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Design grads try out architecture

Graduate Design/Build Studio students are working through a rainy summer in an effort to reach their Aug. 11 completion date of an amphitheater at the T. H. Rogers School. The students were responsible for the design and building of the privately-funded project. | Ashley Evans/The Daily Cougar

For most college students, summer is a time to relax and enjoy a break from studies, but for first-year master’s students of UH’s Graduate Design/Build Studio (GDBS) program, this summer is all work.

The program, part of the Gerald D. Hines College of Architecture, is in the depths of an intense build project.

11 graduates are working in conjunction with non-profit organizations to build an outdoor amphitheater for the T. H. Rogers School, an alternative primary and secondary public school that serves gifted and talented students alongside deaf and other multiple-impaired students.

The amphitheater being built in the courtyard of the school will have bench seating, a canopy of tensile fabric, and will be wheelchair accessible. The finished product will serve as an outdoor meeting area for class and school assemblies.

“The space has a lot of eccentric, non-cohesive geometrical figures,” GDBS Director Patrick Peters said. “Our goal was to give it a calming singularity and have one large partial curve in the courtyard that suggested a dominant circular space.”

The program has been participating in community enhancing building projects since 1990. Peters joined the team as director in 1994 and decided to take the projects from wooden structures to more complex and permanent steel structures for public schools. With the help of private donors and non-profit organizations, the design studio is in the midst of its 21 annual project.

“The most important contribution to learning is the opportunity to see ideas tested against the constraints of built reality,” Peters said.

The process allows the students to see architecture in a real world format, Peters said.

Beginning after spring break, the students worked together to form an idea based around the wants and needs of the client.  The students then went through the permitting process before getting their hands dirty working around the clock constructing the design.

Project Manager Maggie Port says that the design project allows them to catch up to the other students in the master’s program, since all of the students in the GDBS program have bachelor’s degrees in backgrounds other than architecture.

“There has been no time for eating or sleeping, just architecture,” Port says of her past year — but she is not complaining. Along with her fellow GDBS students, she believes this experience will give them a leg up on the competition with the combination of field and office knowledge.

Architecture professor and real-life architect Mark Dillon could not agree more.

“The design/build class goes beyond architecture,” Dillon says.  “It also goes into construction and general contracting, which are usually separate disciplines altogether.”

An added difficulty to the project is the use of tensile fabric for the amphitheater’s canopy.  The highly durable, weather resistant material has a complex design technology. The team enlisted the help of Murrell Tensile in New Jersey and with the help of the experts they are working through the technological difficulties involved in using tensile fabric.

Dillon says that the experience for the students is invaluable because they are all first-timers building a full-size, permanent structure.

Dillon, Peters, and the eleven students are all in a race to the finish line, with hopes of an August 11 completion date.

Contributions for the amphitheater come from client and donor support, which, according to a news release, include Morris Architects, Murrell Tensile Works LLC, United Galvanizing Inc., Tolunay-Wong Engineers, CMC Construction Services, Bovis Lend Lease, Asakura Robinson Co., W.S. Bellows Construction Group and Ground Hog Foundation Drilling

To find out more about the current or past GDBS projects, visit the website at http://www.uh.edu/gdbs.

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