Nonya Grenader and Danny Samuels on Architecture and Community

Rice Solar Decathlon House on National Mall. Photo by Eric Hester

The third session of “Spotlight on the Rice School of Architecture” featured Nonya Grenader and Danny Samuels who co-teach introductory courses at the Rice School of Architecture and lead the Rice Building Workshop. (See all posts in the series here.) The workshop is an advanced practicum for undergraduates and graduate students that produces buildings from design to completion. In other words, students donate their labor to a building project and experience first-hand all the logistical, practical, and budgetary challenges that builders face when attempting to execute an architect’s plans. The result is that Rice’s architecture students gain a sure sense of how plans and ideas actually manifest in the real world.

Samuels and Grenader attribute just 15 percent of total effort in any given architectural project to the design process. The other 85 percent goes into actual construction “outside the studio”: meeting budgets, adapting to weather conditions, complying with municipal permitting, communicating with contractors, and collecting and deploying available resources, including materials and labor. “Design is a continual process,” said Samuels, “with problems that have to have design solutions throughout the building process.”

Over the past 15 years, the Rice Building Workshop has developed a set of core ideas about design and service that seem quite commensurate with the values and experiences of its student participants, namely thrift, extreme efficiency, and ingenuity in making the most of small spaces. Dorm rooms, shared houses, second-hand furniture, and Ramen noodle dinners in the face of vertiginous debt: these are the conditions of student life. We are kidding ourselves if we think university students enjoy the privilege of being insulated from some post-graduation “real world.”

No wonder that the Rice Building Workshop made for such an apt partner for Project Row Houses, an arts and community center in the Third Ward founded in 1993 by Rick Lowe on the site of a block of abandoned row houses. Since its founding, Project Row Houses has grown in both its physical presence and in its ambition. Today, the nonprofit organization hosts several art exhibits per year, organizes a young-mothers residential program, and works with other arts and educational programs.

The Rice Building Workshop, because it operates on a semester-by-semester timeline and during construction depends on student labor, takes significantly longer to complete its projects than a typical builder would. Because Project Row Houses valued the mission and methods of the workshop, they were able to accommodate their long-term vision. For its first project, three students spent an entire semester first investigating the community around Project Row Houses, as well as the possibilities inherent in its existing architectural heritage. They found that row houses, however they may signal poverty and deprivation to an uninformed outsider, in fact offer unequaled opportunities for joining interior and exterior spaces, and for consolidating neighborhoods through front and back porches and shared backyard spaces.

The students eventually designed the “Six Square House” to incorporate the best of the row-house vernacular: deep overhangs, cross-breezes, elevation above ground, and the porches. The two-story building, measuring all of 900 square feet, is open to its community, joining with the existing row houses to strengthen the community’s hold on its space. Long-time residents of Third Ward have for years been wary of new development, as builders erect blocks of tall, closed-off townhomes that seem disdainful of their own neighborhood. In contrast, the Six Square House is home to families who graduated from their residencies at Project Row Houses but wanted to stay close by, to continue their association, and make a contribution to the common effort.

It took three years to build Six Square House, with students handling all but the electrical, plumbing, and sheetrock. As with later projects, a number of students who had ostensibly graduated mid-project from the workshop and from Rice, degrees in hand, continued to donate their labor to the construction project for months afterward, a testament to the value they placed on the workshop experience.

Six Square House has served as a successful prototype for 25 new iterations, as duplexes, both at Project Row Houses and in other neighborhoods. These were completed by professional builders, while the workshop turned its attention to new projects.

From Six Square House, the students adopted practices and strategies that prevailed in later projects, including modular design, which allows for off-site construction, and then on-site assembly without even much of a toolbox.

They also developed a “core system” that was refined and strengthened in later designs like the “Extra Small (XS) House.” This 500-square-foot building came much closer to the row house precedent and was built within budget for just $25,000. The core in XS, as with later designs, combined storage and mechanical systems—electrical and plumbing—enveloping a bathroom within and supporting a kitchenette without. As the only intrusion into the living space of the building, it separated the single volume into two highly adaptable open rooms. A skylight illuminated the bathroom, whose walls were translucent polygal. The core thus distributed light through the home.

Several students in Grenader’s and Samuels’ class were astonished by the core, asking more than once if it was really feasible for a single bathroom to serve the whole house. Grenader recalled that XS was designed to house just one or two persons, and that yes, those two persons probably ought to be on intimate footing. Small and inexpensive, XS was an answer to the steeply climbing property values of Third Ward in the early 2000s along with the ever-dwindling supply of affordable housing.

While these projects were built from the ground, the workshop at one time rehabilitated an existing row house and thus encountered a quite different set of challenges. The building had to be gutted, leveled, and areas damaged by termites replaced entirely, along with windows and doors. The students again installed a core at the very center of the building. During the building phase, the students found that the unfinished walls and ceiling, a patchwork of paint bearing traces of the past, meaningful enough to keep. Today this row house serves as an artist residence for Project Row Houses.

The Rice Building Workshop’s most recent and celebrated project was “ZeROW House,” which they submitted to the Solar Decathlon, an international competition by the U.S. Department of Energy to build houses with “net-zero” energy consumption. Grenader and Samuels recounted the origin of the project, an application which several students completed on their own, and which the two faculty members signed off on without quite believing that the project would ever launch. To their surprise, the application was accepted, and the workshop got underway. (See OffCite’s extensive coverage of the Solar Decathlon and visit the official ZeRow website.)

Over the years, the workshop had developed a set of values and focus on community-engagement that it could not relinquish, even though the affordability and site-context were not a criteria for the competition: the demonstration models were to be erected for judging on the National Mall in Washington D.C., far from the workshop’s Third Ward stomping grounds. The Rice Workshop’s 19 competitors spared no expense, building on-site from scratch, incorporating exotic materials, shipping supplies on dozens of trucks, and ignoring life-cycle costs associated with the wear-and-tear on an actual building over time.

By contrast, the Rice Building Workshop, collaborating with the Rice School of Engineering, was determined to build an affordable solar-powered home, which could be transported to and demonstrated in Washington, but which would finally and permanently be installed in Third Ward Houston. They built prefabricated units on a steel chassis that could survive transportation by truck over freeways and through underpasses. In Washington, they immediately gained notice for their lean-and-mean construction and their row-house typology. They questioned the contest rules for entrants to prove, for example, that they could dry eight loads of laundry. Why not install a clothesline?

Grenader pointed out that “this is a realistic house,” unlike most of its competitors. Though the Rice team scored high in the Architecture and Market Viability categories, their contrarian approach ensured that they would not win the overall contest. However, their principled insistence on affordability made an impression on the competition organizers, which have since added affordability to the judging criteria.

Grenader and Samuels took obvious pride and pleasure in showing off the accomplishments of their students and describing as well their uncommon commitment to the workshop. They capped off our class by announcing the very recent news that designs by the Rice Building Workshop had just been selected by the Menil Foundation for the new café they are planning to install on their campus. Quite a different program for quite a different client, but the workshop found ways to adapt their signature core system to even this project. The design allows for an open plan in which café-sitters enjoy free access and egress, and views in all directions.

To join the distinguished architectural company at the Menil would alone be a high honor, but to have done so as students in a pool of experienced professionals goes to reinforce what the faculty leaders have known all along, that the workshop is capable of excellence through diligent research, independent thinking, practical experience, and problem-solving innovation.

Further Reading
Students designing Menil cafe (Houston Chronicle)
by Lisa Gray

Articles on Rice Building Workshop from the Cite archives:

Small Wonders: Architecture Students and Brazos Projects revive a folk-art museum by Lisa Gray (Cite 53, 2002)

Rice Building Workshop Honored by Mitchell J. Shields (Cite 62, 2004)

Contributions to Cite by Nonya Grenader and Danny Samuels:

Texas Places edited by Nonya Grenader (Cite 39, 1997)

The Small House by Nonya Grenader (Cite 54, 2002)

Freeway as Landscape Living on the edge affords a new view by Nonya Grenader (Cite 63, 2005)

Building the Better Townhouse: Thoughts on an Urban Style by Danny Samuels (Cite 49, 2000)

Port of Call: The deep-water ambitions of a bayou city by Danny Samuels (Cite 56, 2003)

The Disposable (?) City: The many lives of durable building systems by Danny Samuels (Cite 62, 2004)