News

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.

Totalization (Rice Architecture and Park Books AG, 2019), edited by Rice Architecture Associate Professor Troy Schaum, was featured July 7 in The Architect’s Newspaper and is currently reviewed in the July/August 2020 issue of Texas Architect magazine. Totalization offers a comprehensive and richly illustrated insight into Rice Architecture’s Totalization Studios—one of the most innovative architectural teaching programs worldwide. The book was released September 15, 2019, on Amazon. Learn more about the book here.

At Rice Architecture, we have been following with great anguish the appalling racial injustice manifested not only by the incomprehensible murder of George Floyd, our fellow black Houstonian, but in the absurdity of racial inequality and the pain and anger it continues to inflict on our diverse communities. While words may seem hollow at this grave moment in our nation’s history, we must speak out forcefully, each in our own way, to make a difference. Now more than ever, our collective efforts are needed to overcome the scourge of racial injustice.  More.  

Rice Architecture students were honored for their achievements at the school’s annual awards ceremony, held virtually this year on May 4. The annual awards program recognizes a range of outstanding work and the amazing students who produce it, and is made possible thanks to the School’s generous supporters.