Oshman Kitchen open for business

Oshman Kitchen open for business
Rice dedicates unique engineering design facility

BY MIKE WILLIAMS
Rice News staff

Like a brand-new blackboard before its first taste of chalk, the Oshman Engineering Design Kitchen is spotless.

But a spotless blackboard is useless. Things get interesting when it gets messy.

The kitchen, the new pride and joy of Rice’s engineers-to-be, was dedicated Dec. 9 by Rice President David Leebron; Sallie Keller-McNulty, the William and Stephanie Sick Dean of the George R. Brown School of Engineering; National Instruments President and CEO James Truchard; and prime benefactors M. Kenneth Oshman ’62 and his wife, Barbara.

	KENNETH OSHMAN

The facility has been assembled in recent months in a building on the north side of campus that used to house the Hicks Kitchen, once Rice’s central food-service facility. For a few days in September after Hurricane Ike, the building served as a temporary triage for the Texas Medical Center.

”It strikes me that 20 years from now people will wonder why it’s called the Oshman Engineering Design Kitchen,” Leebron told several hundred invited alumni, faculty and guests. ”And the obvious response will be that there’s always something cooking over here.”

Oshman is co-founder of the ROLM Corporation, a Silicon Valley telecommunications company acquired by IBM, and is now chairman and CEO of Echelon Corporation, a networking company in San Jose, Calif.

”We were flailing around looking at what we might be able to do (for Rice) when this idea came up,” Oshman told the gathering, scattered among the workbenches that will soon be filled with design projects. ”Barbara, not being an engineer, was not 1,000 percent sure we wanted to become part of something in the engineering department again, despite my love for the school.”

But, he said, the kitchen’s mission to provide space for cross-discipline and cross-technology training that will include not only engineering students but also those in the humanities, social sciences, architecture and business won her over. ”This will be a great base for that kind of education going forward,” he said.

Integrating practical and theoretical understanding is at the heart of the facility, said Leebron. ”I’ll use my favorite Yogi Berra quote, which is, ‘In theory, practice and theory are the same. In practice, they ain’t,”’ he said. ”This facility reflects a broad notion of how we must prepare our students for the world. This is a terrific investment.”

Keller-McNulty approached Truchard for help in creating what came to be the facility’s central space, the National Instruments Design, Prototype and Deploy Lab, which takes up a large portion of the building then being used for storage.

Noting that real design experience is now a requirement for all engineering students, Keller-McNulty said the need was clear. That meant locking in not just the space, but also a partner in National Instruments to provide equipment and technical support, and the experience of faculty and alumni to help guide students. ”These are the people who can teach our students what it means to truly do design,” she said.

Truchard said the kitchen serves a purpose that is ”very important for students, not only those who are here, but also those who should have chosen a career in science and engineering but maybe chose something else because they just didn’t see the experience or hear about it.”

The 12,000-square-foot space, which includes not only the central work area but also conference rooms, a classroom, a wet lab, a machine shop and a welding shop, could have looked quite different, said Keller-McNulty, adding that more industry partners are being sought to help fill equipment needs. ”When the faculty was thinking about this, we had in mind a much more elaborate educational facility/classroom/auditorium that could showcase these wonderful projects,” she said. ”We had a wonderful lounge mapped out for the students so they could enjoy their time in the facility.

”And the students looked at this and said, ‘There’s not enough floor space. There’s not enough machine space. We don’t need a lounge! … We need need movable things in there. We need to assemble.’

”So a lot of this is their design. The students will be part of the governance of the facility. They’re helping set up the rules of use and the contracts students sign to come in and use the facility, so we’re able to provide a component of leadership experience as well.”

Keller-McNulty said students also insisted the building meet Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) green building standards, and so is one of several buildings at Rice that will have a ”green” roof that uses vegetation as an additional layer of insulation to keep the building cool.

”To the engineering students who need a place to congregate and do their work, this has just been a phenomenal gift we’ve been able to give them,” she said.