Bright ideas for brownfields
Rice architecture, civil engineering students tag team on plans for Houston properties

BY MIKE WILLIAMS
Rice News staff

Some building sites need a little extra tender loving care before they can become fully functional contributors to a city.

Houston has a lot of them. Classified as brownfields, they are underutilized industrial or commercial sites that show potential for rehabilitation. City officials would like nothing better than to see them developed, occupied and added to the tax rolls.

	The EcoScope team’s apartment building for the Cottage Grove development.
	A terraced apartment by the Hoffman Solutions team for the Wildcat Estates site.
	KMA’s stepped apartments with an integrated green roof in South Houston.
	Urban Solutions’ modular apartment building for Cottage Grove.

Senior students of Herb Ward, Rice’s Foyt Family Chair in Civil and Environmental Engineering (CEVE) and a professor of ecology and evolutionary biology, chose to envision futures for four such sites in their final design projects this year. They knew they could come up with the steak, but for this set of projects they wanted help with the sizzle.

They got that from students at the Rice School of Architecture (RSA), who worked with the seven student teams on their projects this spring.

It’s the kind of collaboration that should be the hallmark of a Rice education, said Sarah Whiting, RSA dean and the William Ward Watkin Professor of Architecture.

”This collaboration is a great example of what I call piggybacking,” Whiting said. “Our students take a one-credit course that piggybacks onto an existing course in another school.

“Here, the RSA students received one credit for being design consultants. Our students learned from their environmental expertise, and theirs learned from our students’ design experience.”

Students chose to come up with viable plans for four brownfields sites offered up by Ward and his colleagues: apartments and extension of Airline Boulevard at the Wildcat Golf Course south of Houston’s 610 Loop; an environmental laboratory on Old Spanish Trail next to Brays Bayou; a housing development and street replacement at Cottage Grove, just north of the Katy Freeway; and a single-family subdivision at a Belfort Street site near Sunnyside Park south of the Loop.

They were asked to create a strategy for cleaning up the sites, planning structures and infrastructure and protecting them against future environmental contamination. Portraying contractors, the students “sold” their initial concepts in the fall. In the spring, the architecture students joined, bringing art to artifice.

“Sarah and I were co-conspirators,” Ward said. “The senior design experience is an absolute requirement for an accredited engineering degree, and one of the things I decided we were missing in that experience is the benefit of having an architectural connection to the design.

“These are smart kids; they really know their civil engineering,” he said. “But they’re structures people, or environmental remediation people. I knew if we could pull it off, it would be a great thing for the civil engineers. I didn’t appreciate how much good it would do for the architecture students.”

Ward and Whiting called upon William Cannady, a longtime Rice professor of architecture who also had an interest in seeing his students learn from an engineering point of view.

“An engineer can draw an apartment building, but that’s all he can do — make a rectangle and call it a building,” Cannady said. “Whereas we get some innovative ideas coming from the architecture students, things that make people stop and look and think, ‘Wow, where did that come from?'”

“The experience of working with our Archies has given us a real taste of what working with them in the real world would be like,” said Lizbeth Gonzalez, a Hanszen College civil engineering major, about her team’s plans for the Bellfort site. Architecture students Matthew Austin and Giorgio Angelini offered “ideas and concepts we would never have thought of,” she said.

Cannady said one of his architecture students “really nailed down what’s good from their point of view. He wrote: ‘I’m designing … a small environmental project, and it’s been a lot of fun because of the simplicity and banality of the program. It’s refreshing to put aside the messianic fervor with which we typically approach studio projects and try to create something conceptually interesting with modest means. Doing more with less: That’s the challenge.’

“Guess what: That’s what architects try to do every day!” Cannady said. “I wrote that guy back and said, ‘Right on!'”

Charles Penland, a senior principal of Houston engineering firm Walter P. Moore, is the primary instructor on the civil engineering side and likes what he sees of the collaboration. “The engineers don’t quite have the eye and the skills for the architecture part of it, so to have that element provided makes it that much more real and fun,” he said. “Herb’s long-term intent is to provide information on the city’s huge inventory of brownfields that can be used to showcase those sites and put them back into the workplace.”

The engineers appreciate having that showcase, too. “Truth be told,” Gonzalez said, “CEVE groups have embraced the opportunity to flaunt the gorgeous drawings by their respective architects, and we’re no exception.”