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Staying put during the pandemic is hard enough without additional stressors. But for some in Houston, COVID-19 exacerbated situations that already presented challenges. Wortham Fellow Amelyn Ng set out to document the pandemic’s effects on households through discussions with residents of Houston’s Fifth Ward for a pilot study, “Stay-at-Home Stress.”

The Rice Architecture Spring 2021 Lecture Series, "New Proximities," is a collective reckoning of health as a social, political, and fundamentally spatial condition. The global pandemic has not only produced profound shifts in the built environment, but also revealed latent precarities embedded in forms of governance, labor, domesticity, and ecology. This lecture series asks: How does COVID-19 and its compounding crises render visible the uneven geographies in which we operate? How might we reformat existing systems beyond the confining world of pandemic space? Expanding scales and spaces of architectural agency, we will hear from critical voices in design, history, and theory to imagine new futures of care and proximity.

A new small home designed and being built by Rice University students divides to conquer in the quest for energy efficiency.

A Rice University assistant professor of architecture and his students hope to travel to Seoul, South Korea, next fall — if the pandemic allows — to present their work at the city’s Biennale of Architecture and Urbanism. Juan José Castellón and his fall design studio, “Circular Prototypes: Food, Energy and Water Rooftop Infrastructures,” have been accepted to present at the prestigious event, which carries the timely theme of “resilience.”

At first, the plan was to build a giant swing. But when Rice architecture students creating an entry for this semester’s design charrette realized the logistics just wouldn’t work, they moved on to plan B: seesaws. The seesaws won.

Rice Architecture will be participating in various virtual college fairs this fall. All prospective students are invited to attend and learn more about applying to Rice graduate and undergraduate programs.

William G. “Bill” McMinn, an architect and educator who served as dean of three architecture schools, died August 21 in Asheville, North Carolina, of complications from a stroke. He was 89. In 1974, McMinn was named the founding dean of the School of Architecture at Mississippi State University (MSU), part of the College of Architecture, Art and Design, and stayed there until 1984. In 1997, he was named founding dean of the School of Architecture at Florida International University (FIU) now part of its College of Communication, Architecture + The Arts. Read the rememberance in The Architect's Newspaper.

Rice Architecture Fall 2020 Lectures are part of an initiative to acknowledge, understand, and act on systemic racism in the built environment. Invited designers, scholars, and activists will speak on the relationship between race, architecture, and, by extension, related questions of social equity, environmental justice, and gender parity. The aim of the lecture series is to foreground these issues in the school’s curriculum while more broadly fostering solidarity and action in architecture.

An elegantly imagined college dormitory designed for use during a pandemic has won top honors for a duo of Rice University students in the 2020 American Institute of Architects Houston (AIAH) Gulf Coast Green Student Competition. Rice Architecture students Carrie Li (M.Arch. ‘22) and Mai Okimoto (M.Arch. ‘22) won first place in the competition for designing a dorm that could house people during prolonged periods of quarantine and social distancing.