BUILDING A FUTURE TOGETHER
Architecture students and nonprofit partner to build housing in Third Ward
From outside, the long thin building on a narrow street on the edge of Houston’s Third Ward looks odd and a little out of place.
Mixed in with older homes, vacant lots and light industrial buildings, it’s neat and meticulously detailed, looking something like a very chic mobile home or a small portable classroom at a school with a growing student population.
It’s not a trailer or a classroom, but if it was, it would be the most stylish one you’ve ever seen. And this small dwelling is more meaningful than passers-by might guess.
It sits in the backyard of a small, unremarkable home owned by Agape Development, where two paid counselors work with men age 18 to 25 who need help launching as young adults. This unit — designed and built entirely by students at Rice University’s School of Architecture — will house two counselors who lived in the not-quite-1,500-square-foot home with six young men.
The extra living space allows the two counselors, who will move in soon, a little privacy and breathing room and takes the pressure off the tiny home that’s housing a lot of people with four bedrooms and two bathrooms. The Rice crew refers to the structure as an “accessory dwelling unit,” but else-
where it’s the equivalent of a guest house or garage apartment — square footage in the backyard that can supplement a main home or even provide an income stream.
Kirk Craig, Agape’s executive director and co-founder, says the nonprofit works in this small neighborhood in the Old Spanish Trail-South Union area — from Scott Street to Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard and Griggs Street to Loop 610 South — to improve access to housing and help young men and women transition to independence. The 2010 census showed that tract has about 10,000 residents, one third of whom are considered low income.
‘Gateway houses’
Houses like this one on Conley Street are what Craig and Agape call “gateway houses,” where young people get intensive support as they work to become independent after living with a parent or grandparent, aging out of foster care or even sleeping on couches of various friends, with no real home of their own.
The new two-bed unit in the backyard was a learning experience for a different group of young people, the Rice students who spent four semesters and 70 work days designing and building the structure, some of the work done off-site in a warehouse or workshops and some done onsite.
Danny Samuels and Andrew Colopy, co-directors of Rice Architecture Construct, connected with Craig through a mutual friend, but the two men have done other work with nonprofits in Third Ward, including the well-known Project Row Houses, Samuels says.
It’s not uncommon for architecture students to design hypothetical solutions to real problems — classroom work that was never intended to be built.
In this case, students spent four semesters of elective studio courses designing, refining, building and installing the twobed unit. They didn’t just see the structure on paper, they brought it to life.
“In architecture school, the emphasis is always on the individual and what you can do. It’s implicit that ultimately it’s part of a team, but in school, you’re basically working in ones or twos,” Samuels says. “To be able to do a collaborative project that extends over several semesters with people who are not your normal classmates, you have to figure it out.”
Solving problems
For Samuels, a Rice graduate and professor in practice as well as a partner at Taft Architects, architecture is about solving problems, and this project solved a very specific problem, even if it can be repeated again elsewhere.
For the 25 undergraduate and graduate students who took the studio course at one time or another — anywhere from one to four semesters — it felt more like working in the real world.
“This was a great exercise for the students. We always say if you design something, how do you build it?” Samuels says. “They had to figure it all out. For instance, one day we came to the site and there’s a 500 pound beam they have to install overhead. They looked at this heavy beam and said, ‘How do we get this up there?’ Figure it out.”
They built internal units — a kitchen and bathroom — in a warehouse and worked in an off-site metal fabrication shop. They poured concrete, nailed shiplap into place and installed exterior cement fiber panels.
“It definitely opened my eyes to the level of improvements that architects can bring to neighborhoods. Also, it just reinforced the idea that it’s not just that people need a roof over their heads … but the idea that great design can have an exponential impact,” says graduate student Rose Wilkowski, who worked on the project all four semesters. “The people living in the house were just the nicest, most generous people. Anything we could do to make their lives easier and better, more beautiful, became a personal goal every day that we were out there.”
Wilkowski earned a bachelor’s degree in interior design at the University of Texas School of Architecture in Austin and worked for a while with Rottet Studio in New York before coming to Rice for a master’s degree. She also was Samuels’ graduate research assistant, so she was involved in the logistical side of ordering materials and managing scheduling for the Saturday build days.
All in the details
With Rottet Studio, Wilkowski worked on high-end luxury projects, but learned how the details of big-budget projects can translate to important details for a project like this one, with a $50,000 budget that included the meals required to feed the students who worked on Saturdays. Details like cabinet edges or the way corners come together mean a lot in the world of architecture.
Colopy agrees, saying that better design can affect and elevate the whole area.
“I would go a step further to say you’re doing something more like inspiring people. That when you’re engaged in the community and provide a resource, architecture is creating something entirely new,” says Colopy, who is on sabbatical this semester.
Another example of student work is some duplexes designed for Project Row Houses, which were shelved for five years and then resurrected when money became available and a private contractor built them. He says those students might not have ever realized that their classroom project became a reality.
Except for the backyard unit, the home on Conley isn’t much different from others nearby, most are in the $20,000 to $40,000 range and house lowincome families. Agape’s purpose is to improve the neighborhood through public-private partnerships and a variety of collaborations that get rid of eyesores and nuisance sites and provide housing that those in the area can actually afford.
Agape recently bought a liquor store — the T and C Food Store at Balkan and Calhoun — to rid the neighborhood of a safety issue, and they’ve transformed the store into Agape office space.
Rice isn’t the only university to do such work in poor neighborhoods and with nonprofits, and many for-profit builders pitch in to help, as well. Right now, Craig says Agape is working with Newmark Homes and other companies to build affordable housing in hopes that families who are currently renting will then be able to buy a home. They’re in a capital campaign now and expect to have eight to 10 homes built by the end of 2019.
Craig says that he has worked with University of Houston groups, too, and the help that small nonprofits get are game changers.
“To have that support in a pro bono way is really invaluable. A lot of times, there’s something a nonprofit wants to get done,” he says. “It’s a dream and a wish unless something comes to the table, whether it’s money and a donation or people donating their services. It’s a godsend to a nonprofit like Agape.”