2021_12wks
Attaching the Campus
Chavez High School_Houston, TX
The existing Houston Independent School District’s architecture and dispersed geography provide the most equipped infrastructure to serve the public sphere; the campuses are large, evenly dispersed throughout the city, and provide many existing support systems including healthcare, childcare, and food access. Yet today they act as islands within the fabric of the city, isolating much of the public from their resources.
To test our hypothesis, we initiated a case study on Cesar Chavez High School in Meadowbrook/Allendale in East Houston. Chavez High School opened in 2000 and enrolls approximately 3,000 students. The school serves a mix-income neighborhood with a predominantly Hispanic population. The site sits east of downtown, in the neighborhoods between Hobby Airport and the Shipping Channel. Galveston is a short drive away.
To begin the study, we drew the site in intense detail, attempting to grasp the precise realities, strengths, and weaknesses in its current built form. From that exercise we designed interventions that yielded porosity with minimal impact. A small-scale demolition removes fences, unused parking lots and dilapidated sidewalks. After the demolition, several additions are made to the site to connect it and open it up to its neighborhood. New hike and bike trails connect it to the existing trail system. Large, enhanced crosswalks stitch the campus into the neighborhood. The several built additions to the campus, all oriented to the public right of way, open currently underutilized services and add new competencies to the civic campus. These four additions each target a specific failing of the existing school campus such as, space for the school’s agriculture and trade programs, or a lack of large, shaded space outdoors.
The contextual specificity of these insertions continues in the tectonic strategy, deployed throughout the site, and modified to each intervention. The tectonic strategy was informed by our analysis of the neighborhood context. Carports and other humble, economic yet versatile structures are prevalent in the area and used for a multitude of events. These structures are constructed with the most available materials, common dimensioned lumber, lag bolts, and galvanized corrugated sheets. Similarly, our structural module is constructed these cheap and available materials, the backyard-ness of this assembly allows for its modification, relocation, or expansion over time.
This work on Chavez’s campus is particular to the site and makes an argument for more porous and connected school campuses across Houston. These campuses can assist in the multitude of social services Houston deploys throughout the city: Libraries, Multi-Service Centers, and Community Centers. This model proposes an architecture which is able to occupy the city well, accessible, embedded and particular.
.
