TOUR COMPETITION e RDA ANNUAL ARCHITECTURE TOUR t The Splendid Houses of John F. Staub i Saturday and Sunday, March 29 and 30 1 - 6 p.m. each day. c 99K HOUSE COMPETITION . 713.348.4876 or rda.rice.edu 8 LECTURES Rice Design Alliance and AIA Houston 0 The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Brown Auditorium announce finalists. 7 p.m. G 713.348.4876 or rda.rice.edu N SANFORD KWINTER I Far From Equilibrium: Essays on Technology and Design Culture R A program by the MFA,H Bookstore Wednesday, April 2 IN FEBRUARY, FIVE FINALISTS WERE SELECTED FROM 182 and adaptability to reproduction as well as design. P GWENDOLYN WRIGHT entrants proposing a sustainable, affordable house The winner will receive an additional $5,000 New York City that addresses the needs of a low-income family in stipend. The City of Houston through the Land S Co-sponsored by RDA and Houston Mod Wednesday, April 9 the Gulf Coast region. Each will receive a $5,000 Assemblage Redevelopment Authority (LARA) R award and the competition will move forward to initiative has donated a site for the house located at THOM MAYNE, MORPHOSIS Santa Monica, CA Stage II. 4015 Jewel Street in Houston’s historic Fifth Ward, A The 2008 Sally Walsh Lecture Program a residential area northeast of Co-sponsored by RDA and AIA Houston downtown. Once constructed, Wednesday, April 16 D the winning house will be sold or auctioned to a low- BOOK SIGNING income family. N WM. T. CANNADAY Five jurors, representing The Things They’ve Done E A book about the careers of selected graduates expertise in design, sustainabili- of the Rice University School of Architecture ty, construction of affordable L Thursday, April 10 housing, and Houston’s Fifth 5-7 p.m. Farish Gallery, M.D. Anderson Hall, Rice University Ward, selected the finalists and A will also judge Stage II of the competition: C EXHIBITION Bryan Bell, Jr., Founder and DESIGNED BY ARCHITECTS: METALWORK Executive Director, Design From the Margo Grant Walsh Collection March 15 - August 3 Corps, Raleigh NC; Richard The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston Farias, Executive Director, Tejano Community Center, The following entrants were chosen from a field representing 29 U.S states and 16 countries: Stephanie Eugster, Houston TX; Paul Stovesand and Rebecca Cox, Chicago IL; Kirby Mears, Walter Murphy, Kyle Humphries, Jamie Miller, and Gina Lyons with Murphy Mears Architects, Houston TX; Robert Humble, Joel Egan, Ben Spencer, Owen Richards, Tom Mulica, and Kate Cudney, with Hybrid / ORA, Seattle, Washington; and Gail NEWS Peter Borden and Brian D. Andrews, with Borden RDA BAY AREA STUDY TOUR Partnership, Los Angeles, CA. RDA members toured San Francisco in February, In Stage II the five teams approved for Houston TX; David Lake, FAIA, Principal, visiting new architecture by Skidmore, Owings & continuation will have an opportunity to refine their Lake | Flato Architects, San Antonio TX; Michael Merrill, Stanley Saitowitz/Natoma Architects, Leddy Maytum Stacy, Morphosis, and Herzog & projects and must complete a set of comprehensive Pyatok, FAIA, Principal, Pyatok Architects, Inc., de Meuron as well as Bay Area landmarks by construction documents. The Jury will review these Oakland CA; and Rocio Romero, Owner and Bernard Maybeck, Julia Morgan, and Willis Polk. resubmissions for pricing by a Houston-area home- Principal, Rocio Romero, LLC, Perryville MO. 06 building expert allied with the competition organiz- Bryan Bell weighed in on the process: e ers. The Jury will select the winner based on bids “Sustainability is not just about protecting our t i c . 8 0 0 2 TOP: Kirby Mears, Walter Murphy, Kyle Humphries, Jamie Miller, and Gina Lyons with G N I Murphy Mears Architects, Houston TX R P S BOTTOM: Paul Stovesand and Rebecca Cox, Chicago IL s g n i t i c Robert Humble, Joel Egan, Ben Spencer, Owen Richards, Tom Mulica, and Kate Cudney, with Hybrid / ORA, Seattle, WA fragile environment, but includes the financial sus- tainability of home owners and the stability of neigh- borhoods. This competition asked designers across the world to use their great creativity to address criti- cal social, economic, and environmental challenges faced by many here and across the Gulf Coast.” The competition, announced in October 2007, called for a single-family house with up to 1,400 SF, including three bedrooms and one-and-a-half to two bathrooms, to be built for $99,000 or less. Designers and architects were challenged to design a sustain- able, affordable house, with special consideration given to affordability, longevity, energy savings bene- fits, and appropriateness for Houston’s hot, humid climate. The competition objectives are to broaden awareness of green building strategies applicable Stephanie Eugster, Houston TX to affordable housing, generate and publicize buildable examples of sus- tainable, affordable houses, and S M construct an exemplary sus- R I F tainable, affordable house E V I T prototype. C E P Sponsored by the Rice S E R Design Alliance and AIA R I E Gail Peter Borden and Brian D. Andrews, with Borden Partnership, Los Angeles, CA H Houston, the competition T F O was supported, in part, by Y S generous grants from E T R 07 U Houston Endowment Inc. O C e and the National Endowment t i S c G . N 8 I for the Arts. 0 R 0 E 2 D For more information, please N G E N I R go to the competition R L P L A Web site, the99khouse.com. S Ideson Building in 1955 to honor the city’s first librari- an, served as the Central Branch the Houston Public Library until 1976. In 1978-79 it was sensitively reha- bilitated by S. I. Morris Associates for the Houston Metropolitan Research Center (HMRC), housing the public library’s collection of archives, photographs, architectural drawings, rare books, and manuscripts. New glass-and-steel partitions were inserted for closed stacks and archival storage. Morris’ work, following established preservation standards, was gentle to the Central Library soon after opening in 1926. historic fabric of the building and is easily removed. In 2006, the Julia Ideson Library Preservation Partners (JILPP), an independent nonprofit corpora- tion that Houston Mayor Bill White asked to take on the job, began fundraising to expand and rehabilitate the library for continued use by the HMRC and to PRESERVATION showcase the building’s ornate interior spaces through exhibitions and event rentals such as receptions and weddings. The project—a new wing closely following the footprint of Cram’s original and the restoration of THE LIBRARIAN RETURNS compromised rooms and spaces—is led by architects Barry Moore and Paul Homeyer of Gensler. It will Rehabilitating Houston’s beloved include a state-of-the-art, climate-controlled archival storage area and a new public research and reading Julia Ideson building. room. The design of the wing will be differentiated from the historic portion of the building, following professional historic preservation standards. The restoration phase of the project will include reopening one of the original second-story loggias and construct- ing an outdoor reading garden (an idea conceived by the original architects but never carried out), as well as restoring one of the two original second-floor reading Y rooms currently filled with three levels of steel book R A R B stacks as an exhibition hall. Plans for the building, list- I L C I ed on the National Register of Historic Places and as a L B U Recorded Texas Historic Landmark, will follow the P N THE 1901 DISCOVERY OF OIL AT SPINDLETOP AND THE O Secretary of the Interior’s Standards for Rehabilitation T S opening of Houston's port resulted in the trebling of U and seek a silver LEED certification. Most of the O H the city’s population between 1900 and 1920. Conse- , building will simply be preserved, as many of the R E T quently, by the early 1920s conditions at the 1904 original reading and stack rooms and associated N E Carnegie Library were “almost intolerable . where C furniture, fixtures, and finishes remain intact and H C R everyone gets in the way of everyone else,” reported unaltered. A paint analysis of the interior decorative A E S librarian Julia Ideson to the local press. With support plaster elements—coffering, cornice, and friezes with E R N from Mayor A. E. Amerman and other city leaders, roundels of the great libraries of the world—will be A T I L Ideson led the charge to construct a new central conducted. O P O library. By 1925 the library was under construction and As a testament to the rediscovered love of this city R T E 08 a new Civic Center, designed by the Kansas City land- landmark, the library’s current director, Dr. Rhea M N O e scape architects Hare and Hare, had been proposed, its T t Brown Lawson, has requested that her office be relo- i S c . U 8 building keyed to the Spanish-style architecture of the cated to Julia Ideson’s namesake, where it was housed O 0 H 0 Y 2 central library. during the first 50 years of the building’s life. S G E T N I Designed by the Boston architectural firm Cram & R R U P O S Ferguson, the Central Library, renamed the Julia –Anna Mod C URBAN PLANNING s THE CITY BEAUTIFUL? g Form-Based Development Code n in Houston. i t i c A PREDICTION: WITHIN THREE TO FIVE YEARS, IT’S LIKELY in context with other places. SmartCode Central defined as everything outside the Loop.