10 Decades constructs the one-hundred year history of Rice School of Architecture (RSA) in Houston, Texas. RSA’s curriculum and culture has transitioned and transformed from the Beaux-Arts traditions of early twentieth century architectural education, through the influences of Modernism, and advances in material and information technologies, to the now contemporary, fast-paced, global moment.
This exhibition was made possible by the generous financial contribution of: Rice School of Architecture, Rice Design Alliance, Architecture Center Houston Foundation, Barbara Amelio, HOK, John Hawkins, Lonnie Hoogeboom and Betsy Strauch JD Miner Systems, LLC, Christina and Mark Mitchell, Louis H. Skidmore, Jr.
9° House was highlighted in the 2011 AIA Houston Home Tour on the weekend of October 22, 2011. The project received critical attention, including a feature article in The Houston Chronicle’s Gloss Magazine.
Exterior view at dusk. (Benjamin Hill Photography)
An essay on Interloop-Architecture’s “Klip House” was recently published in Fast Forward >> Rethinking Architecture’s Engagement with the City.
System Panel Moderator: Dawn Finley.
Conference Chair: Penelope Dean. Assistant Professor, UIC
Prospective home plan buyers and people interested in leading contemporary home design can get an in-depth look at Hometta’s new design delivery model. Hometta is a web-based modern home plan company offering small, sustainable home designs from internationally recognized architecture and design studios. The company is committed to making design accessible and affordable to a large cross-section of prospective homeowners. Interloop-Architecture Principal Dawn Finley is a founding partner of Hometta. A modified version of IA’s internationally acclaimed 48′ House is one of the design prototypes exhibited.
Welcome Hometta: Houston
New World Gallery, Houston, Texas
July 16, 2009 to August 2, 2009.
Welcome Hometta: San Francisco
San Francisco Living: Home Tours
September 12 & 13, 2009.
Welcome Hometta: Boston
PinkComma Gallery
October 16 to November 6, 2009
48′ House was featured on the Rice Design Alliance 2009 Architecture Tour, featuring “Small Houses.” The tour was held Saturday and Sunday, March 28-29, 2009 from 1:00 p.m. to 6:00 p.m., highlighting innovative examples of small houses, under 2,000 square feet. The tour broke all previous records – nearly 1,900 tour guests.
E-X-I-T was presented in its first exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, Special Exhibitions Gallery on the third floor.
Vik Muniz (Brazilian, b. 1961) is the ninth artist to participate in Artist’s Choice, a series of exhibitions in which an artist serves as curator, selecting works from MoMA’s vast collection to create an exhibition. In his work, Muniz inventively questions the function and traditions of visual representation by using unlikely materials to render the subjects in his photographs. For this exhibition, Muniz has chosen a rebus—a combination of unrelated visual and linguistic elements to create a larger deductive meaning—as the organizing principle of his presentation. The exhibition will feature approximately 80 works of sculpture, photography, painting, prints, drawings, video, and design objects selected and installed by the artist in a narrative sequence to create surprising juxtapositions and new meanings. Among the artists whose work will be on view are John Baldessari, Gordon Matta-Clark, Nan Goldin, Marcel Duchamp, Pablo Picasso, Eugène Atget, and Rachel Whiteread. Design objects will range from a wooden pencil to a kitchen pail to a Rubik’s Cube to finally, an Exit sign.
“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
“Innovation, like other impulses in the design field, is regulated. Professional institutions created to support architecture often undermine the proposal of structures, components and elements that have no common precedent. Most of the language contained in contracts associated with the construction industry deliberately avoids risk – a fundamental characteristic of innovation. There are circumstances that justify crossing the line between designer and fabricator, leaving the safety of the designer’s realm and embarking upon the complexities and liabilities of the fabricator’s world. By doing so we can recapture some of the innovative sensibility apparently written out of our discipline by insurance policies, professional associations, and institutions of higher learning. Architecture is obligated to build with a philosophy of innovation in mind.” Exerpt from “Assuming Risk,” by Dawn Finley
Perspecta 34 “Temporary Architecture,” The Yale Architecture Journal. June 2003. Edited by Noah K. Biklen, Ameet N. Hiremath and Hannah H. Purdy. “The Rest of the World Exists,” by Dawn Finley & Mark Wamble
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.
Interloop Architecture was commissioned by the Dutch design group Droog Design to design and fabricate a mailbox to be exhibited in Do Create, an international product design collection at the Milan Furniture Fair 2000. Do is an active brand created by KesselsKramar and the Do Create exhibition is a collaboration with Droog Design. Each product in the collection requires consumer interaction and participation in order to complete or activate the product.
Do Post Prototype, Epoxy Coated Steel
Two essays by Mark Wamble are featured – “Parsing Eye; The Architecture of Greg Lynn” and “Kneeplay.”
“16 Houses was founded in 1995 by architect Michael Bell with funding from the Graham Foundation of Chicago; initiated as a study of the economics and design of the single-family house and its pivotal role in down-payment voucher programs initiated by the federal government.”
Interloop-Architecture was one of sixteen architects invited to design single-family houses for the Fifth Ward Community Redevelopment Corporation in Houston – to examine the architectural implications of the new federal policy of decentralization and dispersal. Interloop’s proposal was Klip House, an experimental housing delivery platform. An exhibition of the projects, “16 Houses: Owning a House in the City,” opened November 6, 1998, at DiverseWorks in Houston. In the spring of 1999, the exhibition moved to the University of Texas at Austin.
(excerpt from Michael Bell)