Albert Pope, Gus Sessions Wortham Professor of Architecture, and co-investigator Dominic Boyer from Rice University’s Anthropology Department have been awarded a Strengthening American Infrastructure grant by the National Science Foundation (NSF). Their three-year project will study the resilience of three Houston neighborhoods, each with numerous structures in the city’s 100-year floodplain. The research will inform a buyout program to make these neighborhoods safe from rising waters and to vastly improve their prospects going forward.
“As a community of scholars, we are deeply committed to research as the foundation of architectural practice. The NSF grant awarded to Professors Pope and Boyer is both a demonstration of that commitment and a major accomplishment,” said Igor Marjanović, the William Ward Watkin Dean of Rice Architecture. “It is also a testament to architecture’s agency in an ever-changing world, demonstrating that architectural design and anthropological thinking can work in unison to unfold new forms of design research.”
Joined by Professor Jessica Eisma at the University of Texas at Arlington, Pope and Boyer propose to restore a significant portion of the floodplain by designing a buyout program that, in turn, will trigger additional urban reforms. The goal is to craft neighborhoods that are more resilient and better able to respond to future extreme weather events.
Read more about their project and the grant here.