Michiel Brinkman, or Mario Pani; revisit the philosophies of Alison and Peter Smithson and Jaap Bakema and their contribution to Team 10 (1953–1977); and re search Lima (1969), as well as the Case Study House Program, with a critical approach. The stu dio will also investigate the progressive ideals de veloped by Kazuyo Sejima in Metropolitan Hous ing Studies, together with recent hybrid housing proposals by MVRDV and Alejandro Aravena’s and Tatiana Bilbao’s theories on affordable hous ing; the design project will allow students to ques tion how architecture interrelates with urban planning and with social, economic, health, cul tural, political, and environmental challenges. The project should (re)consider: urban density, flexibility (individual vs. collective), social aspects (identity and diversity), circular economy, ecolo gy, materiality and affordability, and experimen tation (units and systems).

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Tear It Down, Build It Up / Susan Rogers

The production of architecture, and more broadly that of the built environment, is political. Space—as produced and experienced—reveals the values, ethics, and politics of the producers. Questioning and transferring agency in the pro duction of place and space is fundamental to transforming the power of production of the same. The fundamental questions being posited are: who has spatial agency and for what purpos es is space produced? Buildings are never just buildings. Buildings respond to the political foun dations of the institutions that fund, envision, and desire them. Buildings are physical manifestations of the ideologies they serve. Although a naively

detached or romantic position may render buildings as semi-autonomous artifacts capable of shel tering or enveloping space, this depoliticized at titude overlooks their historical and material relationship to regimes of violence and terror. Buildings can protect, but they can also confine, instill fear, crush, and oppress. Buildings can school and foment hospitality but can imprison and torture. Buildings can be tools for ethnic seg regation, cultural destruction, and historical era sure. Buildings can reinforce the status quo and aid in the implementation of settler-colonial de sires of expansionism. Anti-racist democratiza tion of access is only possible through the decol onization of buildings and public spaces.

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An Inhabited Bridge for Houston / Ronnie Self

Though few remain today, inhabited bridges were once common in many historic cities. They provided urban continuity between the banks of a river and more buildable space in dense, walled cities. The inhabited bridge is at the cross roads of architecture, engineering, and urban de sign. This inhabited bridge project is related to the current Texas Department of Transportation (TXDoT) North Houston Highway Improvement Project (NHHIP) for IH-45. Rather than spanning a river, it will span an Interstate Highway. To be gin design, students will: • Research the U.S. Interstate Highway System and its impact on Amer ican cities. • Collect information and drawings from the TXDoT website focusing primarily on “Segment 3” of the project. • Collect information on the bridges currently proposed. • Consult Air Alliance Houston, The Kinder Institute, and Link Houston regarding the NHHIP. • Choose either Elgin Street or Tuam Street in Segment 3 of the NHHIP to design an inhabited bridge between Midtown and Third Ward. • Document the adja cent urban context. • Develop a program for the inhabited bridge. • Study the current TXDoT plans and current bridge proposals to understand

necessary structural spans. A valuable resource for precedents and the history of the inhabited bridge is the catalog Living Bridges: The Inhabited Bridge, Past, Present and Future by the Royal Acad emy of Arts, London.

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Living in a Virtual World: Designing Architectural

Space for the Real + Unreal / Peter Jay Zweig

The current extraordinary events of a pan demic, economic collapse, and social unrest have pushed society to reconsider work, play, the delivery of education and knowledge transfer, com mercial/retail spaces, social environments, and the very nature of public and private space. As a result, the world is going online and virtual, of fering a unique opportunity to explore our dif ferent experiences in Real and Unreal (Virtual) Space. This design studio explores this newly developing culture, which is becoming increasing ly virtual. The amount of time spent on smart phones, computers, iPads, TVs, and gaming consoles is drawing our attention from the real world and fast-forwarding us into the future. The question posed for this semester is how to inte grate the Real + Unreal use of space into a philosophy for our times and for moving forward. As we progressively accept the advances in medicine that enhance our body—pacemakers, stents, hip replacements, gene therapy, nanotechnology—e.g., how much will society accept moving into the vir tual space of Zoom meetings, conference calls, Skype, WhatsApp, etc.? The innovation that will transform how we communicate and what tools we use is only just beginning. As students, it is your time to take this new paradigm and advance into what is perhaps the next evolutionary step for humans. We will develop a design process of creating space from the inside out. We will begin with research in small teams to produce the con ceptual starting point for the principles of living in a schism between the real and the virtual world. The research will include taking a position on

what it is to be human. The three research groups will include the body, real/unreal space, and ma terials. After the group research, we will begin an individual project designing a space that will evolve into the scale of a house and a housing community. I will ask you to take a position on a housing issue that is relevant today. These archi tectural concepts can explore what it is like to exist in a world that is in transition, not just migrat ing from rural to urban, but increasingly living in a virtual world.

Ferdous Kabir

Gaston Denari and Sharon Philip

Eugenia Forgang and Hanna Montalvo

Lauren Greene

5 Almudena Esponda and Marcela Ramos

Rukaiya Jamali and Enrique Lozano

Melanie Getman-Villarreal

Sofia Sayeed

Sebastian Andrade

A Cultural Library for Art and Music:

Adaptive Use of the El Dorado Ballroom Building / Geoffrey Brune

The concept of adaptively reusing heritage buildings as a component of sustainability was strongly supported by respondents, but doubts remain about viability, particularly of economic issues. To a large extent, the sustainability of local communities depends on the sense of place and value they perceive in their local communi ty. Heritage invests local communities with a powerful reason to look after their local environ ment and lead more sustainable lifestyles. It fos ters a powerful connection to the physical envi ronment through visual amenity and the intrigue and uniqueness of heritage buildings and street scapes. People feel a stronger sense of connection with their local surroundings through heritage, which is quite different from the mentality asso ciated with new building stock. It can be replicat ed anywhere and therefore lends no specific con nection to the local environment. Heritage buildings are cultural icons, and their preserva tion impacts communities’ well-being, sense of place, and social sustainability. Due to these fac tors, it is preferable to reuse rather than replace heritage buildings regardless of bad plot ratios and poor efficiency. This course explores the or igins and theory of the historic preservation movement in the United States and the tech niques and strategies for the adaptive reuse of both historical and supporting structures. The position proposed in this course of study is that the designer’s intention is embodied in the design of the structure and site, sequencing of spaces, and selection of systems and materials. It is expressed in the process, plan, section, and elevation draw ings augmented by three-dimensional drawings, captioned text, and physical models. The issues are not abstractly conceptual but concerned with the user’s/owner’s goals, the efficient function of the spaces, the complex experiential characteris tics of the form/space, and the scale and propor tion of parts and materials incorporated into the design strategies.

Boredom & Bedroom / Jeff Halstead

In Dan Graham’s installation Public Space / Two Audiences (1976), participants are divided into two groups by a glass partition. Each group can view the other and its reflection, overlaying both perspectives of subject and object. Similar ly, in Mies’s Barcelona Pavilion, unwitting visi tors see themselves reflected in its dark glass walls. The sky, trees, and clouds appear to be both in front of and behind them. In both instances, the visitor becomes what is on display; instead of con templating a set of discrete objects, participants identify as the exhibition’s subject matter. This type of interaction among participants in Gra ham’s work is frequently established not through direct contact but through technology mediation. Video, mirrors, photographs, sound recordings, and TV programming are a few mediation devic es that we will borrow from Graham and employ in certain studio stages. As a premise, we will ex plore the relationship between art installation, technology and contemporary domestic portrayal, and home design roles. We will study the com positional devices used by Pop and Conceptual artists and by photographers like Hiroshi Sugimo to and Doug Aitken and painter David Hockney. We will hone in on a few of their methods and de velop corollary architectural exploration forms through a series of digital models, renderings, and animation techniques. The studio will consider a trajectory in American art and architectural prac tices reliant on alternative/invented structures of representative aspects of the home, including photographers Jeff Wall and Stephen Shore, sculp tor Alex Da Corte, and Diller & Scoficio + Renf ro. This will enable us to expand on or challenge architectural conventions of domesticity and pro vide a means to view the home as a constructed stage set for contemporary life. The studio’s goal is to identify various approaches artists and architects have taken toward the domestic interi or’s spatial representation and document and em ploy some of the design strategies that emerged from those interests. We will borrow techniques from set design and video production. Like film making, physical models constructed later in the

semester will serve as stages to facilitate a series of animations. Appropriating “the model as an ar tifice” will procure conditions in which to devel op an approach for overlapping recorded footage with digitally constructed environments. This, in turn, will lead us to a concluding look at the fam ily home and staged installation as dueling forms of domestic conjecture.

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Past + Future Dialogue / Dijana Handanovic

Dialogue can be defined as a conversation between two or more people. The word “dialogue” comes from the Greek dialogos Dia meaning “through” and logos “word” suggest that dialogues mean “the word that moves” or a “multidirectional exchange of thought.” Dialogue is not an un productive debate between people trying to prove their point, but it involves a willingness to engage in exchange and resolve problems that arise from thought. Students will look at Yugoslavia’s polit ical and cultural history, dissolution, and the countries that emerged from it in this studio. Students will analyze the cultural and social signifi cance of the architecture that was produced from its inception to its demise. We will further zoom into and examine the region of Bosnia and Herzegovina: What is the current political and social situation? What dialogue does/doesn’t exist be tween the different ethnic groups? What is archi tecture’s role in making a society? Students will have the opportunity to analyze and question ar chitecture’s ability to contextualize and recon textualize individuals and the society within an urban space. By answering what architecture’s role in society is and how architecture can help promote productive dialogue, students will be challenged to offer a solution through an urban intervention.

Wild Life / Daniel Jacobs

“Wild” implies a condition or state of be ing that is uninhabited, undomesticated, uncul tivated, or inhospitable. Nature is wild, while hu man nature is cultured, civilized, ordered, controlled. This binary view of human/nature is overly reductive, destructive, and even racist, al lowing humans to justify actions that lead to exosystemic collapse and environmental injustice. Reprogramming this binary thinking is a critical step toward inventing a future when human in teraction with the environment moves toward Timothy Morton’s term “the symbiotic real.” Cul turally, however, this human/nature counter po sition structures potentially useful social associations with becoming wild. Humans become wild when they reject cultural norms, open society up to new modes of interaction, or blockade and de stroy the normal operations of culture and capi tal. Such dispositions can usher in more sustain able and hybrid forms of existence or cause reactionary acceleration of exploitation of nature. Architecture and urbanization have always occu pied a critical position among these disparate eth ics—operating at the psychological and material threshold between the territory of human occupation and the otherness of the wild and provid ing a strong frame to mediate our relationship to this artificially constructed idea of “nature.” Com plicating this condition, increasingly complex material and technological systems have isolated the architectural interior from the exterior, re jecting other organisms’ incursion into the human domain. Wild Life is a provocation to proj ect new ways to live in a rewilded world, seeking to maintain and encourage forms of wilderness and propose radical new modes of coexistence and collectivity. The studio will respond to this provocation by proposing new visions for archi tecture’s relationship to materials, ecosystems,

landscapes, organisms, and each other, and it can include components like residencies, research spaces, forests, art studios, power generation, me dia spaces, libraries, galleries, workshops, social condensers, atmospheric generators, remedia tion areas, etc., all keeping in mind the prompt of accepting wilderness within and beyond the building footprint. This institutional prototype should serve to question normative ideas of ar chitectural, urban, and landscape types: curating new relationships between organisms, ecosys tems, communities, and urban infrastructures. Through the design of a new type of environmen tal institute that includes spaces of research and housing and production and cultivation, projects will propose alliances between people, architec ture, and ecosystems that lead to a wilder life.

Place Analysis: Explore the Power of Dwelling and the Possibilities for a Neighborhood in Transition / Donna Kacmar

SPACE + MATTER: “We live in this culture of endless extraction and disposal: extraction from the earth, extraction from people’s bodies, from communities, as if there’s no limit as if there’s no consequence to how we’re taking and disposing of, and as if it can go on endlessly. We are reach ing the breaking point on multiple levels. Com munities are breaking; the planet is breaking; people’s bodies are breaking. We are taking too much.” —Naomi Klein

SPACE: Design 20 dwelling units for your selected site, utilizing one or more of these dwelling unit types: single-family units, duplex/quad plex, townhouse, co-housing, or adaptive reuse to design a community for 20 household units that support the functions of connecting, sleep ing, bathing, and eating. Develop and present the SPACE research and reading agenda for your work. Develop the building program, including interior and exterior spaces and systems. Include doc umentation of architectural precedents and iden tification of possible sites in the Third Ward.

MATTER: Develop two interior and exteri or material systems for your buildings. Develop and present the MATTER assembly systems + ma terial research and reading agenda for your work.

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“Houston” / Kyriakos Kyriakou, Sofia Krimizi

“Because Texas is a part of almost everything in modern America—the South, the West, the Plains, Hispanic and immigrant communities, the border, the divide between the rural areas and the cities—what happens here tends to disproportionately affect the rest of the nation.” —Lawrence Wright Houston is a metropolis that happened in the last 150 years, born out of a development project with great ambitions. It grew fast and without much planning, becoming what every new Tex as-and-beyond town at the beginning of the 20th century aspired to be: a capitalist metropolis. On Houston’s disorienting flatness, we will look for the generic, unseen, overlooked, and irrelevant. We will deal with urbanism and architecture on a radically small and vast scale between the mi cro-urbanism of the residential suburb and the hyper-context of the industry. We will extract samples that describe its extremities, unfold sto ries of late capitalism phenomena. We will dissect Houston as a patchwork of districts populated by strictly autonomous architectural objects, explor ing the continuous green carpet of residential lots, the concrete and tarmac highways, the vast air-conditioned interiors of Houston’s mega building objects, and the imposing presence of industrial infrastructure equally present in the background and foreground of everyday life. Stu dent projects are not autonomous; together, they produce a thesis about the social and political role of the architect and the discipline, each project serving as the context for another. All of the above

coexists in random juxtapositions produced by the complete absence of zoning, in a kind of ur ban condition topped by extreme weather and pollution on top of a sinking landscape. The stu dio produces readings of Houston in a variety of nontraditional ways, cultivating critical thinking, producing clear positions that expand to greater global phenomena and explore how design can reinforce these positions, and producing critical arguments, exaggerated realities within notso-remote imaginative scenarios. This is a re search-based studio with a strong collaborative component.

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Materialize: Framing Methods of Detour / Jason Logan, Patrick Peters

“At present, all American schools of architecture are entirely dependent on traditional European models of conceptual thinking. It is therefore important for us to remember that our indigenous method of the detour is in every way as logical and potentially as rich as the foreign insistence on conceptual consistency.” —Tom Peters, Perspecta, vol. 25 (1989)

In the spring 2021 vertical studio, students will de sign a material system rather than a single project. We will work within the material constraint of wood, researching historical framing systems, their details, techniques, and applications while analyzing the benefits and liabilities of each. The studio will also research construction and demolition waste to understand our industry’s impact on U.S. landfills and inform ideas for material op timization, recycling/upcycling, and closed-loop material systems. The wood framing systems that develop from this research will be used across mul tiple scales to demonstrate their viability—first, as an individual design problem that focuses on

housing, and second, as a collective design exercise that will serve as the design/build project, fabricated in the summer of 2021. The studio is timely (American framing was the 2021 U.S. pa vilion theme at the Venice Biennale). Its subject, however, is far from novel. We will begin by read ing Tom Peters’s 1989 essay, “An American Cul ture of Construction,” to start a conversation about “conceptual vs. empirical” cultures of mak ing and the value of “creative misunderstanding” and “methods of a detour.” Peters flips the com mon reading of the American system, where in formality and ambiguity are generally used as pe joratives, and reframes these characteristics as design opportunities, mirroring the cultural values of freedom, novelty, and individuation. In his essay’s endnotes, Peters makes a prescient obser vation that leaves open the question of whether the computer’s tendency to “conceptualize the empirical” will prove productive or destructive to the opportunities he sees in the American farm ing system. The studio will take on this question by engaging with digital tools and fabrication methodologies to locate work between the oppo sitions of conceptual and empirical practices— hypothecizing that our contemporary digital tools allow for a both/and approach to making, resulting in resilient material systems able to rec oncile precision and optimization with improvisation, flexibility, and adaptability.

Quad Zero. Smart Green City: West Bellfort Intelligent Transit Hub Community Partners: METRO / Bruce Race, Shafik Rifaat

The urban built environment is responsi ble for 75% of annual global GHG emissions; buildings alone account for 39%. Eliminating these emissions is the key to addressing climate change and meeting Paris Climate Agreement tar gets (Architecture 2030, 2019). The West Bellfort Park and Ride Transit Center is located in a Hous ton community that reflects contemporary chal lenges of the spatial mismatch between jobs and housing facing U.S. cities. There are 23,000 households and 65,000 people living in census tracts within a two-mile radius of the Transit Center. These census tracts have a 78% minority

population. Compared to the region, nearby households have lower median incomes and high er poverty rates, lower educational attainment, and a higher percentage of wage earners making less than $25,000 per year. In spite of the site’s strategically advantaged location, households spend a disproportionate amount of household income on transportation. In a net-zero future, Houston’s park-and-ride facilities provide an op portunity to diversify housing and mobility choices. Students will explore how the West Bell fort Park and Ride and Transit Center can become a transit-oriented development (TOD), demon strating emerging intelligent transportation sys tems and low-carbon development. Our project sponsors are METRO and the S.W. Management District. The information contained in this class syllabus is subject to change without notice. Stu dents are expected to be aware of any additional course policies presented by the instructor during the course.

9Chandigarh, Modernist City, Sector 22 / William Truitt

“Still, the notion of a type Oriental, Islamic, Arab, or whatever—endures and is nourished by similar kinds of abstractions or paradigms or types as they emerge out of the modern social sciences.” —Edward Said

The studio will investigate the problem of archi tecture as a figure and the legacy of the modern ist city—Chandigarh, Le Corbusier, and Pierre Jeanneret’s most significant project. Students of architecture are familiar with the many individ ual government buildings and housing prototypes of the city. However, little is documented of the first built superblock at the center of the master plan: Sector 22. Students will investigate and document the use of a building prototype in the sector. Each student will use that model paired with a chapter from Edward Said’s Orientalism to reinterpret the complex history and potential

future of the building in two ways: first as a post-pandemic interior alteration of the existing building and second as a complete transforma tion of the program that reinvigorates the English Garden planned superblock as a whole.

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Woven Landscapes: a Space of Refuge in Athens, Greece / Sheryl Tucker de Vazquez

“What’s interesting to me is this idea of fabric and weaving as a kind of abstraction of making places that people come together in.” —David Adjaye

“The weaving of branches, led easily to weaving baskets into mats and covers and then to weaving with plant fiber and so forth.... Wickerwork was the essence of the wall.... Hanging carpets remained the true walls, the visible boundaries of space. The often solid walls behind them were necessary for reasons that had nothing to do with the creation of space.” —Gottfried Semper

Weaving once played a key role in material cul tures across the globe. Unfortunately, the knowl edge and craftsmanship of such artifacts are slow ly vanishing and being replaced by mass production. Because it is not economically viable to sustain the traditional craftsmanship of weav ing, its applications have not been updated and adapted to contemporary needs. This studio asks, “What if a contemporary architecture could har ness and reintroduce, reinvent, and re-form the key elements of these techniques to address the

unique needs of under-resourced users?” Weaving is simultaneously an intuitive, improvisation al process and a mathematical, rule-based system in which the basic units of link and knot can gen erate a woven spatial system. Situated between the natural and the cultural, weaving processes can offer generative source material for a new way of conceiving architectural space and form. Architecture is traditionally conceived of as an in flexible, static kit of parts—whereas the language of knotted fabric introduces architecture as a seamless fluid field that allows for growth, move ment, and porosity, opening up liberatory possi bilities for the future of the building. This way of making is rooted in the origins of architecture as a handmade system and is explored by Semper in The Four Elements of Architecture. The studio proj ect, a Shade Canopy for Suzy Tros, will explore contemporary processes of weaving on multiple levels as a strategy to literally and metaphorical ly knit together the three discrete zones/pro grams of an existing courtyard and a new shading canopy. It will also investigate the relationship between the process of making and the final form, as well as between the handmade and the digital in service of creating a social spacew that will help “knit” together a community of refugee children of various nationalities/ethnicities.

Living in a Virtual World: Designing Architectural Space for the Real + Unreal / Peter Jay Zweig

The current extraordinary events of a pan demic, economic collapse, and social unrest have pushed society to reconsider work, play, the de livery of education and knowledge transfer, com mercial/retail spaces, social environments, and the very nature of public and private space. As a result, the world is going online and virtual, of fering a unique opportunity to explore our differ ent experiences in Real and Unreal (Virtual) Space. This design studio explores this newly develop ing culture, which is becoming increasingly vir tual. The amount of time spent on smartphones, computers, iPads, TVs, and gaming consoles is drawing our attention from the real world and fast-forwarding us into the future. The question posed for this semester is how to integrate the

Real + Unreal use of space into a philosophy for our times and for moving forward. As we progres sively accept the advances in medicine that en hance our body—pacemakers, stents, hip replace ments, gene therapy, nanotechnology—e.g., how much will society accept moving into the virtual space of Zoom meetings, conference calls, Skype, WhatsApp, etc.? The innovation that will transform how we communicate and what tools we use is only just beginning. As students, it is your time to take this new paradigm and advance into what is perhaps the next evolutionary step for humans. We will develop a design process of creating space from the inside out. We will begin with research in small teams to produce the conceptual starting point for the principles of living in a schism be tween the real and the virtual world. The research will include taking a position on what it is to be human. The three research groups will include the body, real/unreal space, and materials. After the group research, we will begin an individual project designing a space that will evolve into the scale of a house and a housing community. I will ask you to take a position on a housing issue that is relevant today. These architectural concepts can explore what it is like to exist in a world that is in transition, not just migrating from rural to urban, but increasingly living in a virtual world.

Hannah Montalvo

Mariam Moini

Zynab Al-Helfi, Jesus Guillen, and Ana Carolina Peralta La Cruz

Lisa Evans and Kathleen Healy

Amanda Lopez, Hugo Margain Lozano, and Caleb Matheson

Faith Charles, Drake Flood, Ana Sevilla

Amanda Lopez, Caleb Matheson, and Patrick Margain

Jonathan Henning

Fernanda Pineda Reyes

Kyle Swisher

Allison Reyes

Sebastian Andrade

Jonathan Guerrero

Thesis Studio

The optional ARCH 5593 Thesis Studio program addresses the critical, cultural, and social dimensions of contemporary design practice. Starting with theoretical positions and speculative agen das on architecture, the thesis provides students with an oppor tunity to develop design proposals as applied considerations of the human-impacted environment. As an independent, studentdriven research and design project, the thesis provides seniors with the opportunity to engage in a yearlong project that can begin to illuminate their thematic, aesthetic, and philosophical inquiries, which may evolve at the graduate and professional levels. Research and design are interlinked and deployed to study a diverse range of complex topics that engage the relationship of culture and the environment, empowering graduates with the flexibility, resourcefulness, and passion required for practice in a rapidly changing profession. As a reflection of the natu ral diversity of the student body, the wide range of options, and faculty research interests, topics include, but are not limited to: community engagement, critical contexts, global studies, real estate, digital fabrication, material research, resiliency, preservation, literature, history, and theory.

Each is distinguished by a particular focus on developing the intellect, critical thinking, and technical skills needed for future practice. The thesis is a culminating project for the undergraduate architecture program. Because it is not the only option for a student’s senior year, it is optimal for a student who can work independently and pursue a specific research agenda.

Ariana Flick, Bywater Urbanism. William Truitt, Meredith Chavez.

Steps to build up your neighborhood.

Document an area for intervention: Many empty lots in Bywater are designated by city council as part of the “Mixed-Use Historic Core!” This allows land to be used for agricultural, rec reational, and community facilities as long as they “increase convenience and walkability for neigh borhood visitors.”

Get the whole block involved: The greater the demand for action, the greater the chance of city approval. Call a community meeting to dis cuss the benefits of a regenerative unit on your block. Collect signatures to send in with your ap plication.

Apply : Visit your local neighborhood council to fill out a formal application. From there, dedicated volunteers will work with the city to secure permit approval.

Build your unit: Play Space (playground oriented), Social Gathering (performance orient ed), Cultural Spaces (community oriented), Pro ductive Landscapes (agriculture oriented)— Sam ple Units come in four different configurations. Once a permit is procured from the city, you will receive an informational booklet on how to build and maintain your new unit. Construction is sim ple and intuitive.

Customize and enjoy: The most import ant thing is that the unit works for you. While some ideas are given in your guide book, feel free to customize to your liking.

When you’re done, congratulations! You’ve not only created a much for valuable space but you’re also contributing to Bywater’s revival.

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Franco Denari, Cistern. Robert Burrow, Rafael Beneytez-Durán.

In Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius , Jorge Luis Borges writes about our infinite perspectives and how they shape reality. He says there isn’t only one coin, but that there are as many as there are people perceiving it. The Buffalo Bayou Cistern shares this quality with Borges’s coin. The Buffa lo Bayou Cistern was built in 1920 as a drinking water reservoir. After a crack formed in its retain ing wall, plans were drafted to demolish the obsolete cistern. It all changed when an engineer de scended into the space for a routine inspection. At that moment, a new cistern was born. As a piece of infrastructure, the Buffalo Bayou Cistern was built and situated pragmatically, from a perfor mance perspective. The surrounding urban net works, however, fail to connect it to its local context. King Henry II and his mistress, Diane de Poitiers, faced a similar dilemma. Physically sep arated in their Château in France, their secret re lationship went unfulfilled. Their architect, Phi libert de l’Orme proposed a trompe: a volume nested in a corner, disguising a secret stair that fi nally connected the two lovers again.

The trompe became the physical manifes tation of the reconnection of the two lovers. The networks around the Buffalo Bayou Cistern are broken because they fail to connect it to its surrounding elements. Standing on top of the cistern, one is completely unaware of the skatepark be low. An oppressive fence marks the impermeable edge between the spaces. Pedestrians and runners have no awareness of the skatepark and cistern above. This thesis emerges as a series of interven tions that reconnect the broken networks surrounding the Buffalo Bayou Cistern. These new interventions make the disparate elements that surround it once again aware of each other. Three main interventions are The Channel, The Tunnel, and The Bridge. Meaningful events such as The Crack and The Engineer’s Hatch emerge as mark ers of an untold story.

Katherine Polkinghorne, Biopolitics of NHHIP. Ziad Qureshi, Rafael Beneytez-Durán.

IH-45 is an inconceivably large ribbon of infrastructure that acts as a border between po litical and geographic communities. IH-45’s mar gin shelters sociopolitically marginal architectur al programming. If we consider space a material constitution of power, then the contested and marginal territory of the North Houston High way Improvement Project is a critical site for ar chitectural engagement. Through non-hegemon ic site analysis and the imagining of counter-futures at four sites along the NHHIP’s extent, this thesis reconceives of the freeway’s marginal territory as a site for liberatory praxis and theorizes modalities of active engagement with megastructures and megaprojects.

Territory: Biopolitics regulates and disci plines the population as a normative abstraction of its constituent identities. Similarly, territory is regulated and disciplined as a normative abstrac tion of spaces and architectures. The creation, maintenance, and contestation of borders is nec essarily a component of this regulation and dis cipline, because without borders there could be nothing that is “territory.” Houston is a fiercely diverse and fiercely segregated city. Nearly 700 square miles of territory is subdivided into polit ical communities with distinct borders and identities. Because Houston experienced its most am bitious growth in the latter half of the 20th century, many of its neighborhoods have grown up with freeways as borders.

Marginality : The freeway is a dynamic, contested, conflicted space that produces mar ginal and heterotopic architectures. Parcels that face the freeway frontage road are more a part of the infrastructure itself than any political or geo graphic community. Though this interstice does not often have “Architecture,” the margin is an ideal vantage point from which to view the cen ter, and it can enable liberatory praxis.

Technology: The freeway and surround ing territory are represented through satellite photography, HCAD filing, Google Maps, and the dismally complicated technical documentation produced by TXDoT. Mapping is a political act,

and maps themselves are technological devices for the administrating and regulating of territo ry because they control how it is represented and interfaced with. Maps, apps, and interactive da tabases are to territory what demographics are to the population and should be taken as central tools for the state’s enforcement of norms and biopolitical imperatives.

Experience: The experience of freeway driving has been parsed from Banham to Baudril lard. Our academic imagination produces a view from the road, with the freeway as a grand con nector between “here” and “there.” Similarly, the NHHIP is sold under the priority of connecting Houston’s ever-creeping suburban outskirts with its flaccid central business district. However, many of the communities adjacent to the NHHIP’s extent are neither “here” nor “there,” and under standing this relationship is necessary to accu rately represent and appropriately interact with the infrastructure.

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Angelica Monroy, 4 Ecologies of Houston. Marcus Martinez, William Truitt.

“The language of design, architecture, and urbanism in Los Angeles is the language of movement. Mobility outweighs monumentality there to a unique degree...and the city will never be fully understood by those who cannot move fluently through its diffuse urban texture, cannot go with the flow of its unprecedented life.” —Reyner Banham, Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies

In the 1970s, Reyner Banham constructed four ecologies of Los Angeles exploring the city’s ar chitectural characteristics that could have de scribed Houston 50 years into the future, as both cities share a vehicular-dominant lifestyle. How ever, as of 2021, Houston is to undergo transpor tation changes with the North Houston Highway Improvement Project proposal to merge IH-45

and 59. The “kinetic experience” that Houston and LA share will drastically change (Banham 72). Without the romance of a vehicular-domi nant ecology, Houston must establish what its own four ecologies are. The purpose of this the sis is to study the four new ecologies of Houston and reveal their presence within one site: Bayou Place, a mass forced to become a void through the changing cityscape. “The denizens of the free have become its product, users transformed into victims. Commuters on a subway train passive ly submit to the indignities of underground life, while drivers on the freeway enact the very form of the network. No longer kibitzers, they are per formers in the theater of mobility.” “Although a diffuse megashape must be imagined and con structed in the minds of denizens, the pillard roominess of the zoohemic canopy in Houston promises a beyond.” Lars Lerup, One Million Acres & No Zoning. The third ecology is both natural and foreign. The pine trees Houston is known for are human-made relics that changed natural ventilation’s efficacy across the moist plains. In One Million Acres & No Zoning, Lars Lerup dis approves of this intervention: the complex risk in manipulating the prairie. The canopy, which appears perfectly natural, is almost as artificial as the technology that replaces a cool breeze (Le rup 141). Now an identifier of wealthier neighborhoods, the broad trees commonly meet in the middle of a path, the natural arch creating an in terior room in the middle of the flat Houstonian landscape. Much like Central Park, Buffalo Bayou utilizes this canopy to create space between humans and the city.

accordingly: 1) high density of population and activities, 2) mixture of primary uses, 3) small-scale blocks, 4) retention of old buildings mixed with the new. Both the NRG stadium and the Astro dome demonstrate what happens when a build ing’s duration is not fully considered. Early As trodome success depended on single-use sporting events and the novelty of the space with its firstof-a-kind indoor air-conditioned domed stadi um. Due to its lack of adaptability, the entire com plex embodies what Lewis Mumford describes as “Space-Eaters.” This thesis reevaluates the rele vance of Jacobs’s four elements, using the points to break apart the single-use event in the city.

4Antonio Perez, Astrodome & Jane Jacobs. William Truitt, Marcus Martinez.

In The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Jane Jacobs describes the importance of diversity in architecture, concluding that there are four elements that make a city thrive if planned

Single Use Land Development: From the early design development, the Astrodome was overall designed in a symmetrical, ideal way. The original symmetrical object (dome), parking, and Astro Hall promoted the modern promise of the future in its singular ideal form. As time went on, the Astrodome lost its ideal presence. As the city grew and expanded so did the site of the Astrodome. In 2002 the NRG stadium was built; now the site already suffering from one single-use structure now hosted two. With the NRG’s poor location right next to the Astrodome, the ideal image started to fade away. By 2019 the only piece of history still left is the Astrodome building it self. The site has grown drastically, losing any sense of order. The football facility has grown drastically in the past 20 years with the now smallest project—the defunct Astrodome—hid den from view at the center. Gated and surrounded by 6,959,500 square feet of parking, the site lacks any diversity of use or habitation. Its mas sive system of parking only sees a limited amount of use each calendar year. The gated-off land has taken on a role of a non-place. Most Astrodome proposals have fallen apart simply due to the lack of activity envisioned. This proposal intended to turn a single-use structure into another single-use design, focusing heavily on the cost of these proj ects, instead of the diverse activity that a struc ture of this scale should posses. Astrodome Park (Mini Dome) proposes demolishing the structure and leaving the Astrodome’s outer shell to frame

a single-event green space. In the center of this green space will be a small-scale model of the As trodome that will act as a museum to honor all that took place throughout its existence. In the opposite direction from Astrodome Park, ADome Park celebrates the Astrodome. Instead of demolishing the structure, this proposal removes the building’s cladding and embraces its contribution to the field of structural engineering. The proposal is mainly a park/ hiking trail for run ning and biking. The center volume functions as a flexible event space.

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Stefani Portocarrero Arone, Veterans, Inwood Landscapes. William Truitt, Donna Kacmar. The U.S. federal government offers hous ing assistance plans for veterans, but these plans exclude many who have varied needs, and marginalizes even those who receive benefits. The midtown U.S. Vets complex demonstrates the iso lating effect of veteran housing in the city. In the Inwood Forest neighborhood, single-family homes and townhomes fit between a central ur ban corridor and a defunct golf course. This the sis leverages the connection between city and landscape and proposes to develop a housing strategy for multiple groups of veterans hybrid ized with an agricultural and vocational program. Problem #1: Veterans are not a uniform group, but the housing program in Houston only serves those who are terribly injured or suffering from severe addictions, marginalizing young veteran families with kids, single parents, financially struggling families or individuals, and veterans with mild mental diagnoses (PTSD, depression, or anxiety).

The Neighborhood: Inwood Forest is a residential development located 15 miles north west of downtown Houston. Developed around a golf course, allowing for large green spaces, the site has no grid; streets curve differently and many become dead ends. There are 1,254 homes and

each has a unique character. The styles vary from English Tudor, Spanish, French, New England Colonial, and more. Overall, all these elements make Inwood Forest a very interesting and di verse place.

History: Around the 1860s, German im migrants (The Futchs family) settled around the White Oak Bayou and established a dairy farm, which thrived for over one hundred years. Around 1963 the few family members left began selling their land, and by the 1970s the gentle pastures and forest began to develop into an affluent res idential community we now know as Inwood For est. Inwood Forest development began with Sec tion 1 located southwest of the site by White Oak Bayou. After Section 1 was built, then came a golf course and country club, followed by the remain ing sections around the golf course. In 1960 Col lier Airport, a small airport with a single runway, was built. Potential buyers could take airplane rides to observe home sites. Meanwhile, home owners could park their small airplanes and walk home. However, the airport shut down in the late 70s due to the high rate of residential develop ment in the area. Inwood Forest continued to be quite successful; with the oil bust of the 80s, how ever, the neighborhood began to decay. Further more, natural disasters worsened the situation. In 2007 Inwood Forest golf course and country club were sold to an investment company that planned to develop all 226 acres as commercial and high-density residential. This led to a three-year legal battle between the homeowners association and the investment company that ended in favor of the homeowners association, which demand ed that the site only be developed as recreational space. Eventually, the city purchased the golf course and country club, and now there are cur rent development plans for a recreational space and multiple detention ponds to aid the terrible flooding conditions. Problem #2: Natural disas ters forced Houston’s City Council to approve a major development project, which involved ex cavating 11 30-feet-deep detention ponds across the existing golf course in order to alleviate the current flooding conditions. Tropical storm

Allison (June 2001) flooded 900 out of 1,254 homes, which led to the expansion of Vogel Creek. Hurricane Harvey (August 2017) flooded 175 homes; some of the sites were bought by FEMA and later demolished, and some were declared unsafe to be rebuilt.

Michael Fajtl, Artificial Earthscapes

The thesis explores using soil, taken from an abandoned surface quarry mine (defined as drosscape by Lars Lerup and Alan Berger), and developing the site into a vocational learning cen ter and temporary housing. These help spread awareness of Rammed Earth construction as a re fined, modern alternative to contemporary materials. The main facility provides a testing ground for application and research of Rammed Earth construction.

This thesis project proposes using an openpit mine’s own materials to inhabit it with new structures, bringing awareness to the artificial construction from natural materials. The abandoned open-pit mine therefore provides both an opportunity and a critique, as suggested by Solà-Morales, to present a solution to the contex tual destructive practices.

It was crucial to identify a region with po tential for a Rammed Earth growth and with lit tle historical or cultural tradition, while still climatically and geologically viable for the technique.

The U.S., especially in the north, has been historically one of the last areas in the world to be introduced to Rammed Earth. Unlike South and Central America, which adopted the tech nique from the Spanish settlers centuries ago, most of U.S. never moved beyond limited exper imental projects (Augarde).

The Northeast Megalopolis, stretching from Washington to Boston, represents the larg est urban area on the continent. As these coastal cities grow, they require materials extracted from a few kilometers inland, resulting in a series of open-pit mines penetrating the earth in a northsouth line parallel to the cities.

The project quarry is within driving distance of each regional major city. With rising ur banization rises the diversity and size of the tar get audience, maximizing the number of people the project can educate. In fact, for this reason the nearby King of Prussia town is home to the larg est shopping mall in North America. Though the mall is visited by millions of people, the quarry, which shares the same urban connection condi tions, remains disconnected from the urban fab ric. The possibility of reclassifying the post-in dustrial area in need of reuse into an area that suits its conditions and urban context makes the site desirable for the project: the program wasn’t conceived as a solution to the site, rather the site was chosen for the purposes of the program. The site allows the project to not merely answer the question of “how” but also the question of “why.” A Rammed Earth vocational center and criticism of contemporary industry practices could each individually be accomplished at a different locale, but only here can the bisociation of the two occur.

Stefan Nino, Reconstructing St. John

This thesis project will focus on complet ing an unfinished puzzle that will tie together memory, culture, and a future vision. John the Be loved traveled throughout the Mediterranean and eventually settled in Ephesus, where he spent the rest of his days, later passing away and being bur ied in Ayasuluk Hill. Over his tomb today sheep roam. He is the only apostle who does not have a proper tomb over his body or a place for people to celebrate and worship, to read his writings while going through the ritual of the Mass that he helped design. This project seeks to rectify this by creating a series of chapels that will allow for the three original denominations of Christianity to worship.

Around the 4th century, a church was built atop St. John’s tomb. The Basilica, whose ruins are still visible today, was built by Emperor Justinian in the 6th century. In the 13th century,

Tamerlane’s Mongol army leveled the site, leaving the Basilica in ruins that sit at the base of Aya suluk Hill, now part of the renowned ruins of Ephesus. The campus will provide a place for rest, meditation, celebration, and worship. The con cepts of love and affection will be driving themes throughout the project, which finds its inspira tion in the writings of John, where love is the key element. There are three important rules guiding this project: The first is that it protects and re spects St. John by creating a proper space of wor ship for him. The second is that the site is touched as little as possible so as to respect the physical site and not disturb the ruins. The third is for the project to clearly distingsuish the ruins so that you can easily identify old from new.

The three pillar denominations of Chris tianity—Roman Catholic, Orthodox, and Arme nian Apostolic—will each have their own place of worship surrounding the tomb, allowing for in terreligious dialogue similar to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. They will all be connected through the tomb of St. John, who is present through their readings.

Ariana Flick

Franco Denari

Antonio Perez

Ambar Stefani Portocarrero

Super Jury Awards

Each Academic Year, the Super Jury Awards Program celebrates the best work of the culminating levels of Professional Level and Thesis Program of both Undergraduate Architecture programs of Bachelor of Architecture and Bachelor of Sciences of Environ mental Design.

Previous

Mariana Galvan, Ferdous Kabir, and Edwin Barajas

Franco Denari

The Coin, The Crack, and The Cistern

Marian Galvan, Ferdous Kabir, and Edwin Barajas Vigil

Second Place

Gaston Denari and Sharon Philip

Katherine Polkinghorne

Events

MATTER(S)

Lecture Series

Since the nascent origins of the universe, matter / energy has comprised the essential building blocks of existence ranging from galaxies to at oms. Humanity and its productions are insepara ble from this stream, and all will eventually re turn to its shared origins in cosmic dust. For the design disciplines, matter offers a point of shared convergence—from its enablement of creative and productive forces to its inherent transscalar ecologies, social impacts, and environmental values. The way designers produce buildings, prod ucts, and designs can work in harmony with the material world or it can harm it for future gener ations in a reality of increasing scarcities. This program series posits what truly matters, across design disciplines and scales via the social, cul tural, historical, and environmental realms—and how designers can create work that is in concert with the consonance of the shared universe.

SEP. 21 BROOKS + SCARPA

Moderated by Jesse Hager

oCT. 19 ANDREW KUDLESS Matsys

Moderated by Jeff Halstead

Nov. 16 BETSY BARNHART

Moderated by George Chow

JAN. 25 AMALE ANDRAOS WORKac

Moderated by Rafael Beneytez-Durán

FEB. 8 ANUPAMA KUNDOO

Anupama Kundoo Architects

Moderated by Alan Bruton

FEB. 22

SALLY WALSH ROUNDTABLE

Eugene Aubry, Alan Bruton, Stephen Fox, Lois Farfel Stark, with special guests: Gail Adler, Barbara Amelio, Marilyn Archer,

Beverly Bentley, Raymond Brochstein, Mary Burnette, Robert Burnette, Tony Frederick, Kathy Heard, Paul Hester, Lannis Kirkland, Judy Kugle, James B. Thomas, Anna Wingfield, and others who knew and worked with Sally Walsh

MAR. 1 ASSEMBLE

Moderated by Daniel Jacobs

MAR. 22 OMER ARBEL

Omer Arbel Office

APR. 5 RAJA SCHAAR

Westphal College of Media Arts & Design, Drexel University

FEB. 9 Complexities of John Hejduk’s

Work: Exorcising Outlines, Apparitions and Angels

Kevin Story

Moderated by Bruce Webb

FEB. 23 Consuming Surrealism in American Culture: Dissident Modernism

Sandra Zalman

Moderated by Natilee Harren

MAR. 14 Eugenics in the Garden: Transatlantic Architecture and the Crafting of Modernity

Fabiola Lopez-Duran

Moderated by Michael Kubo

APR. 13

BOOKS AND BITES

The Books & Bites series promotes UH research and publishing and provides opportunities for faculty, students, and researchers to learn more about topics such as archival research, image li censing, working with publishers, and other sub jects of interest to design professionals.

SEP. 17 Giedion and America: Repositioning the History of Modern Architecture Reto Geiser

Moderated by Michael Kubo

oCT. 23 The Architecture of Museums: A Decade of Design: 2000–2010 Ronnie Self

Moderated by Sandra Zalman

Nov. New Essentialism: 19 & 20 Material Architecture

Gail Peter Borden

Moderated by Rafael Beneytez-Durán

Making Houston Modern: Life and Architecture of Howard Barnstone Bradley, Fox, Sabatino

Presented by Stephen Fox

Moderated by Peter Gershon

APR 22 The Chamaleon Effect, Architecture’s Role in Film

Dietmar Froehlich

Moderated by Maria Elena Soliño

Directory

Dean

Patricia Belton Oliver

Associate Dean Dietmar Froehlich

Assistant Dean Trang Pang

Director of Undergraduate Architecture Rafael Beneytez-Durán

Director of Graduate Studies Gail Peter Borden

Faculty

Vera Adams

Kevin Barden

Rafael Beneytez-Durán

John Bellian

Geoffrey Brune

Galo Canizares

Sharon Chapman

David Chlebus

Amanda Dean

Stephanie Delgado

Tom Diehl

Karim Fakhry

Stephen Fox

Dietmar Froehlich

Jeff Fong

Victoria Goldstein Michael Gonzales

Jesse Hager

Jeff Halstead Dijana Handanovic Paul Homeyer

Megan Jackson Daniel Jacobs Matthew Johnson Donna Kacmar

Sofia Krimizi

Michael Kubo Andrew Kudless Kyriakos Kyriakou Nora Laos

Brandie Lockett

Jason Logan Marcus Martinez Emily Moore Peter Noldt

Christopher Oliver Patrick Peters Roya Plauché

Celeste Ponce Bruce Race

Shafik Rifaat

Joshua Robbins

Susan Rogers

Marta Rodriguez Fernandez

Heather Rowell

Ronnie Self

Joshua Smith

Kevin Story

Rives Taylor

William Truitt

Sheryl Tucker de Vazquez

Drexel Turner

Josh Vanlandinham

Adam Wells Ross Wienert

Peter Jay Zweig

Coordinators

Design Media

Andrew Kudless

History, Theory, and Criticism

Michael Kubo

Technology Rives Taylor and Tom Diehl

Foundation Level Studios

Jason Logan

Intermediate Level Studios

Rafael Beneytez-Durán

Comprehensive Level Studios

Patrick Peters

Professional Level Studios

Gail Peter Borden

Gerald D. Hines

College of Architecture & Design

Prospectus 2020–21

Undergraduate Architecture Program

Editor

Rafael Beneytez-Durán

Main Contributors

The Dean, Associate Dean, Architecture Programs Directors, Coordinators, Faculty, Staff, and Students of the Hines

College of Architecture and Design

Additional Contributors

Nisa Ari

Alan Bruton

Natilee Harren

Rex Koontz

Luisa Orto

Ziad Qureshi

Brooks + Scarpa

James B. Thomas

Sandra Zalman

Photo Essay

Rafael Beneytez-Durán

Copyediting

Sheila Majumdar

Graphic Design

Veneziane

This work is the product of a collaborative effort by many and by its nature would not be possible if not as a collective effort of those many. This was possible thanks to the strong belief in the pedagogical capacity of a collective intelligence—that blurring of the individual—that can speak to presentday concerns and discussions. I am very grateful to the students whose works in these pages help all of us to grow, and to all faculty, for the inspiring prompts, provoking such productiveness, collective enthusiasm, energy, and commitment. Particularly, I wanted to extend my gratefulness to the Hines staff Avani Dave, Thuy Mai, and Nancy Do, whose heavy lifting of all administrative tasks supported all these pages and whose silent work makes everything we do possible. I am very grateful to Trang Pang, Dietmar Froehlich, and Stephen Schad for all the guidance and care. And finally, my infinite gratitude goes to Dean Patricia Belton Oliver, whose optimism and belief in the powers of pedagogy have been instrumental and a source of continuous support to make collective thoughts and imaginaries settle and materialize. The final shape of this work is thanks to Normal, whose delicate and dedicated conversation have oriented and resolved the graphic design process, allowing all design divergencies to dwell in a democratic camping.

© 2022 University of Houston. Text and images © their authors. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced in any form without prior written consent by the publisher.