Practical Experience Makes for Memorable Architecture Class

After designing and building two houses in Houston’s Third Ward for Project Row Houses, students in the Rice Building Workshop (RBW) took on a more personal project last fall when they built their own work space in that neighborhood.

Last spring, RBW students designed the project, which consists of a covered, open-air structure on Dowling Street to house the workshop’s novel portable Workbox (a metal shop and wood shop made from modified freight containers), a storage area, and a small office, along with a construction yard for research and development. The concrete slab for the project was poured last October in preparation for the erection of steel beams for the framework, and then students started work on the build-out and completion of the project.

The practical experience of designing a project and seeing it through construction makes the RBW an especially memorable class for architecture students.

Christopher Mechaley ’04, who now works in New York for the studio Christoff:Finio Architecture, recalls how rewarding it was to help build out the RBW’s extra-small house, a 500-square-foot house designed and constructed with a $25,000 budget to accommodate the neglected housing market for a one- or two-person residence. The experience “allowed me to work with materials ‘in the real’ and in full scale—not a representation model or drawings, not a mock-up, but what we are trained to ask others to build for us,” he says. “I think you must understand and have experience building in order to make architecture.”

The experience made Mechaley much more appreciative of the contractor’s role. “The coordinating and choreography of a build-out is a real art that often is overlooked,” he says. But he cites community involvement as the most rewarding aspect of the RBW. “Seeing the effect your work can have on a community is a real pleasure,” he says. “It has inspired me to seek future opportunities that will connect both my profession and community involvement, and it has reminded me that my role as an architect is much richer than simply designing projects.”
More than 150 Rice undergraduate and graduate students have participated in designing and building RBW projects since the School of Architecture established the workshop in 1997.

Directed by Danny Samuels and Nonya Grenader, RBW has received the National Council of Architectural Registration Boards’ Prize for Creative Integration of Practice and Education in the Academy and the American Collegiate Schools of Architecture’s Collaborative Practice Award. These national awards acknowledge RBW’s work with Project Row Houses, a local nonprofit group that promotes neighborhood revitalization, historic preservation, and community services in a low-income area of the city.

RBW students have had an opportunity to explore affordable housing alternatives and examine neighborhood planning issues. The first RBW design/build project, completed in 1999, was a 900-square-foot modular house. Conceived as a low-cost prototype offering a variety of configurations, the Six-Square House, as it was known, incorporated concepts found in neighboring homes, such as deep overhangs and double-hung windows aligned for cross-ventilation and shaded porches. A mother and her two children now live in the house.

“The workshop offers preparation that students may not get in other classes,” says Samuels, the Harry K. Smith Visiting Professor of Architecture and professor in practice at the School of Architecture. “They work in the community on a real project with time restraints and code restraints and still try to have an innovative building. It’s preparation for the real world.”

“We want the ideas our students come up with to be economically viable,” says Grenader, professor in practice at the School of Architecture. “As the neighborhood in the Third Ward becomes open to developer housing, at the doorsteps of that community are models of what a conceptualized and designed unit can be at a price range the existing community can afford.”

The new student-built work space should facilitate RBW’s goal of bringing students out of their classrooms and into a community that has a critical need for affordable housing and design services.

—B. J. Almond