Gerald D. Hines
College of Architecture & Design
Prospectus 2020–21
Undergraduate Architecture Program
Arch 1500: Representation
Arch 1501: Conceptualization
Arch 2500: Contextualization
Arch 2501: Design Methods
Arch 3500: Design Strategies
Arch 3501: Material Practice
Arch 4510: Integrated Design Solutions
Arch 5500: Topic Studios (Fall)
Arch 5500: Topic Studios (Spring)
Arch 5593: Thesis Studio
Patricia Belton Oliver, Dean
As a College and a University, if we are serious about establishing ourselves as a center of influence, we must understand that this journey demands 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 individuals 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 predicted. 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 become necessary for our personal and professional 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 influence in everyday life.
For many years, another shift has been occurring. The University’s research agenda has been connecting environmental concerns to growing expectations that the College lead research 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 strategies 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 resurgence of demand for inclusivity, compassion, and mutual respect. The work of the Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Task Force and the faculty and students of the College have inspired us to work harder to ensure an environment supporting collective conversations toward social justice around ability, age, class, ethnicity, gender, race, religion, and sexuality. An equitable environment cultivates 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 transformation. It is a time of great movement from one way to another. Thom Mayne, Visiting Professor in 2016–17, said that the methodology of his work was “constantly a push-pull between affect 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 architects, designers, educators, and students, thrive. Every day is a time to look forward.
Rafael Beneytez-Durán, Director of Undergraduate Architecture Programs
Change is all about motion. Academics and professionals are challenged by how rapidly new coordinates 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 refugees, 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, formal, material, technological, environmental. In this new era of ecological consciousness, architectural work becomes an embassy (a cross-section) of all these assembled layers. Architecture is the assemblage that manifests in ethical and aesthetical form. As an embassy, architectural work is a powerful tool that reconfigures and mobilizes 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 Architecture and Design embrace this privileged period of change and prepare students to design architectural 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 experimentation, where all academic areas of Design Media, History, Technology, and Theory and Criticism interact and overlap in their commitment to global evolution. Every semester the UGA programs launch more than 30 studio problems that evolve in multiple directions before reporting back their results in juries, discussions, and exhibitions that cover the building walls or populate our digital archive with thousands of remarkable 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 myriad 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 tactile craftsmen to new design media robotics. Prospectus 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 architecture. Prospectus has been born in a context of eco-
logical consciousness and celebrates the diversity 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 foreign territory. Design is all about assembling cultures, 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 Burgee reassembled the new college’s building ideas and its material forms. The 1980s introduced a period of fantasy when architecture and symbolism were married with the late 20th-century paraphernalia of the emerging technologies that envisioned a sealed world—a quasi-autonomous world fed with conditioned air, managed by machinery, 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 paradigm of abundance that divided Houston in tempered 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. Prospectus 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, rethink, and reformulate the college’s material and technological forms. Where are the quarries, the territories, and the landscapes that have been rearranged to support this building? “Building” becomes 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 logics of our present.
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 workflows 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 visualization across the design disciplines. An introduction to the history and methods of design drawings, ways of making, analog and digital media, 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 consciousness. We will find that to design is not simply to dream a perfect image and reproduce it flawlessly with tools but is instead a collaborative negotiation 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 design projects, making use of real-time technologies 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 environments has generated a wave of playable architecture 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 Unreal 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 democratization may mean for architecture. We will approach design as an act of discovery, make catalogs 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 reading discussions. We will explore projects that make use of Game Engines, Surveillance Equipment, 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 lecture/lab introduction to the concepts of digital design. We will use Rhinoceros and introduce Grasshopper as well as explore methods of digital 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 approached 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 critical workshop. The students will be asked to realize each theme (or working method) by completing 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 methods within the discipline of digital design and craft. In addition to group and individual problem-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 computational design strategies and tactics. A series of lectures and demonstrations will cover general knowledge of emerging computational strategies within architectural, interior, and industrial design as well as more specific training in parametric 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. Starting 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. Students will be responsible for completing assignments in Grasshopper and submitting wellorganized and annotated files for review and grading. Lectures and demonstrations will be provided via synchronous online instruction, and all recordings will be made available so students can review the course materials on their own schedule. In addition, students and instructor will communicate asynchronously via email, chat, and other platforms.
arch 3397-11: Hybrid Visualization with AR / Joshua Smith
This lecture course is based on a set of three premises 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 possibility to connect AR/PR (physical reality) as amalgams of physical interaction, digital connectivity, and symbolic creativity. The resulting projects
will have the ability to create a new typology of public space that exists within our collective technological imagination.
Due to the ubiquitous computing technologies, shared data networks, global media and techniques of control, and surveillance at the scale of the entire planet, our world seems increasingly uniform, monocultural, and generic. This appearance of growing homogeneity hides differences and heterogeneities at a small scale, which manifest themselves as resistant discontinuities or emergent phenomena in that seemingly continuous 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 drawing. 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 variety 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 number 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.
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 presentation tools found in most software packages. Major topics include lighting, materials and texture mapping, perspective matching, and animated walkthroughs. Emphasis will be on the importation of 3D geometry from all major modeling programs.
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 applications 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 information 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.
Required Technology Courses, Undergraduate Architecture, 2020–21
arch 2327: Technology 1
Introduction to the broad nature of architectural 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 integrated with studio projects. By the end of the semester students have an awareness of the multiple performance-related factors impacting the design and construction of buildings.
arch 2328: Technology 2
Examination of the multi-faceted integrative nature of architectural design with an emphasis on structural and environmental systems and the role of the architect relative to other consultants. Introductory investigations and analysis 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 systems 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 factors through calculations and integration with studio design projects.
arch 3328: Technology 4
Advanced building science focusing on quantitative measures. Case studies of integrated building systems: site, climate, structures, envelope, and materials. Investigation of the integration of design systems in architectural design with an emphasis on site, climate, structures, envelope, 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.
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.
Required HTC Courses, Undergraduate Architecture, 2020–21
arch 1358: Introduction to Design Culture / Michael Kubo
Lectures provide a thematic introduction to major issues, events, and actors within the history of the design disciplines—in particular architecture, interior architecture, and industrial design. Weekly topics are organized around a series of fundamental 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 observation, description, and reflection that underlie 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 isolation. They are part of global processes that include colonialism, imperialism, nationalism, industrialization, 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 contexts in turn. We examine the worldwide movements 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 addressed in order to provide context for architecture; 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 attention and admiration. This course investigates the roots of this new Japanese architecture, looking beyond the nostalgic argument that Japan’s success is based on its respect toward tradition. This seminar is intended to promote reading, writing, discussion, and critical investigation of selected aspects of Japanese architectural culture 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 understanding 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 discussions. These include five short books that will be read in their entirety: From Bauhaus to Our House, Learning from Las Vegas, Palladio, Toward an Architecture, and Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture. Each class will focus on one or several articles 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 Roman Empire to the present. Includes illustrated lectures, readings on culture and theory with associated 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 explaining its connection to landscape, infrastructure, 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 global urbanism vis-à-vis this thing we call landscape. The framework of the course is half seminar, half design studio. The main projects in the class will be research exercises intended to understand more specifically the physical and demographic variables that shape the modern global city.
arch 3380/6380: Architecture + Film /
Dietmar Froehlich
The class introduces students to films and literature 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 contemporary architecture, to enable students to use film/video as an investigative architectural tool and as a means of representation for architectural 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 significant writing element, using the AIA Gold Medal Winners and Industrial Design Award Winners as our topic. Each student will choose five projects by award winning designers and research a case study for each. Writing products at semester’s end will include two-page design briefs. A design brief is an example of professional writing 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 communicative media—from books to magazines, pamphlets, broadsheets, zines, blogs, Instagram feeds, and other publication formats both analog and digital.
Note: This class should be taken by any students 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 lucid, 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 readings and class discussions we will explore ways of looking at and writing about interesting buildings, whatever their architectural pretensions and however 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 lectures and walking tours that describe and analyze the architectural history of Houston. The basis of the lectures is a chronological account of the development 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 historical 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 investigate physical, social, economic, and political morphology of cities and address the following research questions: What are the traits of a globally fluent city? What are design problems and solutions of global fluency for a city? What skills within 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, including 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, history, theory, and contemporary influences including 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 traditions 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, metalwork, mosaics, textiles, and more contemporary media, such as photography and video, in order 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 extensive 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 understand how courtly ritual shaped the center of what is perhaps the most celebrated architectural ensemble created in the Americas before the coming of the Spanish.
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, performance, 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 artists 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 social, cultural, and economic change in the post–World War II moment, as well as significant theoretical 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 photography from its invention and global dissemination in the mid-1800s to the present day. With special attention to how photography’s rise corresponded 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 transnational networks and new forms of collectivity across the globe. Moving chronologically and thematically, we will examine the diverse uses of photography not only in the fine arts, but also in the fields of science, anthropology, and military conquest. 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 Viceregal art and architecture to the contemporary in Mexico, Argentina, Brazil, and other key Latin American artistic centers. No previous experience 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 having successfully taken this course. In the spring course, you will work directly with curators and objects in the MFAH’s rich Latin American collections 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 exhibitions on the understanding of artworks and their history.
Spring
arch 3198: Design Justice / Alan Bruton, Megan Jackson, Donna Kacmar, EunSook Kwon, Susan Rogers
This interdisciplinary seminar focuses on the relationship between design and justice. The seminar will address the practices of industrial design, interior architecture, and architecture. The method 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 design matters.
Grounded in critical readings, videos, discussions, and in-class activities, the course explores the histories, values, practices, narratives, scales, pedagogies, and matters of design justice from both historical and contemporary perspectives, 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 “inexpert” 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 often 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 architecture emphasizing 18th-through-20th-century interiors and their influences on current practice. This involves: lectures by Houston interior architects; 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 readings about different chapel types, and it will conclude 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 presentation is intended to lay the groundwork for a formally written research paper about the chapel, 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 equity 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, including 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, particularly including histories that bear parallels with the current moment. We may work collaboratively to structure a model curriculum for a design school and/or to create syllabi for courses 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, observation, 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 public parks and open space in successful, livable, sustainable 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 investigate 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 seminar. The course addresses in particular the research 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 lucid, insightful, and intermittently provocative commentary, as in the cases of 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 readings and class discussions we will develop acute and sophisticated observations of (and writings about) interesting buildings, whatever their architectural pretensions and however 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 relationship to design and built works while giving particular attention to the ideas and buildings of contemporary architects. The material will be approached from a point of view that gives value to the craft of architecture and the art of construction. 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 lectures and walking tours that describe and analyze the architectural history of Houston. The basis of the lectures is a chronological account of the development 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 historical 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, including sustainability and environmental design, exposure 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 historical context of the late 19th century through contemporary 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 artistic, architectural, literary, scholarly, and cinematic 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 discourse—that of how the “West” constructed the “East”—by comparing it with theories of intercultural artistic exchange and by examining Orientalist 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 historical legacy for the fields of art history and postcolonial studies.
arth 4394/6394: Drawing in the Expanded Field (Selected Topics) / Natilee Harren
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 overlap 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 technological 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 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 representational techniques in the world, focusing on the contextualization 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.
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 developed 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
Necessary for any designer is a facility with and understanding of the representational techniques that allow for the practice of a particular discipline. This is because designers rarely make the things they design—objects, products, furniture, interiors, architecture, etc. Instead, designers 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 preconception). Graphic Forms is the first step in exploring 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 inspiring 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 various art movements and their impact on fashion, industrial design, interior architecture, and architecture. Similarly, designers may engage in developing 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 interested in the graphic resonance between the originating geometries, patterns, etc., that are specified 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, students will build on the processes and techniques developed in the Graphic Forms exercise to explore 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 distinction 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 longer be clearly defined as such. The point of the exercise 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 preconceptions of form and space. In Project 2, each studio will develop a series of rule sets that utilize 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 preexisting 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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In the final project, students will explore surface as a volume-defining element that leverages minimal material means to maximum formal, 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 simultaneously. 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 volume 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 efficiency). However, design isn’t simply a question of efficiency; 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 differently—from articulated assemblies of surface-toframe, patterning, tiling, layering, etc., to notions of composite assemblies where techniques of laminating, 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.
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
Sharon Chapman
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.”
From Poché to Poche. Poché is a drawing convention that is used to distinguish the space of architecture 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 constructions. 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 created in architectural construction and made inert by their inaccessibility. Rather than focusing on the graphic clarity of poché, the studio will explore the opportunities of the space that it conceals. The French word poche (no accent on the “e”), translates to pocket, which will serve for the purposes of the studio as a convenient misreading 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).
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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 relationship to form and space, students will develop an anthropometric drawing study that documents their human proportion in relation to the average heights used in furniture design, interior architecture, and architecture. Students will also document their bodies’ movements through space to understand minimum spatial requirements and the constraints of stairs, ramps, and circulation spaces. The drawings should be developed as both an analytical document and an aesthetic work, drawing inspiration from photographic motion studies such as those by Étienne-Jules Marey and Gjon Mili, among others.
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Project 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 develop a series of massings that describe the spatial sequence of an installation that will provide spaces for studying, resting, socializing, eating, etc. The massings must have a minimum of 3
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.
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):
• 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 connect to another spatially.
Project 1D: Embedded Functions, Aperture, and Interior Atmosphere
“Sunlight. Fairy tale.” Within the remaining poché of the plans and sections, embed functions and cut apertures to support the various activities: • Embed functions—storage, furniture, etc. • Cut apertures • View out/in, up, down
• Aperture size • Light levels • Surface materiality, texture, pattern, etc.
In 1999 Stan Allen wrote the essay “Field Conditions.” In it he describes a design methodology that moves from the development of objects to fields. He describes a field as a system that can be linked or interconnected globally while allowing the flexibility to respond and differentiate itself locally within the overall network: “To generalize, a field condition could be any formal or spatial matrix capable of unifying diverse elements while respecting the identity of each. Field conditions are loosely bound aggregates characterized 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 organizing 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 2A: Precedent
Each student will draw the primary floor plan of their assigned precedent and analyze the assigned precedent based on: Structure, Circulation, and Programmatic Organization. 10
Working in the groups from Project 2A, students developed a conceptual matrix that hybridized the organizing principles from the assigned precedents. Each of the organizing principles 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 circulation diagram from precedent B? Or the programmatic 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 distinction to make during this process was differentiating between extracting an organizing system of parameters/rules from a precedent versus mimicking 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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Students picked one of the hybrid systems from the conceptual matrix in phase Project 2B. Each student took the rules from the selected hybrid system and applied it to what Stan Allen describes as a “field condition.” The field condition must demonstrate the capacity of the hybrid system to respond locally to the specificities of the project site and a selected series of artworks.
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.
Kevin Barden
Sharon Chapman
Donna Kacmar
Christopher Oliver
Celeste Ponce
Joshua Robbins
Kristin Schuster
Ross Wienert
The typical “Building Analysis” exercise often puts an emphasis on the reproduction of archival quality models and drawings as a way of teaching fundamental skills of technique and craftsmanship, while also learning from an architectural 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 representational technique. A comparative analysis will allow students to understand the diversity of scales, forms, types, and organizations across culture, 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.
“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 particular context.
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Project 2: Dwelling as __________ : A Proposal for a Multi-Unit Dwelling
Working within the studio theme “Dwelling as __________,” each student will develop a multi-unit housing proposal (2–4 units) for an infill 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 intention is reinforced and refined through a more detailed investigation of material, structure, or environmental systems—whether passive or active. Each studio selects a topic for elaboration.
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 Intermediate design studio, Material Practice, develops students’ capacity 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.
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 precedent study to support the analysis and understanding of the case study’s design methods. Once Phase 1 has unfolded all the materials 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.
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 distinguishes 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.
1Building 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 relationship 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 studio interacts in specific and unique ways with the ground plane. While differences may be recognized in terms of form, material, climate, time, and program, the relationship still stands significant 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.
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 architecture 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 other, the roof lintels, with their perfect horizontality and tremendous dimension, were none other than a symbol of stability, equilibrium, and firmness. Was Calimaco trying to defy gravity by placing the graceful leaves at the point of maximum compression? Gravity has always formed architecture. The terrestrial attraction force of 32.174 ft/s2 magnitude is a passive designer of the architectural 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 structural 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 topography combined with disruptive weather events contribute to a place where being elevated has become a way to build. Let’s leave Houston’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 substantial differences between the various approaches to addressing this emancipatory trend, all celebrate lightness, elude the historical opacity of architecture, and operate with a necessary stability, in contrast with an architecture that abuses formal stability to symbolize its permanency.
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 populace with residents of surrounding areas will become 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 protected; residency and income levels will not be taken into account. Art, education, and play/sports/activities should be blind to socioeconomic and residency status; they are, in fact the tools we can use to break down barriers, both explicit and implicit. 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 common 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 history, something that was immediately palpable... That’s what makes him so vital, because it’s really more about the architect exercising imagination 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 Orthodox church’s site. This humble site will embody the spirits and intentions of both Hejduk and the de Menils.
Gather / Interact / Community / Tom Diehl
Architects are organizers, as creating order 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 organization 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 development, and material cladding, etc. These aspects require organizational concepts and strategies as well. Forming those into intentions creating a coherent whole defines the basis of a thorough design process. Often left under-conceptualized are unidentified design attributes that impact a building’s design. They are not always themes that emanate from the pragmatic distribution of the functions 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 understand the “non-functional” yet impactful relationship 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 responses to the site and program. With this understanding the goal is to refine the use of language-based design intentions in both their organizational, representational and performance-related domains.
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Contain / Reveal / Roya Plauché
Design Methods (DM). Our studio will focus 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 Context. 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 project 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 containing, collecting, gathering people, places, and things throughout history. In some cases, the containment is defined physically, providing barriers and boundaries. In other cases, it is a collection 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 notion of the reveal can be present in relationship to light, color, views, sequences, movement, etc. It is this making apparent that allows for an emphasis or focus on the object or subject in the experience of the built environment.
Materialization of Concept and Knowledge / Celeste Ponce
In the essay titled “Paragraphs on Conceptual 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 origins stemming from Marcel Duchamp’s readymades, 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 expression 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 Motion, LeWitt developed ideas centered around seriality, 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 others to execute or construct. He questioned whether 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 emphasizing concept over object or “thinker” over “craftsman.” The student will examine artworks by Sol LeWitt, as a way to think about the implementation 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 understand and collect their architect’s measuring tools. Scientific observations will be utilized to formulate 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 originality to meet a particular function instead of aestheticism. LeWitt’s notion of constraint will serve as a backdrop for analyzing environmental, cultural, 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 another, 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 series 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 architectural reaction. Once we have finished our journey from inside to outside, we will turn and begin the journey back based on new (and more local) contextual constraints prompting novel architectural responses. Guidance on this journey will be provided by a series of readings including Infrastructural Urbanism by Stan Allen and Landscape as Urbanism by Charles Waldheim.
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 building, the way that designers respond to those factors varies widely. Each designer will prioritize certain influences, emphasizing some elements while minimizing others. The expression of that hierarchy possesses the potential to embody value and establish meaning. Internal—Programmatic Relationships: Within the building, students will be asked to consider the demands of a variety 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 pursuit of the surrational. External—Experiential Sustainability: Beyond the building, students will
be asked to consider both the aesthetic and performative potential of sustainability. This question will be addressed from the standpoint of a designer, with an emphasis on the effect on experiential qualities and embodiment of cultural value over the calculation and quantification of numerical value. Each design should consider how the building responds to issues related to sun, wind, and water in order to provide thermal comfort and potentially heighten one’s understanding of ecological forces.
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 reinforces 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 findings 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.
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 somewhere 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 relationships 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 ecological realms. The problematic framework was constructed during the unit discussion and was shaped by student preferences.
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 communication and survival in different ecosystems have led to insights about invisible interconnections among living organisms. These living systems operate with an interconnected symbiotic technology. Ants, bees, and humans are known as *superorganisms.*
Unlike natural systems living in a negotiated balance with their environment, human technology constitutes a synthetic superorganism. 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 *Anthropocene.* Architecture bears a large share of this anthropic 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 disparities. One of the many goals is to understand the symbiotic aspects of neighborhoods and ecologies 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 social fabric with neighborhoods subsumed and marginalized by this growing “prosperity.” Houston has firmly rejected zoning to guide this development since its first zoning vote in 1948. This
has engendered and continues to sustain an antagonistic relationship between industrial development 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 disrupted by industry, climate change, and economic disparities threatening their survival. This project will examine these affective and effective layers along Buffalo Bayou and propose architectural solutions mediating encountered disparities and prosperities.
A Plastic Island: On the Origins of the Period of Material Thinking / Rafael Beneytez-Durán
A blue pen, sunglasses, most of the elements 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 democracy” at such a level that it has metamorphosed from crude oil into many of our forms of dwelling 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 partially plasticized environments and bodies, even culture, by producing 260 million tons of plastic per year. “Plastic has become emblematic of economies of abundance and ecological destruction....
The material force of plastics prompts new forms of politics, environmental responsibility and citizenship.”
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 plastics industry will consume 20% of total oil production, and 15% of the annual carbon budget.” Evidence of the long-term effects of microplastics 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; “microplastics 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 process of removing waste in an economical manner with little concern given to environmental considerations. Waste byproducts of extraction and manufacturing processes were seen as necessary outcomes of doing business rather than as integral parts of a process where the waste products of one manufacturing process could be reimagined as feedstock for another.
This semester research and design investigations will expand the premise of recycling to advance awareness of its potential beyond material considerations. The intent is to allow for a reconceptualization 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 project can be viewed as a place of education, whether 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 architecture that not only solves the necessities of the program but also informs and educates.
Expansive Recycling: Perspectives, Materials, Land, Program / Tom Diehl
The idea of recycling became a part of the public mindset with the inaugural Earth Day celebrated in 1970. The holiday gave a voice to an emerging public consciousness about the state of our planet. An outgrowth of the actions and activities surrounding Earth Day was a new commitment to the recycling of materials. While extensive in its reach, recycling became primarily understood as an individual act that could, on occasion, include community action.
Houston, as the center of the oil and gas industry 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
6Forgotten 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 approximately 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 energy it took to produce it and generates greenhouse gases like methane, carbon dioxide, and chlorofluorocarbons, which contribute to global warming.
According to the World Wildlife Federation, the production of wasted food in the United States is equivalent to the greenhouse emissions 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 materials with no toxic byproducts, and can be modified 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 tributaries—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. Collection booms are placed not only on Buffalo Bayou but also along neighboring bayous, with BBP removing 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 removed from the waterway.
The Houston area stormwater drainage system directs street water and debris into curb catch basins that route the runoff through an underground system that empties into the city’s bayous. 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 recedes 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 presence of trash, debris, and pollutants degrades water 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 Buffalo Bayou, Buffalo Bayou Partnership (BBP) initiated a clean-up program in 2002. Thanks to ongoing partnerships with Harris County Flood Control District and Port Houston, BBP contin-
Dredge of Tomorrow: Recycled Dredging Facility + Institute for Landscape Architecture / Marcus Martinez
This semester’s investigation focuses on rapidly evolving landscapes. Brady Island was created 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 begins 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 neighborhood 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 recycling facility, and along the south are industrial 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 Houston’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 “processed into engineered structural fill and employed in wide variety of beneficial reuses including 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.
The spot formerly known as Old Harrisburg is nestled between working-class neighborhoods and tankers heading to the ship channel. It also marks the spot where Buffalo and Brays Bayou 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 junction, and west of Brady’s Island. It was founded before 1825 on the eastern stretches of the Buffalo 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. Historical 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 environmental sustainability to the public by providing a public viewing area and educational center for student and community groups showing the process of recycling large- and small-scale waste products and its benefit to support a more sustainable 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 recycling 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 aluminum can waste products at a designated on-site drop-off location.
10Broken 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 opportunity 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.
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 architectural 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.
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 frontage roads which feed the endless commerce distributed in repeating 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.
Resilience Factory: An Icon of Houston’s Motivations / 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, infrastructure and environment are facets so distinct to Houston that they have become form-giving and regional in scale (bayous and freeways, flooding and traffic). Amplified by the automobile 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 studio 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 typology. 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 impact, community impact, and material logic. Ambition: We set out to ask not only how architecture 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 visually construct ideas with durable impact. From exploded axonometric, obliques, and performative slices, the semester promises a perpetual mining of representational means, capturing material interrogations that produce rich drawings that chronicle contextual attributes, quirks, environmental cycles, and the diversity of participants.
Human civilization has made great technological leaps, but fulfilling the promise of socioeconomic 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 communities. These communities are nomadic, transitioning between temporary resource opportunities 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 defensible territory are lacking. Inaugurated for military mobility, freeways slice through cities and landscapes, often unaware of the effects on local natural and sociological contexts. Their necessary expansion deepens the wound to neighborhood connectivity. Today, environmental impact studies are an essential part of understanding landscapes. 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 freeways, as public infrastructure, better accommodate 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, allowing government agencies to maintain jurisdiction over public infrastructure. This project will explore 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 demands 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 islands 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 appropriation of the residual infrastructural islands enable a reinvention of the urban agricultural landscape? How can these interventions enhance urban connections, prioritize pedestrian traffic, and empha-
size community integration? Can interventions within the urban islands of existing infrastructural megashapes contribute to human-centric urban development and allow cities to become more resilient, ecological, and sustainable? 7 8 9
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 influence 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 later 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-growing 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 environmental conditions in order to generate hybrids between natural and artificial city-systems. The initial Parametric Charette will introduce students to techniques with which they can quickly 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 downtown, 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 originally 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 segregation 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 impacted the Third Ward dramatically. Opened in 1952, the Gulf Freeway (ih-45) divided the Third Ward into north and south, bisecting the once-bustling 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 technically 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 minority ward was not accidental or unusual. According to Kyle Shelton, author of Power Moves: Transportation, Politics, and Development in Houston, “During the 1950s and 1960s, as a part of wider urban renewal efforts, officials from many states and cities worked jointly to place highways through minority and working-class neighborhoods.” 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.
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 asphalt and concrete that undergird these metaphorically “hot” real-estate markets are themselves getting hotter as the earth warms and the dangerous effects of urban heat islands are exacerbated. 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 between highly paved and unpaved areas in Houston during the hottest times of the day. Extreme heat is just one danger posed by a paved, warming 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 environmental management that acknowledges our shared climactic “citizenship” and more robust and visible advocacy for climate-related interests: a “climate 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 political power. Our site is at the corner of Loop 610 and Westheimer in Uptown, the prototypical
Houston “Speed Zone” along the most congested highway in the state and one of the hottest neighborhoods in Houston.
The North Houston Highway Improvement Project to rebuild ih-45 is scheduled to begin 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 housing units, 344 businesses, five places of worship, and two schools (TXDoT Environmental Impact Report). The current HPD South Central Sub-Station 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 research of Studio Gang Architects’ Polis Station to develop a community centered police station that promotes connection between officers and neighborhood 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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Kevin Story
The City of Houston Department of Planning and Development does not list zoning requirements for land-use development in Houston. The freedom to build disparate building program types in and around our local communities 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 restrictions 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 dynamics of Houston’s life revolves around the freeway system, but we typically ignore the drosscapes below. These landscapes are used as drainage facilities, TXDoT storage areas, and general landscaping in an attempt to enhance the freeway infrastructure. This studio project seeks to uncover the spatial and social possibilities for improving the experience of these non-developed areas. The urban experience is enhanced when the element of surprise and/or spectacle is introduced 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 trauma 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 pervades the daily lives of the homeless community in our city. The proposed building and site area shall infuse the concept of “shelter” with light, nature, color, and autonomy to stimulate the sense of a brighter future.
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 technical 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.
The specific program and project type selections are planned organically through individual faculty interests and their searches for relevant educational vehicles. Nonetheless, the proposed institutions 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.
1John 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 participating 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 district from 1987 until his death in 2020. His unofficial 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.
The 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 abolitionist, is known as the “President of the Underground Railroad.” The house that he built for himself 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 documented the house, and these drawings are held
within the collection of the U. S. Library of Congress. The Levi and Catharine Coffin House Interpretive Center is to be built across the street from the Coffin House on the footprint of a historic building: the Seybold-Price House. This building was documented as a contributing structure 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, including its street profile and volume. The Coffin and Seybold-Price houses evoke Fountain City when it was an active commercial center along the primary north-south trade route and Underground Railroad that freedom seekers traveled between Cincinnati, Ohio, and Detroit, Michigan.
Despite the profound local heritage of advancing social justice, Klu Klux Klan members are active in the area today, and the Coffin House Historic 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 unaware 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 assessment, was determined to be unfeasible to renovate, 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.
Boston Center for Spiritual Renewal and Hope / Kevin Story
The city of Boston has partnered with a non-profit foundation to dedicate the construction 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 materiality. The intention of this project is to use architecture 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 architectural use of light, space, structural system(s), and materiality to enhance the aspirational representations of the building design.
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Memorial for Peace and Justice Dialogue Center / Sheryl Tucker de Vazquez
This specific studio program and process will explore structural and environmental systems 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 studio 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 supported by the space’s envelope, as well as environmental and structural systems. Site Context: Memorial for Peace and Justice, Montgomery, Alabama. The National Memorial for Peace and Justice, also known as the National Lynching Memorial, is a national memorial to commemorate the victims of racial lynching in the United States. The memorial is intended to acknowledge the legacies of racial terrorism and to advocate for social 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.
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 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 dwelling; 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 architectural design fashion (formalism and digital decoration), 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 reflect and support the beliefs, philosophies, ideologies, 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 contemporary education. A base program will be provided for interpretation and for determining the focus for a specific user group of persons, an identifiable community, and/or a set of specific conditions. You will make a site selection using the approximate required area of building and site improvements, including parking or other program-specific uses. 2 3
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 circulation patterns. None have a more significant impact 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 communities. The effects of increased housing costs continue to cripple urban areas throughout the country, 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 without displacing existing communities. Only by making connections between disparate elements and working toward designing cities as comprehensive 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 communities to rethink their neighborhoods and policymakers to tailor existing development mechanisms to new uses and new ways of living.
In an age when we are finally recognizing the extent of our deep relationships with the environment around us, and the microbiome within us, this studio will develop a form of solidarity with the nonhuman. As the Coronavirus pandemic and stay-at-home isolation has reacquainted us with the importance and complexity of domestic space, the studio will also research how domestic architecture can serve as the medium to reevaluate the politics, cultures, and ecol-
ogies of living not only with each other, but near and with other species. Exploring a variety of alternative building technologies, students will develop dwellings that accommodate both humans and nonhumans. Here, we will be thinking of animals as autonomous neighbors, not as pets, pests, or domesticated beings. The studio will be organized into four phases. In phase one students will gain the needed intellectual, technical, and material background through readings, software tutorials, and fabrication experiments. Next, students will explore traditional human and nonhuman building processes and adapt these to potential automated fabrication strategies. Students will build a collective archive of nonhuman building techniques, potential nonhuman clients within the Houston region, and examples of human-built animal architectures. In phase two, students 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 structures 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
The urban built environment is responsible 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 targets (Architecture 2030, 2019). Students are expected to be aware of any additional course policies 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 catalysts 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 hurricanes and refinery explosions. Upon completing the Coastal Barrier (Ike Dike) System, this community of hardworking Texans will have new opportunities for investing in the future. The Port of Texas City has traditionally focused on exporting petroleum. Texas City will need to identify a new economic base in a net-zero future and is interested in your generation’s perspective. What will make this strategically positioned community 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.
Urban Hybrid Housing Complex / Marta Rodriguez
In this studio, students will design a collective 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 density, productivity, integration, connectivity, iden-
tity, safety, and ecology. The studio project will be an opportunity to reflect on the concept of “living and working together,” as well as on the building as a socially interactive experience, adaptable to the varying needs and desires of the community. The studio will analyze the work of architects 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 research Lima (1969), as well as the Case Study House Program, with a critical approach. The studio will also investigate the progressive ideals developed by Kazuyo Sejima in Metropolitan Housing Studies, together with recent hybrid housing proposals by MVRDV and Alejandro Aravena’s and Tatiana Bilbao’s theories on affordable housing; the design project will allow students to question how architecture interrelates with urban planning and with social, economic, health, cultural, political, and environmental challenges. The project should (re)consider: urban density, flexibility (individual vs. collective), social aspects (identity and diversity), circular economy, ecology, materiality and affordability, and experimentation (units and systems).
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 production 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 purposes is space produced? Buildings are never just buildings. Buildings respond to the political foundations 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 sheltering or enveloping space, this depoliticized attitude 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 segregation, cultural destruction, and historical erasure. Buildings can reinforce the status quo and aid in the implementation of settler-colonial desires of expansionism. Anti-racist democratization of access is only possible through the decolonization 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 crossroads of architecture, engineering, and urban design. 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 begin design, students will: • Research the U.S. Interstate Highway System and its impact on American 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 adjacent 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 Academy of Arts, London.
Living in a Virtual World: Designing Architectural Space for the Real + Unreal / Peter Jay Zweig
The current extraordinary events of a pandemic, economic collapse, and social unrest have pushed society to reconsider work, play, the delivery of education and knowledge transfer, commercial/retail spaces, social environments, and the very nature of public and private space. As a result, the world is going online and virtual, offering a unique opportunity to explore our different experiences in Real and Unreal (Virtual) Space. This design studio explores this newly developing culture, which is becoming increasingly virtual. 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 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 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 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 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.
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 community. Heritage invests local communities with a powerful reason to look after their local environment and lead more sustainable lifestyles. It fosters a powerful connection to the physical environment through visual amenity and the intrigue and uniqueness of heritage buildings and streetscapes. People feel a stronger sense of connection with their local surroundings through heritage, which is quite different from the mentality associated with new building stock. It can be replicated anywhere and therefore lends no specific connection to the local environment. Heritage buildings are cultural icons, and their preservation impacts communities’ well-being, sense of place, and social sustainability. Due to these factors, it is preferable to reuse rather than replace heritage buildings regardless of bad plot ratios and poor efficiency. This course explores the origins and theory of the historic preservation movement in the United States and the techniques 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 drawings 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 characteristics of the form/space, and the scale and proportion 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. Similarly, in Mies’s Barcelona Pavilion, unwitting visitors 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 contemplating a set of discrete objects, participants identify as the exhibition’s subject matter. This type of interaction among participants in Graham’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 devices that we will borrow from Graham and employ in certain studio stages. As a premise, we will explore the relationship between art installation, technology and contemporary domestic portrayal, and home design roles. We will study the compositional devices used by Pop and Conceptual artists and by photographers like Hiroshi Sugimoto and Doug Aitken and painter David Hockney. We will hone in on a few of their methods and develop 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 practices reliant on alternative/invented structures of representative aspects of the home, including photographers Jeff Wall and Stephen Shore, sculptor Alex Da Corte, and Diller & Scoficio + Renfro. This will enable us to expand on or challenge architectural conventions of domesticity and provide 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 interior’s spatial representation and document and employ some of the design strategies that emerged from those interests. We will borrow techniques from set design and video production. Like filmmaking, physical models constructed later in the
semester will serve as stages to facilitate a series of animations. Appropriating “the model as an artifice” will procure conditions in which to develop an approach for overlapping recorded footage with digitally constructed environments. This, in turn, will lead us to a concluding look at the family home and staged installation as dueling forms of domestic conjecture.
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 unproductive 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 political and cultural history, dissolution, and the countries that emerged from it in this studio. Students will analyze the cultural and social significance 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 between the different ethnic groups? What is architecture’s role in making a society? Students will have the opportunity to analyze and question architecture’s ability to contextualize and recontextualize 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 being that is uninhabited, undomesticated, uncultivated, or inhospitable. Nature is wild, while human nature is cultured, civilized, ordered, controlled. This binary view of human/nature is overly reductive, destructive, and even racist, allowing 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 interaction with the environment moves toward Timothy Morton’s term “the symbiotic real.” Culturally, however, this human/nature counter position 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 destroy the normal operations of culture and capital. Such dispositions can usher in more sustainable and hybrid forms of existence or cause reactionary acceleration of exploitation of nature. Architecture and urbanization have always occupied a critical position among these disparate ethics—operating at the psychological and material threshold between the territory of human occupation and the otherness of the wild and providing a strong frame to mediate our relationship to this artificially constructed idea of “nature.” Complicating this condition, increasingly complex material and technological systems have isolated the architectural interior from the exterior, rejecting other organisms’ incursion into the human domain. Wild Life is a provocation to project 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 architecture’s relationship to materials, ecosystems,
landscapes, organisms, and each other, and it can include components like residencies, research spaces, forests, art studios, power generation, media spaces, libraries, galleries, workshops, social condensers, atmospheric generators, remediation 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 architectural, urban, and landscape types: curating new relationships between organisms, ecosystems, communities, and urban infrastructures. Through the design of a new type of environmental institute that includes spaces of research and housing and production and cultivation, projects will propose alliances between people, architecture, 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 reaching the breaking point on multiple levels. Communities 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/quadplex, townhouse, co-housing, or adaptive reuse to design a community for 20 household units that support the functions of connecting, sleeping, 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 documentation of architectural precedents and identification of possible sites in the Third Ward. matter: Develop two interior and exterior material systems for your buildings. Develop and present the matter assembly systems + material research and reading agenda for your work.
Communicate your understanding of detail, material, labor, and health as you prioritize choices based on embodied carbon, local labor, and occupant health. 5
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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 Texas-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 micro-urbanism of the residential suburb and the hyper-context of the industry. We will extract samples that describe its extremities, unfold stories of late capitalism phenomena. We will dissect Houston as a patchwork of districts populated by strictly autonomous architectural objects, exploring 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. Student 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 urban condition topped by extreme weather and pollution on top of a sinking landscape. The studio 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 research-based studio with a strong collaborative component.
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 design 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 optimization, recycling/upcycling, and closed-loop material systems. The wood framing systems that develop from this research will be used across multiple 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. pavilion theme at the Venice Biennale). Its subject, however, is far from novel. We will begin by reading Tom Peters’s 1989 essay, “An American Culture of Construction,” to start a conversation about “conceptual vs. empirical” cultures of making and the value of “creative misunderstanding” and “methods of a detour.” Peters flips the common reading of the American system, where informality and ambiguity are generally used as pejoratives, 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 observation 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 farming system. The studio will take on this question by engaging with digital tools and fabrication methodologies to locate work between the oppositions 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 reconcile 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 responsible 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 targets (Architecture 2030, 2019). The West Bellfort Park and Ride Transit Center is located in a Houston community that reflects contemporary challenges 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 higher 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 opportunity to diversify housing and mobility choices. Students will explore how the West Bellfort Park and Ride and Transit Center can become a transit-oriented development (TOD), demonstrating emerging intelligent transportation systems 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. Students are expected to be aware of any additional course policies presented by the instructor during the course. 9
Chandigarh, 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 architecture as a figure and the legacy of the modernist city—Chandigarh, Le Corbusier, and Pierre Jeanneret’s most significant project. Students of architecture are familiar with the many individual 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 transformation of the program that reinvigorates the English Garden planned superblock as a whole.
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 cultures across the globe. Unfortunately, the knowledge and craftsmanship of such artifacts are slowly vanishing and being replaced by mass production. Because it is not economically viable to sustain the traditional craftsmanship of weaving, its applications have not been updated and adapted to contemporary needs. This studio asks, “What if a contemporary architecture could harness 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, improvisational process and a mathematical, rule-based system in which the basic units of link and knot can generate 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 inflexible, static kit of parts—whereas the language of knotted fabric introduces architecture as a seamless fluid field that allows for growth, movement, and porosity, opening up liberatory possibilities 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 project, a Shade Canopy for Suzy Tros, will explore contemporary processes of weaving on multiple levels as a strategy to literally and metaphorically knit together the three discrete zones/programs 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 pandemic, economic collapse, and social unrest have pushed society to reconsider work, play, the delivery of education and knowledge transfer, commercial/retail spaces, social environments, and the very nature of public and private space. As a result, the world is going online and virtual, offering a unique opportunity to explore our different experiences in Real and Unreal (Virtual) Space. This design studio explores this newly developing culture, which is becoming increasingly virtual. 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 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 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 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 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.
/ ARCH 5593
The optional ARCH 5593 Thesis Studio program addresses the critical, cultural, and social dimensions of contemporary design practice. Starting with theoretical positions and speculative agendas on architecture, the thesis provides students with an opportunity 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 natural 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.
1Ariana 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, recreational, and community facilities as long as they “increase convenience and walkability for neighborhood visitors.”
Get the whole block involved: The greater the demand for action, the greater the chance of city approval. Call a community meeting to discuss the benefits of a regenerative unit on your block. Collect signatures to send in with your application.
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 oriented), Cultural Spaces (community oriented), Productive Landscapes (agriculture oriented)— Sample 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 simple and intuitive.
Customize and enjoy: The most important 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.
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 Buffalo Bayou Cistern was built in 1920 as a drinking water reservoir. After a crack formed in its retaining wall, plans were drafted to demolish the obsolete cistern. It all changed when an engineer descended 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 performance perspective. The surrounding urban networks, however, fail to connect it to its local context. King Henry II and his mistress, Diane de Poitiers, faced a similar dilemma. Physically separated in their Château in France, their secret relationship went unfulfilled. Their architect, Philibert de l’Orme proposed a trompe: a volume nested in a corner, disguising a secret stair that finally connected the two lovers again.
The trompe became the physical manifestation 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 below. 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 interventions 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 markers 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 political and geographic communities. IH-45’s margin shelters sociopolitically marginal architectural programming. If we consider space a material constitution of power, then the contested and marginal territory of the North Houston Highway Improvement Project is a critical site for architectural engagement. Through non-hegemonic 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 disciplines the population as a normative abstraction of its constituent identities. Similarly, territory is regulated and disciplined as a normative abstraction of spaces and architectures. The creation, maintenance, and contestation of borders is necessarily a component of this regulation and discipline, 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 political communities with distinct borders and identities. Because Houston experienced its most ambitious 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 marginal and heterotopic architectures. Parcels that face the freeway frontage road are more a part of the infrastructure itself than any political or geographic community. Though this interstice does not often have “Architecture,” the margin is an ideal vantage point from which to view the center, and it can enable liberatory praxis.
Technology: The freeway and surrounding 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 territory because they control how it is represented and interfaced with. Maps, apps, and interactive databases 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 Baudrillard. Our academic imagination produces a view from the road, with the freeway as a grand connector 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 understanding this relationship is necessary to accurately represent and appropriately interact with the infrastructure.
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 architectural characteristics that could have described Houston 50 years into the future, as both cities share a vehicular-dominant lifestyle. However, as of 2021, Houston is to undergo transportation 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-dominant ecology, Houston must establish what its own four ecologies are. The purpose of this thesis 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 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.” “Although a diffuse megashape must be imagined and constructed 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 disapproves 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 (Lerup 141). Now an identifier of wealthier neighborhoods, the broad trees commonly meet in the middle of a path, the natural arch creating an interior 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.
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
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 Astrodome demonstrate what happens when a building’s duration is not fully considered. Early Astrodome success depended on single-use sporting events and the novelty of the space with its firstof-a-kind indoor air-conditioned domed stadium. Due to its lack of adaptability, the entire complex embodies what Lewis Mumford describes as “Space-Eaters.” This thesis reevaluates the relevance of Jacobs’s four elements, using the points to break apart the single-use event in the city.
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 itself. 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—hidden 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 massive 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 projects, instead of the diverse activity that a structure 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 Astrodome 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 running and biking. The center volume functions as a flexible event space.
5Stefani Portocarrero Arone, Veterans, Inwood Landscapes. William Truitt, Donna Kacmar.
The U.S. federal government offers housing 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 isolating effect of veteran housing in the city. In the Inwood Forest neighborhood, single-family homes and townhomes fit between a central urban corridor and a defunct golf course. This thesis leverages the connection between city and landscape and proposes to develop a housing strategy for multiple groups of veterans hybridized 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 northwest 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 diverse place.
History: Around the 1860s, German immigrants (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 residential community we now know as Inwood Forest. Inwood Forest development began with Section 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 remaining sections around the golf course. In 1960 Collier Airport, a small airport with a single runway, was built. Potential buyers could take airplane rides to observe home sites. Meanwhile, homeowners could park their small airplanes and walk home. However, the airport shut down in the late 70s due to the high rate of residential development in the area. Inwood Forest continued to be quite successful; with the oil bust of the 80s, however, the neighborhood began to decay. Furthermore, 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 demanded that the site only be developed as recreational space. Eventually, the city purchased the golf course and country club, and now there are current development plans for a recreational space and multiple detention ponds to aid the terrible flooding conditions. Problem #2: Natural disasters forced Houston’s City Council to approve a major development project, which involved excavating 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.
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 center and temporary housing. These help spread awareness of Rammed Earth construction as a refined, 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 contextual destructive practices.
It was crucial to identify a region with potential for a Rammed Earth growth and with little 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 technique from the Spanish settlers centuries ago, most of U.S. never moved beyond limited experimental projects (Augarde).
The Northeast Megalopolis, stretching from Washington to Boston, represents the largest 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 urbanization rises the diversity and size of the target 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 largest shopping mall in North America. Though the mall is visited by millions of people, the quarry, which shares the same urban connection conditions, remains disconnected from the urban fabric. The possibility of reclassifying the post-industrial 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.
This thesis project will focus on completing an unfinished puzzle that will tie together memory, culture, and a future vision. John the Beloved traveled throughout the Mediterranean and eventually settled in Ephesus, where he spent the rest of his days, later passing away and being buried 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 Ayasuluk Hill, now part of the renowned ruins of Ephesus. The campus will provide a place for rest, meditation, celebration, and worship. The concepts of love and affection will be driving themes throughout the project, which finds its inspiration 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 respects St. John by creating a proper space of worship 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 Christianity—Roman Catholic, Orthodox, and Armenian Apostolic—will each have their own place of worship surrounding the tomb, allowing for interreligious 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.
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 Environmental Design.
Second Place
Lecture Series
Since the nascent origins of the universe, matter / energy has comprised the essential building blocks of existence ranging from galaxies to atoms. Humanity and its productions are inseparable from this stream, and all will eventually return 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, products, and designs can work in harmony with the material world or it can harm it for future generations in a reality of increasing scarcities. This program series posits what truly matters, across design disciplines and scales via the social, cultural, historical, and environmental realms—and how designers can create work that is in concert with the consonance of the shared universe.
sep. 21BROOKS + SCARPA
Moderated by Jesse Hager
oct. 19ANDREW KUDLESS
Matsys
Moderated by Jeff Halstead
nov. 16BETSY BARNHART
Moderated by George Chow
jan. 25AMALE ANDRAOS
WORKac
Moderated by Rafael Beneytez-Durán
feb. 8 ANUPAMA KUNDOO
Anupama Kundoo Architects
Moderated by Alan Bruton
feb. 22SALLY 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. 22OMER ARBEL
Omer Arbel Office
apr. 5 RAJA SCHAAR
Westphal College of Media Arts & Design, Drexel University
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 licensing, working with publishers, and other subjects 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
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
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
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
Normal
Printing
Grafiche Veneziane
Edition
500 copies
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.
ISBN: 978-0-578-29459-9