Houston is a sprawling, vibrant, and unregulated city in which a skyscraper can spring up next to a wood-frame cottage. At its heart are two enclaves of order: the Menil museum complex and the campus of Rice University. Rice is a century old, and the buildings that line its tree-shaded axes are as uniform as soldiers on parade, sharing the same neo-classical vocabulary and buff brick cladding. Michael Maltzan won the commission to create the Moody Center for the Arts with a linear block that is full of references to the context but stands apart from its neighbors. In a university best known for its schools of engineering, medicine, and sciences, Moody is a key part of an emerging arts district that extends across the southern sector of the campus. It joins the music and dance departments, a James Turrell Sky Space, and an opera house that will soon break ground, serving the 7,000 students as well as residents who come here to enjoy a cultural and recreational resource. As Maltzan explains, “Rice is trying to grow its position in the creative arts, developing a series of experimental programs. They are pairing engineering and design, bio-technology and literature, bringing together diverse fields of study to see what comes out of those mash-ups.” For its director, Alison Weaver, Moody is a trans-disciplinary lab for creativity, a platform for creating and presenting innovative work, a flexible teaching space, and a forum for creative partnerships with visiting artists. That is a substantial program for a 5,000 sq m, two-story building, but Maltzan has concealed its complexity and achieved a sense of openness and lightness. The upper-story is boldly articulated as a succession of cubic volumes that project forward and appear to levitate over the fully-glazed north façade of the ground floor. In contrast to the buff brick of its neighbors, the architects specified a black magnesium brick that changes with the light, turning deep purple on bright...
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Seven speculations on the future of section
Marc Tsurumaki
Section, as both a representational technique and a series of architectural practices pertaining to the vertical organization of our buildings and cit...Dar Es Salaam MAPPING
The CityPlan once again goes to sub-Saharan Africa. After Luanda, capital of Angola, we now look at Dar es Salaam. Although now the former capital of ...A NEW CHAPTER IN DAR ES SALAAM’S CITY TRANSFORMATION
A city poised for change Dar es Salaam is a vibrant and fast growing East African coastal city of 5.7 million people (growth rate projections for 2017...