© Courtesy of Kell Muñoz Architects

Architects: Kell Muñoz Architects
Location: Schertz, Texas, USA
General contractor: O’Haver Contractors
MEP Engineer: DBR Engineering
Structural Engineer: Datum Engineers
Civil Engineer: Brioñes Consulting
Landscape Architect: Laffoon Associates
Project area: 30,600 sq. ft.
Project year: 2009
Photographs: Casey Dunn, Christopher Gutierrez

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© Chris Cooper Photography

Architects: Kell Muñoz Architects
Location: Edcouch, Texas, USA
Conceptual design: Henry R. Muñoz III
Project architect: Ronald J. Biediger, AIA
Project designer: John H. Kell, FAIA
MEP engineer: Goetting & Associates
Structural engineer: Hinojosa Engineering
General contractor: Jamail Construction
Civil engineer: Noe Garza Engineers
Project area: 31,000 sq. ft.
Project year: 2007
Photographs: Chris Cooper Photography

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Rice University Spring 2011 Lecture Series

Rice University’s School of Architecture has shared with us their Spring 2011 Lecture Series which will feature several international architects and professors. All lectures begin at 5:30pm and are free and open to the public and take place in the RSA’s Farish Gallery, Anderson Hall, unless otherwise noted. Below are the dates of the lectures:

February 3
Miquel Adria
Editor, Arquine

February 10
Antoine Picon
Co-Director, Doctoral Programs, Graduate School of Design, Harvard University

February 23
Juergen Mayer H.
Principal, J. Mayer H., Berlin

March 10
Catherine Ingraham
Professor of Architecture, Pratt Institute, New York

March 17
Inaki Abalos
Principal, Abalos + Sentkiewicz Arquitectos, Madrid

April 13
Brown Auditorium 7:00pm
Petra Blaisse
Landscape/Interior Designer, Amsterdam, Inside-Outside

Dallas is hosting both the Super Bowl this coming Sunday and this weeks Architecture City Guide!  If you are heading there for the big game be sure to take a look at our list of buildings featured after the break.  We want to hear from you, so take a minute to add your favorite can’t miss buildings in Dallas in our comment section below.

The Architecture City Guide: Dallas list and corresponding map after the break!

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© Charles Davis Smith

The site for the Dallas Public Library Lochwood Branch, is bound by a strip mall, apartment complex, and residential neighborhood, which presented significant contextual opportunities. The design centers on addressing each context, as well as the library’s programming needs, through directing and screening views and considering varied levels of scale.

More photographs and drawings of the library designed by Meyer, Scherer & Rockcastle following the break.

Architects: Meyer, Scherer & Rockcastle, Ltd.
Location: Dallas, Texas, USA
Associate Architect: FKP Architects, Inc.
Mechanical and Electrical Engineers: M.E.P. Consulting Engineers, Inc.
Structural Engineer: Datum Gojer Engineers, LLC
Civil Engineer: Pacheco Koch Consulting Engineers, Inc.
Landscape Architect: Talley Associates, Inc.
General Contractor: J.C. Commercial
Project Area: 20,000 sqf
Project Year: 2009
Photographs: Charles Davis Smith

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© Hester + Hardaway

After 10 years of leasing space in a corporate office building, the Lance Armstrong Foundation found its permanent home in the 1950s Gulf Coast Paper Co. warehouse in East Austin, an underserved community in the process of revitalization. The design breathes new life and energy into both the building and neighborhood. Submitted for LEED Gold certification, the project reflects the LiveStrong mission of the Foundation—connecting to each other, constituents, community and environment.

Architects: Lake Flato Architects and The Bommarito Group
Location: Austin, Texas, USA
Interior Design: The Bommarito Group
MEP: ARC Engineering
Graphics: fd2s
Structural: Architectural Engineers Collaborative
Civil Engineering: Baker-Aicklen & Associates
Landscape architects: Ten Eyck Landscape Architects
LEED: Center for Maximum Potential Building Systems
General Contractor: Spaw Maxwell Company
Client: The Lance Armstrong Foundation
Project Year: 2009
Photographers: Hester + Hardaway

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© Urs Peter Flueckiger

The concept: a prefabricated, sustainable design-build project by the College of Architecture, the College of Visual and Performing Arts, and the College of Engineering at Texas Tech University. The Sustainable Cabin, a living laboratory located in Crowell, Texas, is an ongoing project that focuses on a variety of solutions embracing the creativity of architecture incorporating and celebrating sustainable design practices.

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© Hester + Hardaway

The Colorado River, which dissects the city of Austin, is a precious resource that this house very much embraces. Located on a long narrow river side lot, the house is conceived as a “floating fishing village” on the edge of a man made canal, where a collection of small gabled buildings and boardwalks mask the line between land and water.

Architects: Lake|Flato Architects
Location: Austin, Texas, USA
Design Team: Ted Flato, FAIA, Bill Aylor, AIA
Structural: Lundy & Associates
MEP: Comfort Air
Interior Design: Stonefox
Contractor: Renaissance Builders, Inc.
Photographers: Patrick Y. Wong, Hester + Hardaway

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Houston is our focus this week for our Architecture City Guide series.  We know Houston is packed with lots of great architecture so we are expecting to hear about your can’t miss buildings in the comment section below.  Remember this list is intended to be added to by you, our readers.  We will be updating our Architecture City Guides in the future to reflect your suggested buildings to visit.

Follow the break for our Houston list and corresponding map!

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© Andrew Vrana

New Harmony Grotto, by METALAB Architecture + Fabrication, is a reinterpretation of  avant garde architect Frederick Kielser’s Grotto for Meditation.
With the growing genre of architecture generated by biomorphic design and biomimetic processes, a reevaluation of Kiesler’s work is ever more timely. During the mid-20th century he became increasingly occupied with the relationship of structure and natural form in architecture. The Cave of the New Being (also known as the Grotto for Meditation), proposed in the 1960s for New Harmony, Indiana, represented the designer’s pièce de résistance, embodying all of the intellectual currents of his era, from surrealism to biotechnics, yet it was never realized.

Architects: METALAB Architecture + Fabrication
Location: University of Houston Campus, Houston, Texas, USA
Partner/Principals: Andrew Vrana and Joe Meppelink
Original Client and Patron: Jane Blaffer Owen
Studio Critics: Andrew VranaVisiting Assistant Professor and Joe Meppelink, Adjunct Assistant Professor, University of Houston College of Architecture
Visiting Critic: Ben Nicholson, Associate Professor, School of Art Institute Chicago
Fifth year Design Studio Digital Fabrication Seminar
Student Team Leaders: Juan Deleon, Rosalia Covarrubias, Lee Kelly, Minh Nguyen, Justin Garret and Michael Gonzales
CNC Fabrication: Ambox, Ltd. (laser cut stainless steel)
Historic Documentation and Design: 2008
Fabrication and Installation: 2010
Structural FEA Analysis: Steve Boak, Buro Happold Engineers
Photographs: Andrew Vrana

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© Salas Design Workshop LLC

Architects: Salas Design Workshop LLC
Location: Austin, Texas, USA
Project area: 3,000 sq. ft.
Project year: 2010
Photographs: Allison Cartwright, Twist Tours

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© Architecture3s

Architects: Architecture3s
Location: Frisco, TX, USA
Project area: 10,000 sq. ft.
Project year: 2009
Photographs: Architecture3s read more »

© Jeff Goldberg / ESTO

Architects: Jean Paul Viguier Architecture
Location: San Antonio, Texas, USA
Project Manager: Blin Vose-Trincal
Project Team: Giovanna Chimeri, Céline Lemercier, Pierre-Henri Cazes, Claire Maguin, Cédric Nieser, Kari Silloway
Architects of Record: Ford, Powell & Carson, Inc
Structural Engineers: Robert Silman Associates | Arcora
Landscapers: TBG Partners
Project Area: 4,800 sqm
Project Year: 2008
Photographs: Jeff Goldberg / ESTO

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 Paul Bardagjy Photography

Texas Hillel is a private organization that provides a forum for high-holiday and weekly Sabbath services for the three main movements within Judaism. However, over and above its identity as a place of worship, Texas Hillel strives to be a community center for the 4,000+ Jewish students at The University of Texas at Austin (representing one of the largest Jewish student populations of any American university). Informal classes, lectures, student activities, community events and a full-service, kosher meal-plan are all part of the daily life of this institution. The design for a new 18,000 square-foot facility, three times the size of the previous dilapidated building, became a vehicle to contemplate the various ways in which architecture might be significant to this organization and its constituencies. Designed for a modest budget, ingenuity in planning and detail were paramount for insuring the quality and character of the building.

Architects: Alter Studio
Contractor: Flynn Construction, Inc
Landscape: Eleanor McKinney
Interiors: The Bommarito Group
Project Area: 18,000 sqf
Photographs: Paul Bardagjy Photography

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© Tony Monk

A remarkable architect not only designs on one scale, but can shift between residential and large-scale buildings while maintaining a distinct style or set of techniques to link them all together.

The houses of Paul Rudolph have withstood the tests of time, both in the physical sense and in their ability to be greatly appreciated and admired even as architectural styles evolve. His residences are marked by his explorative uses of structure and inventive building techniques.

Fort Worth, Texas holds one of the few houses built by Rudolph outside of Florida. The Bass Residence of the early 1970s is evidence of his attempts to fuse a new and old architecture style “whose richness came not from applied ornament but from spatial complexities developed from structure and the three dimensional elaboration of the program.”

The Bass Residence marks the most ambitious housing project of Rudolph, and the intensity of overlapping horizontal volumes and pronounced cantilevers show his rigor in designing a cohesive unit whose ideas can be read and comprehended by any architect or unstudied person alike.

More on the Bass Residence after the break.

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 JH Jackson Photography

Extraordinary views in the heart of the city and a small buildable footprint limited by restrictive easements prompted a thin, three-story home with the main living spaces and master suite on the top floor – essentially a one-bedroom loft with 270° views. A 16’ ipe screen envelopes the body of the house, and rests delicately atop a base of long courses of black Leuders limestone.

Photographs and details of East Windsor Residence after the break.

Architects: Alter Studio
Location: Austin, TX
Contractor: Crowell +
Landscape: David/Peese Design
Project Area: 4,500 sqf
Project Year: 2009
Photographs: Paul Finkel Photography, JH Jackson Photography

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 Casey Dunn Photography

Two blocks east of South Congress Avenue, almost at the top of the gentle rise from Ladybird Lake, the Annie House takes its circumstance as the primary motivation for its form. The elevation combined with the presence of a small church yard directly across the street suggested the possibilities of downtown views in perpetuity from a second floor. As a consequence, the typical arrangement of public and private spaces is here inverted: the primary living spaces are arranged upstairs with a wall of glazing north towards views of downtown, while private bedrooms open to protected courtyards on the floor below. An exterior spiral stair further connects the house to a roof deck and the ever-present breeze.

See more photographs and a further description of the Annie Residence after the break.

Architects: Alter Studio
Location: Austin, Texas
Contractor: Melde Specialty Construction
Project Area: 2700 sqf
Project Year: 2008
Photographs: Casey Dunn Photography

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© Paul Bardagjy Photography

When the clients for the Bouldin House, a young couple in the music industry, approached Alter Studio they didn’t have an image in mind, or a site, but knew that they wanted a very special home that would embrace the many different things that they liked. The design presents an aesthetic that engages serendipity in many guises, where board-formed concrete, rough recycled wood flooring, and vertical cedar siding is posed against abstract detailing allowing sunlight and shadow from every direction.

Architect: Alter Studio
Contractor: S&W Construction
Landscape: Mark Word and Client
Project Area: 2300 sq ft
Project Year: 2009
Photographers: Paul Bardagjy Photography and Jonathan Jackson Photography

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© Art Gray

Architects: Andersson Wise Architects
Location: Leander, Texas, USA
Project Team: Arthur Andersson, Chris Wise, Kristen Heaney, Travis Greig
Contractor: Curtis Gravatt, Construction Arts
Project Year: 2008
Photographs: Art Gray

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© Charles Davis Smith

Architects: Bernbaum Magadini Architects
Location: Highland Park, Texas, USA
Project Architect: Bob Borson
Contractor: John Austin Construction Company
Project Year: 2010
Photographs: Charles Davis Smith

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