Michael Bell
16 Houses: Designing the Public's Private House ι 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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