Yoga Studio & Garden is featured in the 2014 RDA architecture tour, Additionally.
Principals: Dawn Finley & Mark Wamble. Design Team: Eric Hughes, Mark Watabe. Specialty Fabrication: Kyle Henricks. Contractor: Royston Technologies. Structural Engineer: Brad Dougherty. Photography: Hester+Hardaway
Inside Corner House is a one-story, single-family residence that occupies a corner lot in one of Houston’s more pedestrian, urban neighborhoods. The domestic spaces are organized around a central courtyard – an outdoor room surrounded by glass with minimal steel frames.
Photography: Jack Mussett, Susan George
Interloop-Architecture was commissioned by the Menil Foundation to develop a concept design for a new full-service cafe to accommodate visitors to the museum as well as a broader public within the city. The cafe proposal was to adapt and re-use an existing 1923 wood-framed bungalow on the campus, directly across from the Menil Collection museum entrance.
The Menil Collection building externalizes structure as an aesthetic means to mediate the scale of the museum building relative to the surrounding bungalows. The new Menil Cafe internalizes structure as an aesthetic means to expand the scale of the bungalow volume.
Interloop—Architecture was one of five nationally recognized architecture firms invited to submit a design proposal for a new landmark in Downtown Houston: Central Station – Main. Houston’s light rail infrastructure currently consists of just one line, but construction has begun on two additional transit lines that serve diverse neighborhoods in the city. These lines will all intersect at the new Central Station transfer zone in downtown Houston. This transfer zone literally occupies the right of way, allowing riders use the city sidewalks to change trains and make connections between the three light rail lines and city buses. Central Station is made up of three light rail platforms: one at Main Street – the focus of this competition proposal – and two more at Rusk and Capitol Streets. These platforms and the common spaces between them combine to form Open Transfer.
The 9° House combines the renovation of an existing, historically significant modern residence with a new 3,000 sf addition. Where the addition begins the base geometry of the house skews 9° to the west to fill the vacant southwest corner of the lot and expand the rear garden for outdoor activity. Every detail of the addition conforms to the 9° shift. The skew produces a profound optical illusion. After spending time in the addition the natural tendency for the eye is to compensate and correct the disorienting effects of the skew. Upon returning to the original wing of the house the visitor then perceives the original portion of the house to be skewed 9° in the opposite direction. Photos: Benjamin Hill Photography
Publication features conversations between Dawn Finley and Clover Lee and between Mark Wamble and Robert E. Somol.
“There are inroads to sponsored research. To practice architecture is to engage spatial and material operations with something that has not yet formed itself legibly. This idea of engagement includes the organization of work that precedes and parallels design; i.e. the discovery circuit, as well as the resulting organizations that execute and inhabit it. How and what architecture becomes within the context of a given project evolve together. One could argue that the means for producing architecture and the object of the deployed production are equally architectural. Both are formal and aesthetic. Maintaining this formal and aesthetic component will be critical in formulating a role for funded research in architecture.” – Excerpt from “Relationships Supercede Dimensions,” by Dawn Finley & Mark Wamble
The Reiss Residence is located in Houston, Texas on a corner lot near Rice University, in a neighborhood originally developed in the 1910’s. The property is surrounded on three sides by public streets. To the north is Sunset Boulevard a prominent residential street with a planted median. To the west is Greenbriar Avenue, a major north-south thruway. To the south is a neighborhood service alley used by local residents for access. The interior spaces of the house are designed around a private garden with a small pool. The kitchen is a double-height room with tall, glass walls facing in to the private garden.
West Elevation
Sited along the edge of one of Houston’s bayous, the White Oak Bayou Studio was commissioned by a prominent painter in Houston to house a studio workspace for production, an exhibit space, and a modest domestic residence with pool.
View of front elevation. Perforated corten steel sliding panels allow the entry and studio to be completely open to the street, or closed down in the evening for privacy
Interloop-Architecture’s “Klip House” is featured in this highly acclaimed publication.
Nasher Sculpture Center is a 60,000 SF structure and a 1.9 acre Garden designed to showcase the sculpture collection of Ray and Patsy Nasher. The Center is located in Downtown Dallas across from the Dallas Museum of Fine Art. Renzo Piano Building Workshop is the lead design consultant, Peter Walker and Partners is the Landscape Architect and Ove Arup & Partners is lead engineers. Interloop Architecture was hired by Renzo Piano’s office to administer the design of the building and garden. Interloop Architecture was also hired to coordinate between the owner and the other consultants all matters relating to the execution of the design, as well as produce Construction Documents for portions of the construction including Finish Millwork, Ornamental Gates, Stone details, a 2,500 SF Auditorium, and various other finish details associated with the project.
Photographer: Tim Hursley ©2003
Interloop Architecture was commissioned by The Nasher Foundation to design a building to house Tending, (blue), an artwork by James Turrell. Tending, (blue) is sited in a planted berm at the west end of the Nasher Sculpture garden, opposite the main museum building. Tending, (blue) contains two artworks – an entry piece and a skyspace.
Photographer: Tim Hursley ©2003
Two-Seater is a folding bench armature that was engineered and fabricated by Interloop Architecture for Tending,(Blue). This bench is a critical element to experiencing the Skyspace artwork by James Turrell. Texas Accessibility Standards (TAS) requires that the bench accommodate wheelchair access for two individuals seated side by side. Instead of creating a void for these seats, we developed a retractable armature that would support the required portion of the bench, (over four-hundred pounds of stone cladding), enabling it to fold into the wall. Actuators allow an individual to operate the bench with very little effort using a concealed handle to slide the bench into position or to fold it back into the wall.
EXIT is a custom exit light produced for The Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas, Texas. Interloop Architecture designed and fabricated the exit lights, working with engineers, fabricators, UL technicians, and the graphic design firm 2×4. In keeping with city, state, and federal safety standards, every emergency light fixture must undergo extensive testing by the Underwriter Laboratories Testing Center to meet a wide range of design criteria. These stringent technical requirements typically thwart innovation by limited new design, requiring the exclusive use of existing UL approved components.
On November 7, 2007, the Museum of Modern Art, New York, inducted E-X-I-T into the permanent collection. A design like E-X-I-T marks a departure in MoMA’s collecting policy, and as such, provides an early precedent in the acquisition of architectural signage.
Plug-On is the first in a series of product prototypes intended for residential structures. It was fabricated and assembled in Houston, then delivered and installed onto an existing modest one-story ranch style house in Richardson, Texas. The client was interested in an addition that would complement the existing language of the house and accommodate a sitting area to redirect the space of the master bedroom to the lush trees in the rear lawn. Our directive was to maximize the qualitative effect of the square footage. Plug-on is an eight-foot cube, fabricated entirely of stainless steel, glass and wood. It is structured as a cantilever using a concrete counterweight and steel beam fulcrum underneath the bedroom floor.
Julia’s is a twenty-five hundred square-foot new restaurant, bar, and full kitchen located in Midtown, Houston. Two existing commercial spaces were gutted and combined to form the new interior. A large portion of the existing brick facade was removed and replaced with new storefront glass windows. The space takes advantage of it’s prime corner location along the new light rail, connecting downtown Houston to the medical center and stadium. The main dining space projects a vibrant interior onto the street. A palette of six (almost cosmetic) colors are deployed like wallpaper, wrapping the interior space with no regard for physical corners or material edges. The flooring is a custom colored epoxy finish, suitable for industrial applications, that wraps up the face of the bar, the banquette seating, and two columns.
The following proposal is for the design of a new high school – approximately 489,000 square feet, on a 15.3 acre site – for the city of Perth Amboy, New Jersey. The City of Perth Amboy, the Perth Amboy Board of Education and the National Endowment for the Arts, in conjunction with the New Jersey School Construction Corporation and New Jersey Department of Education, held a national design competition in 2003 for a new high school, to be constructed with state funds as part of New Jersey’s $12 billion school construction program. The facility is to contain five semi-autonomous specialized academies, or schools-within-a-school.
Three public sector “urban park” projects in Houston, Texas were featured in the July 2002 issue of Architecture magazine – – designed by Mark Wamble between 1999-2001, while Design Principal with Bricker+Cannady Architects.
This project represents the major renovation of an existing public plaza in downtown Houston, constructed over an underground parking garage. The city’s opera house and symphony hall, a major theater, the federal courthouse and several large offi ce buildings bound the full block plaza. Jones Plaza is frequently used for large planned public events, and therefore requires standing room and restrooms for a crowd for 2,000 people, a level area for tents, a permanent concession stand, and a stage with an adjacent green room. The four elevated corners of the plaza, accessed by various stairs, are landscaped with trees, wild grasses, and flowers. Five canopied steel pergolas separate these landscaped areas for a slightly sunken hexagonal paved plaza at the center of the block. Several of the canopies shelter small, freestanding pavilions clad in glass mosaic tiles, which house concessions, restrooms, and other services. The colored tiles create a pattern that abstracts a landscape painting by the French Impressionist Claude Monet. On the northeast side of the site another pergola covers the open air stage. A broad walkway on the east side of the plaza aligns with the main entrance of the symphony hall across the street.
First Architecture Biennale Rotterdam (1ab) is an international urban event organizing a series of lectures, competitions, and exhibitions throughout the city. Eight international architects and designers were invited to design a “stim” – a site specific interactive installation, as described by architect and critic Lars Lerup – an object, image, or space that brings together various forms of technology in order to create a moment of connectivity and intense engagement.
Interloop’s three Stim proposals utilize simple technologies to create a spatial dynamic where fixed material elements become balanced with the real-time circumstances of pedestrian intrigue and engagement.
The Houston Products Laboratory was selected by the Heinz Architectural Center as one of eight projects to be exhibited in Aluminum in Contemporary Architecture, at the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh. Interloop Architecture designed and fabricated a sixteen foot long table to display drawings, diagrams, models, and renderings. The table is a steel powder-coated frame that supports nine custom milled aluminum plate tops, clear anodized and black anodized. The exhibit ran November 2000 through February 2001 in association with the exhibition Aluminum by Design: Jewelry to Jets.
Klip is a consumer based housing platform, a delivery system that provides the physical and operational infrastructure for trade corporations to participate in the production, delivery, and servicing of housing.
This project is a result of our participation in Sixteen Houses – a project organized and curated by Michael Bell in 1998 and funded by the Graham Foundation, the Fifth Ward Redevelopment Corporation, and DiverseWorks in Houston. Sixteen architects and designers were invited nationally to generate innovative concepts and new options for a low-income house – to expand the very limited market. To briefly describe the voucher program – these are Federal and State initiatives that provide financial assistance to qualified families and individuals by awarding, housing “Vouchers” to serve as the down payment on a house. In its current format, the voucher system distributes a mass of capital such that one voucher equals one house.
We were, and are, frustrated with a design system that is constricted by insurance companies, loan officers, municipalities, and contractors, etc. and decided to look at the overall economic impact that these vouchers might have if they were bundled, rather than distributed. Instead of designing a single house that has very little impact to the housing industry, we worked with the idea of consolidating the vouchers to pay for a housing platform, or infrastructure. We needed to work outside of the home mortgage process in order to gain some ground.
Mark Wamble is a founding principal of Interloop—Architecture and has over twenty–five years of experience in architectural practice. He is a licensed architect in the State of Texas. Wamble received a Bachelor of Environmental Design from Texas A&M University and a Master of Architecture from the Graduate School of Design at Harvard University.
Prior to establishing Interloop—Architecture, Wamble worked as a Project Designer, and later as Project Architect, with Eisenman Architects in New York (1983-1991) where he was on the design team for the Wexner Center for the Visual Arts at Ohio State University in Columbus, Ohio. Wamble was also Project Architect on the Columbus Convention Center in Columbus, Ohio, and on three office buildings in Tokyo, Japan. With his team at Eisenman Architects, Mark designed the winning scheme for the international Rebstockpark Competition in Frankfort, Germany. In the early 1990s, Mark was selected for 40 Under 40, a prestigious award given to emerging young architects in the United States. Later that year, he won the Young Architect Award from the Architecture League of New York.
In 1994, prior to collaborations with Dawn Finley, Wamble formed the research practice Interloop Architects in Houston, Texas, and was commissioned to design the Gardiner Symonds Teaching Labs I & II, a series of technology–based teaching facilities for Rice University. Wamble then became a Design Principal and Partner at Bricker+Cannady Architects in Houston (1997-2001) where he designed the Renovation of Jones Plaza in Downtown Houston, a significant urban project that won an AIA award and a Progressive Architecture (PA) Award both in 1999. Jones Plaza was also published with two other urban park projects designed by Mark Wamble in an Architecture magazine feature “Portfolio” article in 2002.
Wamble combines professional practice with academics. He is a Professor in Practice at Rice University School of Architecture and has served as a visiting professor at the University of Michigan, Harvard University, and Columbia University. His current academic research includes advanced structural models for urban high-rise buildings and New Type Here, a design project funded by a grant from the Kinder Institute for Urban Research examining new building types in response to urban context and adaptive re-use as an alternative to historic preservation.