16 Houses
Designing the Public's Private House
Houston ι Texas 1999 - 2001
Part exhibition, part building program, part research project, and most important, a collective work of architecture and planning, 16 Houses developed in three distinct phases. Each stage relied on the expertise of new participants and was funded by different sources. I founded 16 Houses in 1995 with funding from the Graham Foundation of Chicago; the first three years consisted of 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.
The primary goal was to examine the architectural implications of the new federal policy of decentralization and dispersal. In April 1998, sixteen architects were invited to assemble teams to design single-family houses for the Fifth Ward Community Redevelopment Corporation in Houston. An exhibition of the projects, “16 Houses: Owning a House in the City,” opened on November 6, 1998, at DiverseWorks in Houston. More than a thousand people crowded the gallery on opening night. Over six hundred invitations were sent to Fifth Ward residents in addition to the nine hundred people on the DiverseWorks mailing list.
Two community events supported the exhibition: a midday discussion with the designers for area students and a panel discussion, held on December 12, 1998, with guests from the community. In the spring of 1999, the exhibition moved to the University of Texas at Austin.
The third phase started in 2000, when a selection committee chose seven of the sixteen projects to be built. Funding from the Local Initiatives Support Corporation of New York allowed the FWCRC to move closer to construction by providing professional fees for contract documents for each project. At this point, the house designed by Morris Gutierrez Architects is complete, and six others are ready for construction on sites purchased by the FWCRC.
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