University of Houston College of Architecture

Architecture Studio Project and Research led by UltraBarrio Partner Amna Ansari

Resilience Factory

An Icon of Houston’s Motivations

Credits: All graphics and images by students of Architecture Studio 3501 Spring 2021, including cover icon.

Studio Program

Agenda

2018 marked Houston’s resilience journey, joining the 100 Resilient cities network. These plans focus on equity, health and wellness, connectivity, and sustainability. In particular, infrastructure and environment is a facet so distinct to Houston that they have become form-giving and regional in scale (bayous and freeways – traffic and flooding).  Amplified by the automobile as well  as development practice - architecture, once operating on a scale to effectively organize the public life of the pedestrian now confronts challenges beyond historical reference. Houston/TxDot’s current and continuing expansion of the freeway is reshaping infrastructure around the site via the North Houston Highway Improvement Project (NHHIP).  The studio is focused on how we can navigate a landscape defined by such an over-abundance of space that it stresses connectivity by means other than the private car- instead, a highly networked ‘micro speed zone’  - a bike city.    

Program

The program is a ‘resilience factory’ that is a a bike pavilion, a space for health and fitness, a teaching space for bike repair, a space for creation and assembly, a space for entrenpreneurship with small business mentorship, and a mechanism for water storage with proximity to the bayou. If mass production defined a shift into modernity then the factory is modern architecture’s definitive typology. Early factories- linked to resources or an exhibition of process like the Lingotto Factory which also became milestones for material practice. Architects with industry envisioned factories beyond workplaces but rather centers with communities built around them, such as Hershey, PA, to the recent Facebook’s campus. How can the ‘resilience factory’ serve the existing community by considering a co-mingling of programs and architecture? Projects will be representated, evaluated and calibrated through ‘distinct flows’ as process, environmental impact, community impact, and materal logic.  

Ambition

We set out to ask not only how architecture can continue to function in this condition but also how it can play a transformational role in it. This studio sets out to envision the site as a prototype that can respond to the environmental stresses and shocks of the freeways and the bayou. In addition, propose two additional sites anywhere in the city where your prototype could bring value to the community.

Representation

We take aim to visually construct ideas with durable impact. From exploded axonometrics, obliques, and performative slices - there is a high expectation for a semester of a perpetual mining of representational means that captures material interrogations that produce extremely rich drawings that chronicle contextual attributes, quirks, environmental cycles and diversity of participants.

Credits: All graphics and images by students of Architecture Studio 3501 Spring 2021, including cover icon.